Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:26:03.213Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Classical Theism and Pantheism: A Reply to Professor Quinn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert A. Oakes
Robert A. Oakes
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Rolla
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I am grateful to Philip Quinn for his thorough and penetrating critique of my paper on classical theism and pantheism. He has given me much to think about, and it would be philosophically remiss of me not to acknowledge that – in the light of his remarks – the argument which I employed in defence of the thesis that classical theism implies a version of pantheism might well benefit from some amendment. However, the purpose of this brief counter-rejoinder is to establish that the nexus of my argument has emerged from his commentary in reasonably robust health, i.e., to demonstrate that if the argument of my former paper is to be rejected, it will take something more than Professor Quinn's critique to make that clear. Very concisely, then, my response is as follows:

(1) At a preliminary point, Professor Quinn claims that my argument ‘merits careful scrutiny’ because, if it succeeds, ‘something shockingly at variance with received views’ will have been established (p. 290). I find this to be somewhat odd. For it seems clear that St Paul was a ‘classical theist’, indeed a very special one in so far as the shaping of Christian theism is concerned. And while his famous and oftcited dictum that God is the One in Whom ‘we live, move, and have our being’ may be such that it is permissible to construe it in ways which do not imply any version of pantheism, it clearly seems unjustified to maintain that pantheistic doctrines are ‘shockingly at variance’ with that most intriguing statement of St Paul's.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 353 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 353 note 1 Quinn, Philip L., ‘Divine Conservation and Spinozistic Pantheism’, Religious Studies xv (1979), 289–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations from this source will be documented in the text by page number.

page 353 note 2 Oakes, Robert A., ‘Classical Theism and Pantheism: a Victory for Process Theism?’, Religious Studies xiii (1977), 167–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 353 note 3 Leibniz, , Theodicy, edited and introduced by Allen, Diogenes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 43.Google Scholar

page 353 note 4 Letter from Berkeley to Johnson, (25 November 1729Google Scholar). This can be found in Berkeley, George, Principles, Dialogues, and Philosophical Correspondence, edited with an introduction by Turbayne, Colin Murray (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 224–8Google Scholar. The relevant passage is on p. 225.

page 353 note 5 I have used the term ‘perishable’ to discriminate this sense of ‘contingent’ (i.e. the sense in which it is employed by the conservation-doctrine) from the logical sense of contingent'. For it is far from clear that it is inconceivable for there to be objects which are both logically contingent and imperishable, e.g., it is far from clear that God (if He exists) is not just such an object. My own view, however, is that no logically contingent object could be worthy of the title ‘God’.