Thursday, September 8, 2022

Christian panpsychism

I’ve just realized that there is something rather attractive about panpsychism from a Christian point of view. All things God has created are in the image of God. Panpsychism allows them to be in the image of God in a very concrete way: by being minded. There seems to be something fitting about all things having an awareness of reality. And there is Luke 19:40. See also this paper.

That said, I think this falls in the general category of speculative arguments about what God would be expected to create, alongside such arguments as that we would expect God to create a multiverse, or Leibniz’s idea that we would expect a world that is infinitely nested in both the macro and the micro directions. Such arguments need to be extremely tentative.

3 comments:

Martin Cooke said...

Intriguing thought (could this affect whether chairs are logical objects? I wonder ;-)

Anonymous said...

Why do you say that God has made all things in His image? In Scripture only men are said to be made in the image of God. Depending on how we take "image of God" we might be warranted in applying it to angels. (I think not.)

Without that premise, your speculative argument seems even weaker, at least from a Christian perspective.

What do you think?

Alexander R Pruss said...

God is the Good Itself. Everything God made is good, and hence an image of the Good Itself.