Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

always a corruption of good. In this sense the evil god would seem to be less powerful than the good one. The good god could exist alone, but the evil god relies on the existence of good in order to have something to corrupt.

Polytheism is the belief in many gods. Many polytheistic religions however still identify a single God who is over everything.

Pantheism is more or less the belief that God and the universe are one. In many ways it relates to the idea of the universe being conscious. (Panpsychism.) Does the sum of all the consciousness of the universe amount to God or is God more than this? The later view is known as Panentheism. On the ideas of pantheism and panpsychism, two further, related but slightly different, categories can be added. ‘Hylozoism’ is the belief that all matter is alive. Philip Goff (Consciousness and Fundamental Reality) also suggests ‘cosmopsychism’. One of the problems identified for panpsychism is how individual subjects (sub-atomic particles, for instance) can group together to form more complex entities. Also, if say, an electron is conscious, this just seems to re-create the ‘mind-body problem’ on a tiny scale! But these criticisms seem no more puzzling than trying to explain the same realities by other means. And, of course, to an extent we already have the problem of explaining how cells in a complex organism are able to co-operate so seamlessly that we are completely unaware of their individual activities and we have the impression of just a single and essential creature. Likewise, our own internal organs — heart, stomach and gut, for instance

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