Over the years here at Mind Matters News, we’ve looked at Durham University philosophy professor Philip Goff’s work explaining and defending panpsychism — the view that all living things or all of nature is conscious. But note especially Joshua Farris’s piece from 2023, “Reflections on ‘Are Atoms Conscious?’ and Philip Goff.” There Farris asks, “Can we admit consciousness without giving into theism?”

Apparently, Goff ended up “giving in” (if that’s the right phrase) to theism, as he told us late last year:

I now think the evidence points towards a hypothesis that John Stuart Mill took seriously: a good God of limited abilities. This hypothesis is able to account both for the imperfections of our universe – in terms of God’s limited abilities – and for the things about our universe that are improbably good, such as fine-tuning and psycho-physical harmony. God would have liked to make intelligent life in an instant, or by breathing into the dust as we see depicted in Genesis. But the only way God was able to create life was by bringing into existence a universe with the right physics that would eventually evolve intelligent life. God made the best universe they could.

“My leap across the chasm,” October 1, 2024

How does Goff understand God?

He qualifies what he means by “God “ when he says,

The idea of God I received as a child was of something completely separate from the universe. However, there are versions of the God hypothesis that don’t see things in such binary terms. There are pantheists, who think that ‘God’ and ‘the universe’ are simply different words for the same thing. This seems like just atheism repackaged. But there are also pan-en-theists, who don’t quite identify God and the universe, but nor do they think they’re entirely separate. Panentheists believe there is an intimate connection between God and the universe; the two overlap. The universe is in some sense inside God, and perhaps God is inside the universe.

These ideas of the Divine resonate with me spiritually, in a way that the purely supernatural idea of God does not. There is a fit with the conviction of many mystics, as well as the English Romantic poets, that the Divine is present in all things. William Wordsworth spoke in the poem Tintern Abbey (1798) of ‘Something far more deeply interfused.’ “Across the chasm”

As it happens, Christianity shares with all the great monotheist religions the view that God is decidedly not the universe but wholly other from it, an uncreated being in his own right. He can, of course, be present in all things (omnipresent) because he created them. The British poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) may have been a lot of things but he had, generally, a traditional view of God, despite sounding like a pantheist at times in his earlier work.

An eclectic view of Jesus

As Goff struggles with what it means to give up panpsychism, he stumbles upon and rejects the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus (Yeshua), a view he himself describes as “heretical”:

If Yeshua rose as a physical body that could be seen and touched, then surely he could have revealed himself to millions, making the existence of God and the truth of Christianity an indisputable historical fact.

These worries were countered only recently when I read the biblical scholar Dale Allison’s book The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), which presents a powerful defence of a slightly unorthodox view of the resurrection.

For Allison, the resurrection appearances consisted of visions, rather than literally seeing and touching a body. In other words, the resurrection appearances of the first Christians were more like the resurrection appearances of Paul on the road to Damascus… Despite not involving a body that could be physically seen and touched, such novel and intense visions, occurring both to groups and individuals, could be enough to render it undeniable that reality had fundamentally altered in some radically new way. “Across the chasm”

The problem with Allison’s view, if I understand it correctly from Goff’s account, isn’t that it is “slightly unorthodox” but that it contradicts the plain sense of the New Testament accounts, presumably from eyewitnesses:

³⁶ While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

³⁷ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. ³⁸ He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? ³⁹ Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

⁴⁰ When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. ⁴¹ And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” ⁴² They gave him a piece of broiled fish, ⁴³ and he took it and ate it in their presence.

(Luke 24:36–43, NIV)

Here and elsewhere, Jesus was at pains to make clear that his was a bodily resurrection. Thus his followers inferred that in eternity they too would be bodily raised from the dead. And that they would have more powers, not fewer, as a result. Hence their widely reported reduced fear of death in the face of martyrdom.

Goff’s philosophical journey may be marked by a number of turns and forays yet. But, as a general rule, it is best to assume that the authors of the New Testament meant what they said. It was left to later generations to assemble doctrine, discipline, and philosophy around it.