Isn’t pantheism the same thing as atheism?

[vulcanlogician]

The dictionary definition of God isn't really gonna help you understand pantheism. Joseph Raphson coined the term to describe Spinozism. It's not like a popular or colloquial definition of God is gonna illuminate what Spinoza meant by God.

Spinoza was a hard determinist. To him, nobody has free will. Not even God. If you and I count as beings, but are merely a collection of matter doing what matter does, why can't the entire universe also count as a being?.... designated as "God"... but just like you or I... God can only unfold due to it's nature and prior causes.

[Alan V]

The dictionary definition of God isn't really gonna help you understand pantheism. Joseph Raphson coined the term to describe Spinozism. It's not like a popular or colloquial definition of God is gonna illuminate what Spinoza meant by God.

Then Spinoza was fudging with his use of the word "God," probably to navigate the bigotries of the times he lived in.

Spinoza was a hard determinist. To him, nobody has free will. Not even God. If you and I count as beings, but are merely a collection of matter doing what matter does, why can't the entire universe also count as a being?.... designated as "God"... but just like you or I... God can only unfold due to it's nature and prior causes.

A God without the ability to make choices is not a God by the usual definitions. He is powerless rather than powerful.

If you want to redefine all material constructions as "beings," fine. But that changes the definition of the word "being" just as Spinoza muddled the definition of the word "God."

Religious people acquire any number of social benefits from using the word "God" in different ways than the standard definitions. They are actually equivocating to achieve certain ends of their own.

However, I will concede that your non-God God is a possible pantheistic God. Philosophers are always stipulating special definitions and confusing other people in the process. But it's a hollow victory.

[Ferrocyanide]

Spinoza was a hard determinist. To him, nobody has free will. Not even God. If you and I count as beings, but are merely a collection of matter doing what matter does, why can't the entire universe also count as a being?.... designated as "God"... but just like you or I... God can only unfold due to it's nature and prior causes.

A God without the ability to make choices is not a God by the usual definitions.  He is powerless rather than powerful.  

There are 2 kinds of systems: deterministic and non-deterministic.

You can be a deterministic system and also make choices.

For example, you can build a robot that walks and when it reaches a wall, it stops.
That’s an example of a robot that is making a choice to stop.
There is
data input -> which leads to -> thinking -> which leads to -> decision making

The robot is just running an algorithm.
-----------------------
if(close to wall)
   Stop motor;
else
   Keep running the motor;
-----------------------

If you want that to be non-deterministic, then you want it to be random.

The algorithm might be something like this
-----------------------
value=RandomNumberGenerator_0_or_1();

if((close to wall)&&(value))
   Stop motor;
else
   Keep running the motor;
-----------------------

A brain just runs algorithms. A human brain has parallelism and is a neural network and so, there are differences between a human brain and a CPU like your Intel i7 and AMD Ryzen, but these CPUs are general purpose. You should be able to create a program that approximates the human brain, although, it will run slow.

Anyway, like I was saying a brain just runs algorithms.
If you want it to be non-deterministic, you would have to insert some randomness here and there.
If you have too much randomness in the decision making process, that brain is going to behave erratically.

[Alan V]

A God without the ability to make choices is not a God by the usual definitions.  He is powerless rather than powerful.  

There are 2 kinds of systems: deterministic and non-deterministic.

You can be a deterministic system and also make choices.

...

If you want that to be non-deterministic, then you want it to be random.

...

A brain just runs algorithms. A human brain has parallelism and is a neural network and so, there are differences between a human brain and a CPU like your Intel i7 and AMD Ryzen, but these CPUs are general purpose. You should be able to create a program that approximates the human brain, although, it will run slow.

Anyway, like I was saying a brain just runs algorithms.
If you want it to be non-deterministic, you would have to insert some randomness here and there.
If you have too much randomness in the decision making process, that brain is going to behave erratically.

First of all, I see "determined or random" as a false dichotomy.  Humans also "fill in the blanks" to interpret situations without enough information (like you are doing), and choose between frames of reference so they have a better idea which algorithms to apply to which situations. Also, humans create their own programs.

Second, even if all humans were in fact determined, they had to be determined by something else.  A God is in a different, unique category altogether.  To be all-powerful, he must be self-determining.  Otherwise there must be another God behind such a "God," just as there are people behind robots.

So my correction, given what you pointed out, is that a God must be able to make free-will choices. I don't see the whole-natural-world-God-of-pantheism doing that. It isn't the simplest explanation for what we see around us.

[The Grand Nudger]

Alan, you may have absorbed some non seqs that nuts insist on.

A god could lack free will and it would still be a god, just as….if we lacked free will, we’d still be people, still be all that we are. Theistic gods are categorized as such because they’re like us, not in some different class. If the whole universe could credibly be called personal and intervening, a pantheistic god would exist. Pantheism would be true. No extra levels or different stuff required.

It can’t be, and isn’t. It’s not because gods have to be super duper what’s its (they don’t, and most were never claimed to be). It’s because the central claim of pantheism appears to be wildly wrong.

- and yes, Spinoza probably was an atheist who used the idea for cover.

[Alan V]

Alan, you may have absorbed some non seqs that nuts insist on.

A god could lack free will and it would still be a god, just as….if we lacked free will, we’d still be people, still be all that we are.  Theistic gods are categorized as such because they’re like us, not in some different class.  If the whole universe could credibly be called personal and intervening, a pantheistic god would exist.  Pantheism would be true.  No extra levels or different stuff required.

It can’t be, and isn’t.  It’s not because gods have to be super duper what’s its (they don’t, and most were never claimed to be).  It’s because the central claim of pantheism appears to be wildly wrong.

- and yes, Spinoza probably was an atheist who used the idea for cover.

I think I have always stated my positions as my personal opinions on the matters in question.  They are all accurate, that being the case.  You simply disagree.  

I do not agree that if we humans lacked free will, we'd "still be all that we are."  Free will is top-down causation, which is essential to my emergent materialist perspective on both life and consciousness.  Emergentism contends there exists both bottom-up and top-down causation in certain kinds of material configurations.

So I am not a reductionistic determinist, like many other atheists seem to be.

[vulcanlogician]

Alan, you may have absorbed some non seqs that nuts insist on.

A god could lack free will and it would still be a god, just as….if we lacked free will, we’d still be people, still be all that we are.  Theistic gods are categorized as such because they’re like us, not in some different class.  If the whole universe could credibly be called personal and intervening, a pantheistic god would exist.  Pantheism would be true.  No extra levels or different stuff required.

It can’t be, and isn’t.  It’s not because gods have to be super duper what’s its (they don’t, and most were never claimed to be).  It’s because the central claim of pantheism appears to be wildly wrong.

- and yes, Spinoza probably was an atheist who used the idea for cover.

There is a ton of credence for Spinoza using "God" as a euphemism for atheism. After all, he tried to publish his Theological-Political Tract under a German-sounding pseudonym, but was kind of "caught in the act" and exposed for doing so. Oops. Everyone knows you despise religion now, Baruch.

The Ethics (his magnum opus) was published posthumously. And every time I think about that it irritates me to no fucking end. Here is someone who was advancing human knowledge and should have proudly published the Ethics and been able to respond to academic criticisms of the work. But no. You better publish that stuff posthumously, Baruch, given how controversial the imbeciles who surround you take it to be.

Because of this, we'll never really know to what extent Spinoza's "theism" was just a measure to prevent his work from being banned across Europe. (Spoiler alert: upon publication, the Ethics was immediately banned across most of Europe.) I tend to think that there is a difference between Spinoza and other atheistic materialists of his day. To read Spinoza as a straight materialist is only 97% correct. After all, he saw reality as a self-caused thing. And, according to Spinoza there is only one substance. You can say that that one substance must be material, but again, that's only 97% correct. Spinoza is a defacto materialist, but he also thought that reality could be perceived according to an infinite number of attributes. And he also thought that to see reality as a whole is more accurate than seeing it as individual parts.

So, when you look at reality as this unified, self-caused thing with an infinite amount of attributes... it looks more like a god than perhaps a straight materialist might perceive it. But, again, we'll never know. Posthumous publication. Banned across Europe. Hard to clarify your position when you're censored like that.

@Alan V

If we are assuming hard determinism, nobody makes choices freely. Not human beings. Not God. We can still say a king has power over those in his kingdom. We can still say he is a being of great power. Even though, ultimately, he is just a clump of matter behaving as the laws of nature necessitate the clump of matter behaves.

[Angrboda]

A god could lack free will and it would still be a god, just as….if we lacked free will, we’d still be people, still be all that we are.  Theistic gods are categorized as such because they’re like us, not in some different class.  If the whole universe could credibly be called personal and intervening, a pantheistic god would exist.  Pantheism would be true.  No extra levels or different stuff required.

Not having free will would seem to rob our actions of what is traditionally conceived of as moral significance. Such a move would be fatal for a god.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don’t know that any amount of clarification would have helped in his own time. I can’t help but recommend Crosbys religion of nature whenever I think about what Spinoza might have said if he were transported to today.

Ultimately, though, if contemporary god believers glom onto Spinozan pantheism - it could only be an improvement, imo.

---

Fatal for specific types of gods, maybe- but if we’re exploring the god that is, rather than the god we might wish there to be- we have to consider the space left for a god in a fully deterministic universe - just as we’d have to consider ourselves as we are instead of how we wished we were in the same.

Fwiw….gods have never been traditionally seen to have the kind of free will demanded of them in this convo. They had fates, even the Abrahamic god wasn’t ( and still isn’t) free to do this or that…and , ofc, he has that little issue with ferrous metal. Even if there were room for free will in our world ( and hey, who knows…there might be) it’s unclear that a god would occupy that space, or that we do.

As far as morality, what does a god have to do with morality? They might be moral, immoral, amoral, some combo. No shortage of examples in our gods stories. A god could be any of these things and still be a god, just as a god could inhabit a world where there was (legitimately) such a thing as moral significance…or one in which there was not.

[Ferrocyanide]

First of all, I see "determined or random" as a false dichotomy.

So, you are suggesting that there is a 3 rd state. Explain to me how the 3 rd state operates.

“Humans also "fill in the blanks" to interpret situations without enough information (like you are doing), and choose between frames of reference so they have a better idea which algorithms to apply to which situations. Also, humans create their own programs.”

Humans also "fill in the blanks" to interpret situations without enough information (like you are doing), and choose between frames of reference so they have a better idea which algorithms to apply to which situations. Also, humans create their own programs.

This is not a 3 rd state. We use our logic and fill in blanks where it is appropriate. Humans are simply a far more sophisticated program than a Win XP.

Second, even if all humans were in fact determined, they had to be determined by something else.

The human brain takes input from reality, it learns from reality. We also learn from our peers.
The human brain’s circuits are plastic.
A program like Win XP is static but neural based algorithms are designed to learn.
Yes, when a baby is born, its brain is initialized to a certain state. The brain is not a total blank like your hard drive or RAM that you buy from the store.

A God is in a different, unique category altogether.  To be all-powerful, he must be self-determining.  Otherwise there must be another God behind such a "God," just as there are people behind robots.

I have the same request. Explain to me how this 3 rd state operates.

So my correction, given what you pointed out, is that a God must be able to make free-will choices. I don't see the whole-natural-world-God-of-pantheism doing that. It isn't the simplest explanation for what we see around us.

I’m not sure what people mean by free will.
A brain that is totally non-deterministic will not work just like a universe that has no particular rules is totally random and will not work. You need rules, properties in a universe so that it functions a certain way, so that you end up with stars that produce more complex elements, which eventually lead to planets.

For the brain, it needs to work in a certain way, it needs to be logically and this means having rules, having circuits, which means it is deterministic.