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PLAUSIBILITY OF PANENTHEISM, THE
Encounter, Summer 2006 by Towne, Edgar A
At the turn of the twentieth century, some theologians at the University of Chicago were thinking about how new developments in the natural and psychological sciences might affect theology. For one of them it was a long and unconsummated struggle to rethink what he termed the "God-idea." In his lectures on philosophy of religion in the summer of 1918, George Burman Foster is reported to have said, "We have a God idea on our hands. And what are we going to do with God?"1 Just two months before his untimely death, Foster wrote, "we are witnessing the passing of theistic supematuralism. Mankind is outgrowing theism in a gentle and steady way. Theism now has no clear meaning."2 Of course, Foster was wrong-in more than one way. Theism is thriving now in many forms, including its supernatural form and panentheism. These forms need to be made explicit in any discussion of theism and science.
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Foster was struggling for a way to reconfigure his traditional Baptist faith with his understanding of the world. We can appreciate even now how his integrity as a believer required him to address the plausibility of theism. Because he perceived no split between his being a professing Christian and also a university professor, he pursued his inquiry into theism with passion and candor. Foster was working on a theology of culture and anticipated the sociology of knowledge when he recognized the existential significance of the natural and social sciences for theism. In a 1913 essay he writes,
A striking peculiarity of the psychology and sociology of religion is that, whereas other sciences leave intact the things that they explain, the former sciences destroy their object in the act of explaining it....Hence the destruction of the object is the destruction of religion. To reduce God to the idea of God is like reducing bread to the idea of bread. But it is bread, not the idea of bread, that is the staff of life.3
We see here that Foster well understood why his own theological work evoked controversy. He never completed the constructive synthesis of faith and knowledge that he sought so passionately.
Today Foster's point could be made in the following way: The word "God" is an artifact of human culture. The reality of God is not an item in the inventory of processes and entities discovered by the natural and biological sciences. The reality of God for the believer is integrally related to the use of the word "God" by the believer. The use of the word "God" by the believer is also integrally related to the configuration of beliefs about the world with which it is combined in the believer's believing. That is, the reality of God enjoys at least some minimal degree of plausibility such that the believer gives assent to the belief. Even with some dissonance, it is freely owned as his or her belief without sacrifice of integrity-intellectual or personal. The significance of this is that the problem of the plausibility of theism can be seen to involve not only the ontological status of the referent of the word "God" but also its ontic status for any inquirer or would-be believer. In Foster's terms, bread is not reduced to its idea; God is more than the God-idea. God has both an ontological status and an ontic status that can be specified.
This is why the dipolar theism of the American philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) will be considered the benchmark when considering the plausibility of panentheism in this paper. Dipolar theism is a panentheism, but there are other panentheisms not of the dipolar type.4 For Hartshorne the problem of theism is not a matter of demonstration by proof or persuasion. It is a matter of meaning. Unless this is understood, it is possible to talk about God in such a way that one is not talking about God at all. When this happens, inquiries into theism are confounded. To talk about God as if God might not exist5 is to launch theistic inquiry into a futile endeavor that cannot succeed because it already has begged the question. All talk about God is talk about a divinity as described by the talkers, whether or not they are aware of the description they have in mind.6 Hartshorne's concern with the so-called ontological "proof of God's existence is his way of combining the name "God" with a definite description, the meaning of the word. He adopts St. Anselm's description in Proslogium 3 and 4: "no one who understands what God is can conceive that God does not exist."7 With alternative terms such as "dipolarity," "transcendent relativity," and "dual transcenddence," the ontological status of God as necessarily existing is specified in the description. But dipolar panentheism also specifies an ontic status of God. This ontic status is the universe in any moment up to and including the present, but not the future-as observed by persons in conformity to the conditions of Einstein's special relativity. Hartshorne recognized a second type of God's ontic status, though he did not concern himself with it: the ontic status of God as objectified in the awareness of persons who use or mention the word "God."8 Recognition of this twofold ontic status of God is integral to any impartial investigation of the plausibility of belief in God.
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