Why Atheism is Incoherent & You Aren't as Smart as You Think You Are

[Seax]

I actually have a soft spot for pantheism, but I must say, your OP is a piss poor advertisement of it. Who begins his grand essay on pantheism with, "You atheists think you've got it all figured out, don't you?"...???

No, nature is deterministic overall. This is true whether we are talking about natural selection or the orbit of planets.

I am saying that if nature is deterministic, then it can be said to have purpose, one probably unknowable to us, but purpose and meaning nonetheless. Where there is purpose there is will.

What about determinism suggests purpose? Purpose is a vague word. What do you mean by "purpose"? Something separate from teleology? And if so, how so?


I think it's interesting to imagine the entire universe as having (or being) a will. That our ordinary willful actions (like those we commit ourselves) are perhaps not fundamentally different than, say, the orbiting of the planets is also an interesting idea.

But you've got to be careful about assuming too much. It's an interesting question, and one that pantheists can perhaps say more about than "traditional" atheists can (or care to). But, Pantheism (by and large) doesn't pretend to know more about reality than atheism. It's an interpretive mode rather than a theory about what God (or the universe) actually is.

Finally a thoughtful response! Thank you, I was worried I wasn't going to get a single one, and I really appreciate it.

I am not suggesting that the planet are animated by the same mental faculties as man or other mammals, I am saying the the entire universe, all of reality. is an expression of God and at least as far as we are concerned, inseparable from God. Like atheism, pantheism does away with the primitive notion of anthropomorphic personal deities, but pantheism understands that the universe, nature, all of reality—is God.

I was raised an atheist, and I never found Christianity very appealing. but something sat wrongly with me. Life derived from lifeless proteins that began to reproduce themselves, and from this process everything alive today derives. Evolutionary biology is for me not just an empirical reality—but a more compelling story than anything in the Old Testament. And it is a directed process—directed by nature in the form of greater reproductive success for genes with a survival or reproductive advantage. The evolution of complex lifeforms is not just happenstance, it is as inevitable under natural laws as the earth rotating around the sun.

Classical theism isn't a terrible worldview, but when everything can be explained naturalistically, and nearly everything in our lives can be in the 21st Century, the existence of an anthropomorphic Interventionist God separate from nature is hard to justify. I have noticed that whenever pressed, Christians and all other classical theists retreat into pantheism—they talk of God operating through natural processes. But atheism has the same problem—how can you explain that natural laws should lead to ever greater progress, towards ever more complex life, if nature is ultimately devoid of meaning or purpose?