“…being derived from God, the universe is still imbued with the pattern of God. Nature or natural law is a reflection or outworking of the pattern or personality of God but is not under God’s conscious (or trans-conscious) control. As humans, we are used to not being in direct control of all our bodily processes, but this was a decision God needed to make to allow for the existence of a radical other.”

richard (and Chris),

Thank you for your thoughtful responses. I have turned to the study of philosophy in recent years to inform my interests in theology, but I find little opportunity to discuss (even in philosophy of religion) what may be contemporary theological consequences.

At the moment, I am finding as many issues with monism as with dualism. It seems we remain at the mercy of the Parmenidean/Platonic argument, try as we might to avoid it.

I cannot contest your enthusiasm for panentheism – yet. My copy of Griffin’s “Reenchantment” (a term I initially encountered in the study of McDowell) arrived only yesterday. Glancing at the index, I see he prefers panexperientialsm to panentheism, as he’s a non-supernaturalist of the process theology stripe.

The philosophers I am being introduced to (nominalists or at least sympathetic) are bothered most by reification into universals, but it is the issue of the one and the many (and I don’t yet know how or if that is just another version of permanence and change) that interests me. A lifetime ago, it seems anyhow, I satisfied myself that issues of “something rather than nothing” could be resolved with “there is (put as dogmatically as possible) always something.” Heidegger’s long struggle with “nothingness” seems to have eventuated into an identity of Being and nothingness. Derrida interprets that in terms of Being sorta having gotten itself lost (I don’t know to what degree zimzum played a role for him there, and I have not kept up with his recent work.)

So far what I do not find helpful are the distinctions of subject/object (Husserl cured me there), inner/outer (McDowell manages his reenchantment without it) and like/as (here my hero Ricoeur finds room for his Hegelian Aufhebung but has not convinced me. So I expect he would find your reliance on “patterns” and “reflections” honorable. But I still have a cough leftover from a lifetime of smoke and mirrors.)

As for a limited God, it is not that I personally find that impossible (and Chris most of the questions you pose are the kind the current linguistic turn in philosophy has managed with Russell’s theory of types, whose purpose I understand but whose consequences for language remain vague) but except for this BBS, and maybe out at Claremont (California) School of Theology, hold almost no interest for anyone else. Hence the "lead balloon" image. So I struggle on.