Week Three: Views of God part two

4) Pantheism: God IS the universe (the “All”).
a. “Pan” (all) is “Theos” (god).
b. Pantheism states that God is the world
c. 3 Kinds of Pantheism
i. Absolute Pantheism (Monism)
1. There is no distinction. All reality is “one”.
a. In order for things to differ, they must either differ in their “being” on in “non-being”
b. To differ by “non-being” is to differ by “no-thing” or to not differ at all.
c. To differ in “being” is not possible, because two things cannot differ in the very way that they are the same (in that they both have “being” or existence).
2. A response to Monism
a. Though the argument above is “valid”, it is not “true”. The problem is in the categories. This has been answered several different ways, but I feel the most adequate answer was provided by St. Thomas Aquinas
i. Aquinas argued that “being” could be of two kinds, “Infinite Being” and “Finite Being”.
ii. The Infinite Being is “simple” (not composed of parts)
iii. The Finite Being is “complex” (made of both “potentiality” and “actuality”)
iv. Based on this distinction, Aquinas argued that things might differ in the “potential” that has or has not been actualized.
ii. Emanational Pantheism
1. Everything flows from God
a. In this system, it is held that God is not even self conscious, as self-reflection would imply a basic duality of “knower” and “known”.
b. All awareness and all other “minds” emanate out from “God”.
c. “Matter” (the “stuff” that the world is made of) is the furthest from the “center” (or “Ultimate Reality).
d. Since it is held that unity is absolutely good, then “Matter” (as the furthest from unity) is as far as possible from “good”.
e. There is also a “return” of the things that “emanate” out from the center (God)
f. All is in the One, but this is not reversed; the “One” is not in the All.
2. A response to Emanational Pantheism
a. This system is also untenable, as if everything emanates out from God and is thus “part” of God; there is ultimately no such thing as “I” (identity).
b. If we are all “emanations” of the Ultimate Unity, then the “Ultimate Unity” is itself fractured and not “united”.
c. In order to make a real distinction between the “I” and the “Ultimate Unity”, there must be a real difference. If there is no real difference, then they are identical, which is contrary both to our experience and to logic.
d. Change (which we acknowledge to be actual and real) is not possible if there is simply the “One” which is absolute Unity.
iii. Permeational Pantheism
1. “God” penetrates all things (think the “Force” of Star Wars)
a. God is the “energy” that binds all things together.
b. We are all one with the “Force” and the “Force” flows through each one of us.
c. This is the basic claim of most Buddhism.
2. A response to Permeational Pantheism
a. For the “Ultimate” to flow through all things, there must be a distinction between the “Ultimate” which flows and the things through which it flows.
b. There is a certain element of Theistic truth in this view, in that God is omnipresent and infinite (He is literally everywhere).
c. However, we are not to think of God as “flowing through everything, because this would make God less than the “everything” through which He flows; everything has it’s existence “in” God. (See Acts 17:28 and comments below)
d. Biblical “examples” of Pantheism
i. Acts 17:28, “For in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘Foe we also are His children’”
1. Response
a. Acts 17:28 does NOT demonstrate that there is a single Unity, of which we are all part.
b. Paul previously in his sermon stated that God “created” all men, thus implying that there is a distinct separation between God and His creation.
c. A strong case can (and should) be built for Analogy through what is said in this passage, but not for Monism or Pantheism.
d. We are like God (v. 29), not actually part of God.
e. Paul is claiming that God is the sustaining and originating cause of all things, not that God is identical with all things. (See also Colossians 1:17)
ii. The Trinity as a model of “Emanational Pantheism”. Doesn’t the Trinity prove that there can be a “simple Unity” that is also an emanation of multiple Beings?
1. Response
a. No.
b. The Trinity depends on both the actual unity and simplicity of God (that God is not made of “parts”) and the reality of the difference between the different Persons within the Trinity.
c. The different Beings of the Trinity do not Emanate from each other, rather they are all co-eternal, co-equal, and distinctly individual, while all being of the same Essence (or “substance”).
d. The Son does not “flow from” the Father, nor does the Spirit “flow from” the Son in a Pantheistic sense.
5) Pan-en-theism: God is IN the universe (like a soul in a body).
a. Also known as “Bipolar Theism”
i. God is to the Universe as the mind is to the body.
1. There are two “poles” to God, the “potential” pole and the “actual” pole. God is in the continual process of “actualizing” his “potential” pole.
2. The “Actual” pole is God’s “real” self, His “being”. This is His “moment by moment” existence.
3. The “Potential” pole is God’s physical side, His “body” (the universe)
4. The Universe is eternal, God creates ex materia, not ex nihilo. (Out of pre-existing “stuff”, not out of “nothing”).
5. Miracles are not possible, as there is not a universe “outside” of God for Him to interact with; the physical universe is God’s “body”. Individuals in the world are not identical with God; they are not “part” of Him.
ii. Response to Panentheism:
1. How can God “actualize” His own potential? That would be like saying that a cup could fill itself, or that a plant has everything within itself to grow, needing absolutely no outside influence.
2. Anything with “potential” is not infinite and thus cannot be uncaused; cannot depend upon itself for its existence. Therefore, it is valid to ask of the Pantheistic God, “who made God?”
3. If God is eternal, He cannot change, for change is a measured by time and time is inconsistent with eternality (actually infinite). Therefore the Panentheistic God cannot be both eternal and eternally changing.


*A word on Analogy and Analogous Language*

1) Pantheism and Panentheism have a valid criticism about the way we talk about God. The Pantheist says that language is insufficient to convey meaning about God, for how can finite language convey meaning about an infinite God?
a. Univocal
i. Literally, “Of the same voice”, or having identical meaning; the opposite of “Equavocal”
b. Equivocal
i. The same term, with two different meanings
c. Analogous
i. Correspondence between two things that are otherwise not identical; points of “contact” or similarity.
2) Language about God cannot be Univocal; the things we say about God cannot be identical to God, as Pantheism and Panenthism claim. How can finite language accurately describe the infinite God?
3) However, language about God cannot be Equivocal, because if it were, then we would never actually know anything about God; if all our statements about God were “completely other”, then we would essentially know nothing about God.
4) Our statements about God must then be “analogous”. We can speak meaningfully about God by way of analogy.
a. When we speak of God being “love”, we can know what “love” is, but we cannot know what “infinite love” is. Therefore, we know analogously what we mean when we say “God is Love”.

6) Deism: God is beyond the universe, but not in it.
a. Deism is essentially “Theism without miracles”
i. God is eternal and infinite (in distinction to Finite Godism) and He created the world and is separate from it (in distinction from Pantheism)
ii. God is One (in distinction to Polythiesm) but is One in Essence and Person (in distinction to the Trinitarian view held by Christianity; Jesus is not God for the Deist, as this would be an intervention by God, which is not permissible).
iii. Miracles are not possible either because:
1. God is unable to perform them due to the Natural Laws that He established. Just as God cannot violate His moral law and sin, so He cannot violate His Natural Law and perform miracles.
2. God is unwilling to perform miracles. The Deistic opinion is that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that Miracles have occurred and therefore should be rejected.
3. A basic result of the rejection of Miracles the negative criticism of the Bible.
a. The Bible is essentially a record of the Miraculous dealing of God with humanity. The Deist, who cannot (or will not) accept miracles must account for their presence in the text of the Bible.
b. This is done by way of accounting for “Miracles” as embellishments and myths.
i. C. S. Lewis said,

"I am perfectly convinced that whatever the gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear they are not that sort of thing.... Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has based any doctrine on it. And the act of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is purely a modern art."

ii. C. S. Lewis also said,

“A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people's studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious thing about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spend on that Gospel…I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this…”

b. Essentially, God “wound up” the world and is letting it run according to natural laws.
i. Unfortunately, Natural laws are “Descriptive” not “Prescriptive”.
c. The attack on the Bible (The bible contains miracles, which are “not possible” and are therefore mythological or inaccurate information).
d. The rejection of the resurrection
e. Creation is admitted, but then ignored…?

7) Theism: God is both Transcendent and Imminent (beyond and in the world)
a. This is the view held by Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
b. God is infinite, personal, perfect, all-powerful, all knowing, all loving, etc.
c. The ramifications of this view will be discussed in the following weeks, both through demonstration of the validity of Theism and the attributes of the proposed Theistic God of Christianity.