Pantheism
Everything that exists is God.
- One view: God is a force that is in all things (like in Star Wars)
- Another view: sees God as the totality of everything. All is one and one is all.
- Others see: God as manifest in many forms each a part of the ultimate reality.
- Many believe nature is just part of the whole, others believe material reality is only an illusion.
-God is impersonal so God cannot have a moral will- whatever is, is reality and the rest is illusion; our individual personhood is only illusion. When we die, we are absorbed into the impersonal whole. God cannot be intelligent since only persons have intelligence. Cannot be engaged in the world since intentionality and engagement are also characteristics exclusive to persons.
-Dualities or opposites do not exist - there can be no right or wrong, good and evil or true and false.
- no difference between benevolence and malevolence
- logic and reason are also examples of illusions, logic and reason both deal with opposites
- fails to account for features of reality that are expressed in the cosmological, design, and moral arguments.
- if everything that exists is iteself a part of God, then nothing can be transcendent
- the universe is eternal and unchanging, it has no beginning or end.
- a strain of pantheism that is based on the observation that the same matter and energy that makes the universe makes us
-fraught with very difficult problems - with morality. we all share the same fate returning into the impersonal whole, there is no ground for morality.
-claim we are a part of God, God is unchanging, but if we realize that we are a part of God, then we have changed. (Thus, God would change because we changed). Pantheism convenient answer for this contradiction, no such things as logic or reason.