(October 15, 2021 at 1:04 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote: “That just tells you that seax believed in a personal god, not that pantheism proposes one, or that the universe is a person.”
==Well, then, I’m not sure then.
Let’s make a list of possibilities.
1. A god that has a brain, that thinks, maybe he has feelings, that is not frozen and time passes forward for him.
2. #1 and also the god has other components that are non brains, sort of how a human has a brain but also a few arms and a few legs. Perhaps the laws of physics also a component of the pantheist god.
3. God is the universe which is a brainless entity.
Were you talking about #2?
If a pantheist tells me that their god is #3, then this looks like renaming. They are removing the sticker that says apple from the apple and they are sticking the sticker that says banana on it.
Many pantheists will tell you number 3. There is a spectrum that exists: atheistic pantheism- theistic pantheism- panentheism- theism. I only feel inclined to defend "atheistic pantheism" (or #3 on your list). Earlier in the thread I provided a more comprehensive defense of the idea.
Here I will repeat what I think is a good justification for pantheism that I once heard in a lecture:
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.
My bold. These kind of pantheists qualify as #3 on your list. But if you told one of them they are mislabeling the universe, they'd probably respond "Okay. I see your point." They wouldn't go around insisting that everyone call the universe God. Their pantheism is more a disposition than a claim about nature. Think about how theists feel gratitude towards God. The pantheist feels the same sort of gratitude and awe and reverence toward reality (the material universe). The thing about the material universe is: it actually exists.
Of his experience of the woods surrounding Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote:
Quote:Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.
