Abstract

This chapter suggests how certain problematic claims of pantheism might be made more intelligible. It shows, first, that some pantheistic God-talk is comparable to talk involving mass terms; treating “God” as a mass term affords us a way of understanding, for example, how parts can seemingly be identified with the wholes of which they are the parts, as per the claim that “God is everything and everything is God”. This chapter then goes on to describe a contemporary variant of panpsychism, a variant speculatively predicated on the affinity between intentional states and causal dispositions. This allows for a conception of the world as God’s brain, cashed out in terms of a “panintentionalism” that admits of various organizational possibilities for causal dispositional states, comparable to the organization of intentional states in human brains.