Saturday, August 23, 2025

Pantheism's Errors

Matter and spirit cannot be the same, no matter what pantheism, the philosophy that nature is divine (and thus a consciousness in some way), holds.  Matter is physical and consciousness is immaterial, lacking physical substance, whatever the causal relationship between the human mind and body.  Even God or any other explicitly spiritual beings sustaining the cosmos is not the same as them being the cosmos; not even pagan animism is pantheistic in the strictest sense because there is a distinction between the spirits, such as nymphs, and the natural environment they inhabit, such as water or trees.  This alone excludes the very logical possibility of literal pantheism because the two things it regards as the same are fundamentally different.  Even a sort of theistic panpsychism, where all matter is conscious and this is a "divine" hive mind, would still mean that consciousness is in matter rather than that it is the universe.


More foundational than even the difference between matter and consciousness, which would include any divine consciousness, is that which grounds all truth.  Some forms of pantheism might treat reality as if there is only the divine universe.  Without the necessary truths of reason, though, nothing would be true and nothing would be knowable; logical possibility is determined by what is consistent with logical axioms.  As intrinsically necessary truths, logical axioms and what follows from them is neither mind nor matter.  Matter and mind alike could have existed or not existed.  Axioms and other necessary truths would still have to exist because it is impossible for them to not be true.  Thus, not everything is divine, though reason is more foundational than the divine, and there is an inevitable difference between reason, mind, and matter, the former both being true and existing independent of the other two (and of other existents like metaphysical space or time).

The laws of logic are distinct from all else because they alone are true in themselves, could not have been any other way, and dictate and reveal the truth about all other things.  The universe is not the same as everything that exists: the laws of logic, empty space [1], and the uncaused cause [2] would exist independent of matter.  While everything is governed by reason, there is no single thing that all existents are ultimately manifestations of.  Regarding the uncaused cause, which exists by logical necessity in light of contingent things, it could not be made of matter or else something of the universe would have always existed, and yet an infinite causal chain would mean the events of the present could never be reached.  Since there is an immaterial uncaused cause, however, this being must be separate from the universe, which is made of matter.  Once again, here is a logical proof that pantheism is false.

Moreover, my own consciousness perceives an external world of matter--the former is not the same as the universe not only because it is demonstrably nonphysical, but because the external world is just that.  It would have to be external unless a given material thing I visually perceive is really just a mental experience, corresponding to nothing physical beyond my mind!  If my own mind is not the same as matter, the uncaused cause, which would have been wholly immaterial before the cosmos, could certainly not be part of the universe.  At most, it could imbue physical substance with a supernatural (separate from or above nature by virtue of being immaterial) power that dwells within it, and perhaps after creation it fashioned a body for itself.  None of this is consistent with pantheism in its basic form.

There would also be no difference between pantheism and metaphysical naturalism if the universe is divine spirit and vice versa, yet the two philosophies are very different.  The former holds that the physical is spiritual or an extension of a theistic being and the latter holds, except in alternate forms like emergent naturalism for consciousness [3], that there is nothing immaterial at all that exists, and thus no spirit (again, emergent naturalism does not have this same flaw, for one's own consciousness is absolutely certain for all rationalists, though it is not the only immaterial thing that can be proven to exist).  Amidst pantheism's other aforementioned errors--not unlikelihoods, but outright logical falsities--its conflation of mind and matter alone is enough to render it untrue.




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