Episode 57, ‘Pantheism: Personhood, Consciousness and God’ with Sam Coleman (Part II)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

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4.8 • 604 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2019

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Specialising in philosophy of mind, Sam Coleman is a reader in philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. Coleman’s main work centres around questions concerning consciousness, predominantly, on what has come to be known as ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. To paraphrase Colin McGinn, the problem can be summarised as follows: how does soggy grey matter give rise to vivid technicolour experience?

In this episode, we’re going to be focusing on Coleman’s views concerning ‘Personhood, Consciousness and God’, specifically relating to pantheism. In a word, pantheism is the view that God is identical with the universe, as the pantheist slogan goes, “God is everything and everything is God.” If we are to think of personal identity as a stream of uninterrupted consciousness, Coleman argues that pantheism runs into significant problems. Instead, Coleman suggests an alternative theory of personhood which leaves open the possibility of a personal God, which is identical with the universe. As we will find, Coleman’s view bridges fascinating philosophical questions concerning personal identity, metaphysics of consciousness and God, into an original and exciting pantheist theory.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan
0:05.3	Scicast
0:08.2	Part 2 God further analysis and discussion.
0:25.7	Okay, so Sam, first of all, because we're going to go look at God, etc., could you explain
0:31.1	the difference to us between traditional Theism and Pantheism?
0:35.5	And maybe what's the difference between Pantheism and atheism here? Well, I take it the difference between pantheism. And maybe what's the difference between pantheism and atheism here?
0:39.9	Well, I take it the difference between pantheism and atheism is that pantheism says there's a
0:44.2	god and atheism says there's no god.
0:46.2	But as regards the first question, the difference between traditional theism and pantheism,
0:51.1	what do you think about that?
0:53.5	Well, I always thought of you, so classical the
0:56.6	theorists think something like this. God made the universe. God is transcendent from the universe
1:03.7	and is distinct from it. So he looks down on high at us. The pantheist says something like,
1:10.3	no, God, he doesn't look down on high upon us. The pantheist says something like, no, God, he doesn't look down on high upon us.
1:14.5	He really is somehow us. It kind of one and the same, two signs of the coin or something like this.
1:20.5	And then maybe the pantheist also thinks that God maybe either has extra attributes that a classical
1:26.3	theist doesn't have or different attributes that, or lesser attributes, sorry, that the classical Theist would say God has. Does that sound right?
1:35.3	Yeah, the traditional thesis is also, you know, those big omnis, when he's supposed to go in the straws, and he said, describes them as the U-W-God, so not just transcendent and creating the world but omnipotent,
1:44.8	are all-powerful, omniscient, all-knowing, and omnibenevolent, all-loving. Is this the same for the pantheist? I think that the way Greg characterizes it is really good. So there's,
1:49.5	God is imminent, God is not transcendent or apart from the existence of the universe. Somehow,
1:56.0	the existence of the universe constitutes God, or they coincide, even they're one and the same. And yeah,
2:01.5	the pantheist is more prepared as a result to trim away at the traditional ooh God attributes, I
	...

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