January Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 1

Critique of Monism and Pantheism | The Argument from Damnation, Part 2

Welcome to the latest installment of The Worldview Bulletin! In this issue, Paul Copan continues his examination of the worldviews of monism and pantheism, which are held today by various Eastern religions and philosophies, and offers a critique of both viewpoints. Melissa Cain Travis concludes her series on the argument from damnation, contending that horrific moral evils call for divine and otherworldly justice. Paul Gould sketches the beginnings of a theology of language and its importance for a Christian metaphysics, while David Baggett concludes his exploration of the interaction between morality and epistemology in C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces. We round things out with links to important news of note, and great deals on books and other resources.

We thank you for your support of The Worldview Bulletin, which allows us to devote the time needed to create this material for the explanation and defense of the Christian worldview!

Christopher Reese

Editor-in-Chief

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Contents

Part One

1. Questioning Worldviews: Part 4

   Monism and Pantheism 2:

   Drawing the Strands Together

   by Paul Copan

2. The Argument from Damnation, Part 2

   by Melissa Cain Travis

Please see the second email for Part Two of the newsletter.

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Questioning Worldviews: Part 4

Monism and Pantheism 2: Drawing the Strands Together

by Paul Copan

In last month’s Worldview Bulletin, I laid out the perspectives of monism and pantheism—views common in Eastern religious and philosophical traditions.

In this issue, I briefly offer some responses to monism and pantheism. Some of these points are adapted from my 2001 book “That’s Just Your Interpretation”: Responding to Skeptics Who Challenge Your Faith (Baker).

Monism and the Hidden Assumption of Differentiation

First, if all reality is an undifferentiated oneness and differences are simply illusory appearances, as the monist maintains, one wonders how the monist know this? What would even give rise to the illusion of differentiation (e.g., subject-object dualism or distinctions between physical objects)? And if the monist defends his own view against a dualistic view, wouldn’t that reveal that the monist is doing his own bit of differentiating? The monist’s rejection of dualism assumes a belief different from his own.

Monism and Common Sense

Second, why deny what seems so obvious and commonsensical? Monists themselves must live in a way that presupposes distinction. They must face traffic jams, experience both illness and health, encounter good and bad characters, eat food, and so on. While we do occasionally make mistakes in our sense perceptions, it doesn’t follow to say that we can never trust our senses or that we must deny that external objects exist.

The ancient oriental philosopher Lao-Tzu asked: “If, when I was asleep I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, how do I know when I am awake, I am not a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” But even such a question presupposes a difference between a man and a butterfly. The monistic Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba pondered something similar:

Rebuked by his wife

For not shedding even a tear

Over the death of their only child,

The man explained

“I dreamed last night

That I was blessed with seven sons;

They all vanished when I woke up.

Whom shall I weep for?

The seven that are vapour

Or the one that is dust?

The seven are a dream

And the one a day-dream.”[1]

Again, such a scenario assumes the difference between dream-states and wakeful states

If monism is true, this bizarre result follows.  Say you are holding a pen in front of you.  You press your eyeball a certain way so that you see double.  But you know by other means of perception (such as your sense of touch) and by memory that the pen isn’t double. But if monism were true, then the object would be both double and non-double in the same manner!  We would be left with an utterly impossible state of affairs.

Monism and the Burden of Proof

Third, it seems the burden of proof would be on the person who rejects what seems so apparent to so many. Philosopher Peter van Inwagen wonders why anyone would accept this Eastern view of reality.  So he wisely recommends the following procedure: believe what is apparently true unless there is some known reason to believe that it is not.  The best we can do is to believe what seems to be true unless we have good reasons to reject it.  Indeed, why should we accept what seems so counter-intuitive to us.[2] Aristotle was right: the rejection of sense perception is a rejection of common sense:  “to disregard sense perception . . . would be an instance of intellectual weakness.”[3] We could add that there is no satisfactory experiential basis for believing in this illusionistic philosophy, and we are on more solid ground to assume our sense perception is innocent until proven guilty.[4]  This is indeed how the biblical worldview proceeds.

Monism and Laws of Logic

Fourth, ultimately, the monist must deny rules of logic and logical reasoning, which is self-defeating.  The monist can therefore give us no reason for believing his view is true.  D. T. Suzuki wrote in his Introduction to Zen Buddhism that we only comprehend life when we abandon logic.[5] Yet Suzuki used logic to deny the use of logic. 

A similar misstep was taken by Alan Watts—a former Christian minister who became a Buddhist. He maintained that apparent opposites such as good and evil, active and passive, truth and falsehood, yin and yang don’t exist in light of a higher unity. He rejected rules of logic since, as he believed, all reality is ultimately one.  He rejected Christianity as truth because it was “incorrigibly theistic.” But, again, to reject Christianity, he used logic. He believed in the very distinctions he claimed his worldview denied.  He believed Christianity was the false or incorrect view and that Buddhism was true. The acceptance of monism and the rejection of distinctions present us with a clear and obvious distinction.

Monism and the Problem of Evil

Fifth, why take a worldview seriously when it denies the real distinction between good and evil? In his book The Lotus and the Robot Arthur Koestler wrote about an encounter he and several others had with a Buddhist scholar at the International House of Japan. Writing in 1961, Koestler recounted the conversation:

“Buddhism lays great stress on truth.  Why should a man tell the truth when it may be to his advantage to lie?” 

“Because it is simpler.” 

Somebody else tried another tack.  “You favor tolerance toward all religions and all political systems.  What about Hitler’s gas chambers?”

“That was very silly of him.”

“Just silly, not evil?”

“Evil is a Christian concept.  Good and evil exist only on a relative scale.” 

“Should it include those who deny tolerance?”

“That is thinking in opposite categories, which is alien to our thought.” 

And so it went on, round after dreary round.[6]

Koestler offered this assessment of the conversation:  “This impartial tolerance towards killer and the killed, a tolerance devoid of charity, makes one sceptical regarding the contribution which Zen Buddhism has to offer the moral recovery of Japan—or any other country.”[7]

Ultimately, monism yields a moral relativism.  Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha shows us the tragic moral consequences of monism—that whatever is, is right. Siddhartha (or Buddha) states at the closing of his life:

Everything that exists is good—death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding: then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed to lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.[8]

Cruelty and compassion are not ultimately different. Monism obliterates any objective moral order as well as one’s personal moral responsibility to do right and reject wrong.[9] 

Pantheism and Evil

Sixth, pantheism raises its own set of questions regarding the problem of evil. In pantheism, even though differentiation exists (all things that exist are divine/God), the problem remains: what do we do with the reality of evil? For one thing, if “God” is the Ultimate Reality, how is it that evil exists “within” God? Is evil somehow inextricably bound up with the Ultimate Reality? But if “God” is indeed ultimate, evil would seem to compromise this ultimacy. Something about “God” can be improved upon.

Furthermore, such a view implies a fatalistic approach to life: if evil is bound up with God, why try to change anything about the Ultimate? But because evil is a departure from the way things ought to be, then that presupposes a design-plan. But if this is the case, the Ultimate cannot be ultimate! Evil “within” God compromises the ideal status of God’s being.

These kinds of considerations prompt us to seek out a worldview that better addresses these kinds of questions: a worldview that acknowledges the inescapability of differentiation; that takes seriously commonsensical experience, including sense perception, rather than treating it as truth-deficient and inherently flawed; that takes for granted logical distinctions; that acknowledges the reality of goodness and evil. As all of us at The Worldview Bulletin maintain, a more rationally coherent and more explanatorily fruit worldview is the biblical one.

Notes

[1] Cited in Vishal Mangalwadi, The World of Gurus, 2nd ed.  (New Delhi: Vikas, 1987), 253.

[2] Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 31.

[3] Physics 8.3, 253a33.

[4] Robin Collins, “Eastern Religions,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 189.

[5] (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 58.

[6] (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 273-274.  For the sake of clarity, I have laid out the conversation in a more readable format than Koestler’s account.

[7] Ibid., 274.

[8] Trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Bantam, 1971), 116.

[9] Stuart Hackett, Oriental Philosophy, 177.

— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay