There’s something that happens to undergrads when I introduce them to some variety of idealism. Let idealism be any philosophy that regards the ideas of consciousness as fundamentally most real. For example, I might make the claim that ‘1. The eternality of mathematical truths resides in the mind of God’ when teaching Neoplatonism. Students have never thought why math always works and when they hear this, their minds start racing. What else might be objectively as true as math?! What abstractions may be present eternally in the same way as math? My moral values!? It’s just a short skip to moral values. It’s always so tight, so neat when seen for the first time; it doesn’t matter the age. Still, you have to think this way when you’re younger. Then, you’re open to all sorts of magic in the world. The reason why many philosophers, I think, still do metaphysics is to see just how much magic remains, but I differ by temperament. Some of us feel deceived by the lack of magic we were told was there and we spend the rest of our lives seeing if there was anything like it to begin with. Some of us even write about magick and wizards to get a glimpse of a world that never was. We have to see the world as it is experienced. Experience is our guide to building better knowledge.
Through empiricism, I do metaphysics to see how much magic there is present in the material world described by science that I may experience. When you even understand an inkling of how much complexity there is experienced, you’ll discover there never was any such thing as “reductive materialism.” Physical monism is not a threat to the beauty and reverence of what is. It’s only the fundamentalists that see science as a threat to the beauty of nature and the expressive order that emerges in nature’s becoming. It becomes in relations as felt and possibly divine. I say possibly since “at bottom” this is an aesthetic orientation to what is and the only positions that make sense require this aesthetic orientation to see it. This is what I take the “original relation” to be that Emerson spends a lifetime articulating and maybe what Buddhists spend a lifetime trying to feel (or in my case reading Emerson’s poetry and spending a Friday night at the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist temple here in town).
Since I am heading in this direction and that some variety of naturalism is likely true, then whatever metaphysical statement uttered about God must be compatible and not contradict the best scientific descriptions we have of nature. So three candidates for me are found possible, if God exists. These are A. Panpsychism, B. Panentheism, C. Pantheism, and D. the Death of God.
These options are further compatible with the commitments of what it means to be what I call a processive naturalist.
1. The universe consists of relations, both those that hold relatively stable while they endure and others of varying degrees of temporal duration that are unfolding independently of me and some that are in relation in and through human beings.
2. Any object or essence, as it is given phenomenologically, is so woven with other relations that any phenomenological description is bound up to describe these relations.
3. Part of being bound up with relations is that an object, essence, concept, or idea are bound up within time’s flux, so no rigidity and timelessness should be presupposed in any description, understanding, or treatment of them, but instead description, understanding and treatment are understood as interpretations of an object, essence, concept, or idea.
4. An interpretation is found to be pragmatically true insofar as the interpretation terminates in the object, essence, concept, or idea.
Assume P1 and that our best science supports an analysis of nature that is becoming.
P1: If processive naturalism is true, then God is best described by A. Panpsychism, B. Panentheism, C. Pantheism or D. Death of God.
P2: Processive naturalism is true
P3: God is best described by [A v (B v C)] v D
P4: Which disjuncts should be eliminated?
It’s at this point that some reasons must be given that eliminate two of the disjuncts, and that’s the point where I am at in my own metaphysical speculations. In other words, I don’t know how to finish the argument. A, B, and C. as traditionally understood give you something divine whereas D. Being the death of God removes the possibility completely. What options should be eliminated so I can affirm one of the conclusions of A, B, C or D? In addition, there are ways that one might contrive these options in ways that combine them, and so I am not confident that a panpsychist interpretation of reality might not also yield either a panentheism or a pantheism. In my metaphysical speculations, I am looking for what my eliminating reasons are so as to affirm the existence of some interpretation of reality.
The Horizon and The Fringe 