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On overcoming the culture–nature divide: a panpsychist proposal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2020

Joanna Leidenhag
Joanna Leidenhag*
Affiliation:
St Mary's College, University of St Andrews, Fife
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: jmbl1@st-andrews.ac.uk
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Abstract

Within the recently published volumes, Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order, several authors argue that the theological category of creation can help contemporary society overcome the modern, and ecologically harmful, bifurcation between nature and culture. This paper supplements this important argument by showing how theological panpsychism, an ontology inspired by current debates within analytic philosophy of mind, can help theologians articulate a metaphysically robust and trinitarian doctrine of creation.

Keywords

creationcultureenvironmentnaturepanpsychism
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 43 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 Oliver, Simon, ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift is from Above: Creation Ex Nihilo Before Nature and Culture’, in Torrance, Andrew B. and McCall, Thomas (eds), Knowing Creation: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), p. 27Google Scholar.

2 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘“We are All God's Vocabulary”: The Idea of Creation as a Speech-Act of the Trinitarian God and its Significance for the Dialogue between Theology and Sciences’, in Knowing Creation, pp. 53–4. Stephan C. Evans, ‘Are we Hardwired to Believe in God? Natural Signs for God, Evolution, and the Sensus Divinitatis’, ibid., pp. 195–204. Smith, James K. A., ‘Our Chalcedonian Moment: Christological Imagination for Scientific Challenges’, in Torrance, Andrew B. and McCall, Thomas (eds), Christ and the Created Order: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), pp. 192–3Google Scholar.

3 Smith, ‘Our Chalcedonian Moment’, pp. 185–7.

4 Norman Wirzba, ‘Creation through Christ’, in Christ and the Created Order, p. 46.

5 Ibid., p. 47.

6 Oliver, ‘Every Good’, p. 30. Cf. Milbank, John, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 257–67Google Scholar.

7 Oliver, ‘Every Good’, p. 31.

8 Ibid., p. 40.

9 Schwöbel, ‘We are All’, pp. 48–9.

10 Ibid., pp. 51, 57.

11 Ibid., p. 50.

12 Susan Grove Eastman, ‘Knowing and Being Known: Interpersonal Cognition and the Knowledge of God in Paul's Letters’, in Knowing Creation, p. 164.

13 Schwöbel, ‘We are All’, p. 51. Eastman, ‘Knowing and Being Known’, p. 169. cf. Paul K. Moser, ‘Convictional Knowledge, Science, and the Spirit of Christ’, in Christ and the Created Order, p. 207. The need for human beings to recognise ‘the “thou-ness” in all beings’, is a central part of eco-feminist theologies of creation also. See Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 1983), p. 87Google Scholar; cf. McFague, Sallie, Super, Natural Christians: How we Should Love Nature (London: SCM Press, 1997), pp. 1ffGoogle Scholar.

14 Schwöbel, ‘We are All’, p. 62.

15 Mark Harris, ‘“The Trees of the Field Shall Clap their Hands” (Isaiah 55:12): What does it Mean to Say that a Tree Praises God?’, in Knowing Creation, p. 288.

16 Ibid., pp. 291–2.

17 Ibid., p. 304.

18 Wallace, Howard N., ‘“Jubilate Deo omnis terra”: God and Earth in Psalm 65’, in Habel, Norman C. (ed.), The Earth Story in the Psalms and the Prophets (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), p. 63Google Scholar.

19 For a classic text on this question see Fretheim, Terrene E., ‘Nature's Praise of God in the Psalms’, Ex Auditu 3 (1987), pp. 16–30Google Scholar. More discussions can be found in Bauckham, Richard, ‘Joining Nature's Praise of God’, Ecotheology 7 (2002), pp. 45–59Google Scholar; Dominic Coad, ‘Creation's Praise of God: A Proposal for a Theology of the Non-Human Creation’, Theology (May/June 2009), pp. 181–9; and Muers., Rachel ‘The Holy Spirit, the Voices of Nature and Environmental Prophecy’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67 (2014), pp. 323–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Sanctifying Matter’, in Knowing Creation, p. 172, n. 4; Wirzba, ‘Creation through Christ’, p. 48. A similar welcome for further engagement between the panpsychism of Galen Strawson and the doctrine of creation ex nihilo has been made in Soskice, Janet, ‘Why Creation ex nihilo for Theology Today?’, in Anderson, Gary A. and Bockmuehl, Markus (eds), Creation ex nihilo: Origin, Development, Contemporary Challenges (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2018), pp. 50–1Google Scholar.

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22 As panpsychist philosopher Sam Coleman characterises this argument (sometimes known as the Genetic Argument) for panpsychism, ‘there must be some secret properties of matter with a direct connection to consciousness, such that when you put matter together in the right way, as a brain (and perhaps a body too), you get a conscious being’. Coleman, Sam, ‘The Evolution of Nagel's Panpsychism’, Klesis 41 (2018), p. 185Google Scholar.

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24 Robert C. Koons, ‘Knowing Nature: Aristotle, God and the Quantum’, in Knowing Creation, p. 220.

25 Strawson, Galen, Real Materialism and Other Essays (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 39.

26 Whilst the experiential properties of mentality can be known (not perfectly, but) directly and immediately such that we have a secure intuitive grasp on their reality and nature, the non-experiential properties of matter are a step removed from our experience (since, they are by definition, non-experiential). In light of this asymmetry, humanity employs the physical sciences to describe the word in largely mathematical and quantifiable terms and this has produced great predictive and instrumental success. However, we have no good reason for thinking that such a description is exhaustive of the nature of matter; indeed, given the difficulty of understanding the mental on such a reductionist framework, we have compelling reason for thinking that physics is capturing only a part of reality. Moreover, even the discoveries of physics themselves, particularly since the rise of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century, point towards a view of the world that is not made up of solid, inert, grainy particles, but is a swirl of forces, energy, fields and ‘an ethereally radiant vibrancy’. When philosophers complain that the mind could not arise out of the brain, ‘being a hunk of matter in space’, or just ‘soggy grey matter’, it is not merely the reduction of the mind that is at stake, but the unjustified reduction of matter. McGinn, Colin, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 115Google Scholar. Cf. Strawson, Real Materialism, pp. 42ff.

27 For a historical survey, see Skrbina, David, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a contemporary overview, see Brüntrup, Godehard and Jaskolla, Ludwig, Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: OUP, 2017)Google Scholar.

28 For a more thorough exposition of panpsychism see Joanna Leidenhag, ‘Deploying Panpsychism for the Demarcation of Panentheism’, in Godehard Brüntrup, Benedikt Paul Göcke and Ludwig Jaskolla (eds), Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, forthcoming).

29 Sam Coleman, ‘Panpsychism and Neutral Monism: How to Make up one's Mind’, in Brüntrup and Jaskolla, Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 249–82; and Pfeifer, Karl, ‘Pantheism and Panpsychism’, in Alternative Conceptions of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine (Oxford: OUP, 2016), pp. 41–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Chalmers, David J., The Conscious Mind: In Search for a Fundamental Theory of Consciousness (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar.

31 Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: OUP, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Williams, Rowan, Christ the Heart of Creation, (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 223Google Scholar.

33 Chalmers, David J., ‘Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness’, in Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (Oxford: OUP, 1997), p. 20Google Scholar; cf. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, p. xiv. Chalmers makes the comparison to James Clerk Maxwell's idea that electromagnetic forces had to be taken as fundamental, as well as positing new laws governing these forces, in order to explain the apparently spooky effect of electric and magnetic phenomena (Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, p. 127). Thomas Nagel makes a very similar case for the scientific status for panpsychism when he writes, ‘Major scientific advances often require the creation of new concepts, postulating unobservable elements of reality that are needed to explain how natural regularities that initially appear accidental are in fact necessary.’ Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 42. For more on panpsychism and the science–religion dialogue, see Leidenhag, Joanna, ‘The Revival of Panpsychism and its Relevance for the Science–Religion Dialogue’, Theology and Science 17/10 (2019), pp. 90–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Chalmers, ‘Facing up’, p. 20.

35 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, p. 128.

36 Skrbina e.g. writes that panpsychism is incompatible with monotheistic religion because, ‘In all monotheistic Western religions, humans alone possess a divine and immortal soul.’ Skrbina, David, ‘Panpsychism in History: An Overview’, in Skrbina, David (ed.), Mind that Abides (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 See Joanna Leidenhag, ‘Building God's Mind? A Study on the Relationship between Panpsychism and Panentheism’, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0688-z; and Leidenhag, ‘Deploying Panpsychism’.

38 McCord Adams, ‘Sanctifying Matter’, pp. 174, 177.

39 Horrell, David and Coad, Dominic, ‘“The Stones would Cry out” Luke 19:40: A Lukan Contribution to a Hermeneutics of Creation's Praise’, Scottish Journal of Theology 64 (2011), pp. 29–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Byrne, Brendan, ‘An Ecological Reading of Romans 8:19–20: Problems and Possibilities’, in Horrell, David G., Hunt, Cherryl and Southgate, Christopher (eds), Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical, and Theological Perspectives (London: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 83–93Google Scholar; Hunt, Cherryl, Horrell, David G. and Southgate, Christopher, ‘An Environmental Mantra? Ecological Interest in Romans 8.19–23 and a Modest Proposal for its Narrative Interpretation’, Journal of Theological Studies 59/2 (2008), pp. 546–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 John H. Walton, ‘Origins in Genesis: Claims of an Ancient Text in Modern Scientific World’, in Knowing Creation, p. 114.

41 Ibid., p. 115.

42 McCord Adams, ‘Sanctifying Matter’, p. 177.

43 Ibid., p. 176.

44 Ibid., p. 175.

45 Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘For Better for Worse Solidarity’, in Christ and the Created Order, p. 173.

46 This was a favourite phrase of Erich Przywara, favoured by Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, pp. 223–4; and by Sonderegger, Kathryn, The Doctrine of God, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2015), p. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.