Quote:
Originally Posted by Rig Astley
Different in which way? As always, the "believers" leave out the most important part.
The comparison is between
a) a model of Divine existence which treats God as existing entirely outside of "the world" (the kosmos, all that exists), having a very anthropomorphic kind of "will", choosing in an arbitrary way between metaphysical possibilities. God choosing between "possible worlds" is a common way you'd see this expressed.
b) a model of Divine existence in which God is immanent in everything that exists, and which, if also transcendent, at the very least does not posit God as having this sort of metaphysically unencumbered will. This model rejects libertarian free will in its normal formulation, both as applied to God and to Man. It rejects or at least greatly qualifies the anthropomorphic concept of "will" as applied to the Divine. It is in that sense a slightly less "personal" concept of God.
Hence the analogy to the natural processes by which a flower grows. You don't ask why the flower chose to grow the petals it has instead of some logically possibly "other" petals. We don't impute that sort of metaphysical will or choice to nature. (b) posits a Divinity whose dynamism is more like nature than a Supreme Being. In Panikkar's case, this is not exactly like Spinoza's "God or Nature", since Spinoza follows a purely rationalistic way of understanding Divinity and Panikkar does not, but the comparison is obvious, as is the comparison to pantheism, although Panikkar is not exactly pantheist either.
But the "in which way" is most fundamentally the difference between conceiving of God in such a way where the obvious question is "why this and not that?", i.e metaphysical free will, vs a way that is more like how naturalism treats fundamental law: i.e something of a brute fact. Or in religious terms: a mystery.
There are certainly difficulties reconciling (b) with the way Christians have talked about God, but at the same time, some of what Christians have said about God, or what the Biblical authors wrote about God ends up sounding a lot like (b), even while a lot also ends up sounding like (a). Theology is a human endeavor. The theology of (a) isn't some matter of revelation in Christian scripture as such. The Bible isn't systematic in that way. There are lots of tensions and apparent contradictions. The theology in (a) itself is a product of human understanding and reflects the knowledge and cultures in which it developed. It reflects an understanding of ourselves and the world and the Divine which is many ways no longer believable. The history of human religion is full of examples of theological concepts changing as human understanding of the world changes. The Christian theology of the late middle ages similarly needs a reinterpretation