(March 17, 2021 at 10:54 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Which is why..quietly, and without much fanfare, questions like this are the most difficult for pantheism to answer. There are difficult questions for any given set of beliefs to answer..but, this is a weird one - as it denies something so common and uniform as our own apprehension of our own desires as our own possessions.
But it also tells us something about free will, and why we (perhaps mistakenly) believe we have it.
Quote:There can't be lots of causes for anything...in pantheism. Just the one.
Ultimately, yeah. But it takes some explaining how the big bang resulted in the desire for cabbage. I mean, it did, but it isn't necessarily true that a rapid expansion of energy into space always results in such a thing. So we tend to look at how things happened historically... queue the lyrics for the Big Bang Theory sitcom...
Quote:Who thinks that desires for cabbage randomly come forth?
At any rate..I agree that some convoluted way of thinking is what pantheism genuinely entails..but, pantheism in practice - in my experience and in this thread. It's just atheism. Our friend pantheist friend in this thread..an atheist - for example.
Some people think desires randomly come forth. You of all people ought to have seen that in your debate with theists over the years. In any case, I don't blame anyone for thinking this way. To the person who has the desire, it feels like the desire just comes out of nowhere (at a phenomenological level). I mean, we ALL used to think like that until we attended biology class, right?
So here is an interesting lecture... the first 10 minutes or so is more interesting than the rest...
The lecturer decides to simplify the subject matter by dividing pantheists into two camps: 1) theistic pantheists and 2) atheistic pantheists.
You could imagine a continuum:
atheism--atheistic pantheism--theistic pantheism--panentheism--theism
Many criticisms, not yours Nudger... but many atheists... assume that all pantheism is "theistic" pantheism. And when confronted directly with the notion of "atheistic pantheism" they ask: why call it God? You seem to have ask this question in your dismissal of atheistic pantheism as "mere atheism." I happen to like the lecturer's justification for atheistic pantheism:
lecturer Wrote:Do pantheists who deny that God is anything more than the natural world have any reply to the suggestion that they are really atheists? Perhaps they do. They may say that in referring to the system of nature as a whole, as God, they fitly express a reverence and awe and gratitude that it deserves as a thing of wondrous beauty, the source of our life and all that we enjoy. Some of them might add that in heightened awareness of nature that they experience a transcendence of petty self-centered concerns which they regard as typical of religious mysticism at its best.
... hence the identification with a religious mode of thinking (theism) with a worldview that is (in scientific and epistemological matters) in complete alignment with atheism.
I like to think of it like Zen Buddhism that aims to remove every scrap of superstitious thinking from Zen Buddhism and then add Western science. What you're left with after that isn't typical Western atheism. It's something else. And, since it's different, we may as well call it something different.
Kind of like we call them "plantains" instead of "little bananas." If you want to call pantheists atheists, sure. You're mostly right. (I mean atheistic pantheists here.) But someone might want to differentiate themselves from atheists for the reasons listed above.
And, by the way, a LONG time ago, you expressed sympathy for a viewpoint that captured "Zen mysticism" while maintaining "atheist realism." THIS is what I'm talking about here. Nothing more. Nothing less.
