Panentheism, finding God in everyone and everywhere (IV)

This is the fourth in a set of reactions to “How I found God in Everyone and Everywhere”, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Davies and Philip Clayton, for which there is currently the “Cosmic Campfire” book group, a crossover between Homebrewed Christianity and the Liturgists, studying the book over the next few weeks. If you haven’t yet read my first post, you should probably read that first!

The fourth essay is by Keith Ward, holder of MA and DD degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. I was rather caught on the back foot by Keith Ward’s online session being scheduled for Monday 5th November and me only getting to know that on the morning of 4th November; I thought I had until around the end of the week, as I generally need more than a day to get my thoughts in order, so this is a revised and expanded version of the post I originally put up in the group on Sunday.

Anyhow, for anyone who wants a more concentrated dose of Dr. Ward’s idealism, here’s a link to a lecture on his book “Why There Almost Certainly is a God”, a book I’ve read. I also attended a slightly different lecture given by him on the book some years ago.
 
I was, therefore, already aware that felt he was able to found an acceptance of a concept of God in idealism. OK, I would lower the odds from the “almost certain” he obviously accepts if we base the conclusion purely on the argument from idealism (though I think there almost certainly is a God for other reasons), even if you accept idealism, but he makes a good argument.
I’m fairly sure I’m not an idealist myself, and have serious intuitive misgivings about the arguments for it (not least based on my difficulty in understanding how I can stub my toe on an idea), though I’m not certain. I do regard concepts about reality (including scientific laws and hypotheses) as, ultimately, stories we tell about how things are, which are more or less useful depending on how descriptive they are, how useful they are in predicting what we don’t currently know and how easy they are to work with (sometimes called the principle of parsimony; the simpler explanation is preferred, all other things being equal). It also seems evident that evolution is unlikely to have resulted in us knowing reality, rather than something that is useful. It is therefore rather difficult for me to go from things which I generally regard as “made up stories” likely to be inaccurate to things in the mind being more fundamental than what is actually there – though, of course, like Dr. Ward, I think we cannot know for certain what is actually there.
I’m even less certain whether I’m therefore a Cartesian dualist, accepting that there is mind and there is matter or, in an attempt to simplify the whole issue, a materialist, which seem to be the only other normally accepted categories. I see problems with all three options (there may be sort of four options, if panpsychism is taken to be a fundamentally materialist-ish philosophy, as seems to be Galen Strawson’s position). I’m actually fairly comfortable thinking of the material universe as the body of God and of whatever it is that I appear to make contact with (and be in danger of vanishing into) as the consciousness of God, which is a dualist concept. It may not be right, but it’s fairly parsimonious and seems useful. Strawson’s idea leads me to wonder whether what is actually there is neither matter nor mind, but something else entirely, but which seems like matter in one set of circumstances and like mind in another, analagous to wave-particle duality.
But I am not a philosopher (Dr. Ward once made an argument for the existence of God based, I think, on Alvin Plantinga, and ended by saying something along the lines of “if you think this is rubbish, you’re probably not a philosopher; if you think it raises interesting points, you may be a philosopher”, so I accepted his verdict…)
 
Back to the article, I am very much with him on issues such as Biblical interpretation, in which (to simplify) he takes scripture as being a set of human accounts based on experiences of God; it’s when he gets into the philosophy that I start having worries. There’s the issue about “not enough time” again, though – I did once (before hearing his lecture) take apart Plantinga’s argument to my own satisfaction, to try to demonstrate that my intuition about it was correct, but it took me over a week, and I resented having taken so much time over what had immediately seemed to me a specious argument, even if I couldn’t say why (not a philosopher…)
 
Perhaps the connection which worries me most in his thinking is one which wasn’t necessarily explicit in the article, but definitely is in the lecture – the step from saying that a disembodied consciouness can be thought of to saying that such a thing exists. I can rather readily think of quite a lot of things which most definitely don’t exist (and actually some of them, such as the square root of -1, i.e. an “imaginary number”, are extremely useful fictions – a comparison I’ve been known to use against hardline scientific materialists to suggest that a God-concept is potentially at least useful). I cannot, on the other hand, think of any example of a consciousness which is not embodied, and think of the general experience that when you damage the body, there is a tendency for you to damage the consciousness, when you destroy the body, you always destroy the consciousness (at least in any form we can reliably detect). That leads me to think of consciousness as pattern; you can have a pattern made of various materials, but there must always be material to be patterned in that way and, of course, pattern is often in the eye of the beholder rather than in the thing itself (cloud castles, pictures in the fire…). In this I note that I am close to the Hebrew conception of spirits (at least, as that conception is put forward by Walter Wink in his “Powers” trilogy) as needing in all circumstances to be embodied.
For much the same reason, I’m not sure I accept that there must be any such mind of maximal value, if such a thing can indeed exist.
 
I’m also a little perturbed by the concept that a disembodied mind of maximal value would love itself (on which he quotes Aristotle). I find it hard to regard self-love as a virtue, though self-knowledge definitely is (I could refer to Sun Tzu on that front… “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”) But I’d be with him in saying that were there a disembodied mind of maximal knowledge and power, that would be further maximised by being in a loving relationship with a creation. Indeed, it may well be necessary in order for such a mind to know itself, that there be in existence other minds (I’m thinking of Lacan here). OK, he does then slip slightly (IMHO) in saying that that mind would “create a physical universe”, because that’s a step away from idealism into at least Cartesian duality. Is he, I ask myself, merely suggesting that mind is prior to matter? In that case, I think he is fixed with the difficulty philosophers seem to find in working out how one influences the other.
However, once you accept the idea of such a disembodied mind, for such a mind to wish to create “Other conscious autonomous powers” seems less problematic, unless (like me) you think that in order to exist, they need to be embodied, and his derivations through the rest of the essay seem to me to flow reasonably logically from that premise. So he could be right – but in my estimation, very probably isn’t.

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