Pantheism’s Myriad Dilemmas
Having alluded to this very brief rebuke previously and while you await the next work to appear here on the site, I thought it best to put out a revised edition of my biggest qualms with said thesis for you to judge.
Reducing The Supreme Being to a totality of finite objects or as a thing diffused throughout flawed nature, injures our Lord’s honor, dignity and grace and “denies The Author intellect and will.”, as Leibniz charged Spinoza’s philosophy with. Should we pursue this reasoning further, one would see that God would be party to every manner of vice, present wherever injustice occurs, working through the malevolent as the proximate cause of all evil. On a similar note, the conflation of the real and ideal (is vs. ought) does away with the effort to improve our lot here and now. There is no promise of anything else afterwards, above or below us either. Agency too, would be impossible, because the modes of one substance, will behave in accordance with their grounds, which regulates everything about them. It also leaves Him impotent, unable to generate anything truly external, but if unable to do this, from whence cometh pluralism when all “individuals” are equal to a third, or equal to each other?
If you say a thing X is merely apparent, then Y, the genuine article, cannot render so much as the deceit conceivable, because this underlying fundament would need to draw from sources beyond itself, and the other, superadded figment, which is nothing in right of its own, can’t assume form out of whole cloth. By what means would reality be an optical illusion in disguise when the former is absolutely veridical and has nothing false to impart anything outside it with? In this regard, categorically distinct natures (analogous to oil and water) alone can explain phenomenal separation.
The respondent to these objections may at last protest that if God is not all, He will be found wanting, but this is to misunderstand perfection. There exists a sphere, the more round, cannot be imagined and a paragon of virtue so exalted, that no deviation from Him contains any merit.
