Lanell M. Mason
12-16-2025
This entry is the continuation of a two-part series. You can find Part 1 here: https://theologycommons.gcu.edu/2025/09/02/the-compatibility-of-christianity-with-panpsychism-part-1/
4. Panpsychism
Panpsychism attempts to solve the problem of consciousness by making having consciousness part of what it means to exist. In other words, everything that exists is in some fashion a subject as well as an object. Thus, there is no real ontological distinction between being mental and being physical, and therefore no problem of interaction between the mind and the body.
There are many varieties of panpsychism, but the focus here will be on what I am calling non-naturalistic and naturalistic panpsychism. Non-naturalistic panpsychism are those views of panpsychism that admit of the divine as the source for universal spirit or consciousness. I will argue that these views can be problematic for the Christian because they collapse the Creator-creation distinction. Naturalistic panpsychist views, on the other hand, hold that having consciousness is a natural part of what it means to be a physical object. I argue that we should reject these naturalistic views on the basis that we shouldn’t consider fundamental non-physical (for lack of a better word) aspects of the universe to be consciousness. I will end this essay by discussing important ontological considerations to bring into future discussions about the nature of the mind’s relationship to the body.
4.1 Non-naturalistic Panpsychism
When it comes to Western monotheistic religion (as opposed to Eastern pantheistic religion), non-naturalistic panpsychism is the result of a certain kind of theological commitment to God as the source of being and consciousness. This is because if we lean towards panentheistic theological commitments when accounting for the existence of the soul, panpsychism is a natural result.
Panentheism is the thesis that creation exists ontologically in God. Panentheism holds that even though God is distinct and transcendent from creation, he is not entirely so and thus panentheism distinguishes itself from pantheism, which erases the distinction between the divine and world, and classical theism, according to which God is fundamentally distinct from his creation.[1] Panentheism finds its origins in Plato who held that the relationship between God and the world is the same as the relationship between soul and body.[2] Later versions of panentheism has seen God as a transcendent being who is also immanently becoming in the world, or God as the source of and present in all mind and spirit.[3]
This view of creation as existing ontologically in God has had much influence on non-naturalistic views of panpsychism. John Cooper uses the example of nineteenth century academic Gustav Fechner, who held that all entities were both physical and ensouled and reality at its most fundamental is soul.[4] Fechner, according to Cooper, also viewed God as spirit and creation as the body that he animates. Thus, as the world and the people therein grow and develop, so does God, since it is his body that is growing and developing.[5]
Another example of Cooper’s is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. As Cooper discusses, Teilhard does not distinguish between spirit and physical material, arguing that the stuff of the universe is psychic energy.[6] Moreover, evolutionary history of the universe was bent towards the purpose of making beings with consciousness sophisticated enough for them to be self-aware.[7] God himself is the cosmic yet personal destination which the evolution of life and the cosmos is determining all beings will be ultimately united in.[8] In other words, God and all creation will eventually constitute one singular whole.[9] To ensure this eventual union, God put himself ontologically in all entities.[10] It is God’s ontological being in his creation that ensures creation’s ultimate union with him.[11]
Another and more contemporary example would be that of David Bentley Hart. Hart holds that to exist is to exist ontologically in God, and that God is immanently present in all entities.[12] Moreover, Hart views God’s consciousness as grounds for creaturely consciousness:[13] to participate in the act of thinking is to participate in God’s mind.[14] Hart specifically identifies his view as a non-naturalistic panpsychism, one that is more akin to pre-modern notions of the mind’s relationship to the body (such as that of Plato’s).[15] For Hart, being (i.e., existence) is tied inextricably to consciousness. To be is to be intelligible, and God is the infinite source of being and knowledge.[16]
The question becomes whether this non-naturalistic panpsychism is an attractive alternative to substance dualism for the Christian. It may be, but only at expense of the Creator-creature distinction, which results in other theological consequences. If the consciousness that exists in all entities is ontologically God’s consciousness, or if creaturely souls are ultimately God’s soul, then metaphysically creation is not entirely distinct from God. This results in the negation of a number of classical divine attributes, such as God’s immutability, eternality, impassibility, simplicity, full actualization, and aseity. This is why this rejection of classical theism is so prominently seen in the panentheistic leanings of process theology.[17]
However, panpsychism still may be saved for the classical theist. As an alternative to the non-naturalistic views of panpsychism above, we can simply think of the consciousness as a natural part of what it means to exist as a created being and reject the idea that this consciousness is in itself divine. In order to explore the merits of this view, we now turn to naturalistic panpsychism.
4.2 Naturalistic Panpsychism
Naturalistic panpsychism takes experiential consciousness seriously, but unlike with substance dualism, does not take consciousness to be a distinct way of being from being a physical entity.[18] Hence, every physical entity, all the way down to the most fundamental particles, possesses consciousness.[19] Therefore, with the non-naturalist panpsychists, the naturalist panpsychists agree that to exist is to have experiential consciousness.[20]
What make naturalistic panpsychism distinct from non-naturalistic panpsychism, however, is that, according to naturalistic panpsychism, consciousness is not divinely sourced or derived. Instead, everything has consciousness because part of what it means to be a physical object is to have consciousness. Hence, naturalistic panpsychism is compatible with the idea that everything that exists is a physical object. As Galen Strawson explains:
Many take [the interaction problem] to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But those who think this are already lost. For the fact is that we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena.[21]
Thus, the naturalistic panpsychist is committed to physicalism, just not physicalism as it has been traditionally understood. Recalling the three starting point intuitions mentioned in section 2 above (in Part I), panpsychists resolve the interaction problem by defining physical stuff as mental stuff. There is no real metaphysical distinction between these two.
What is distinctive about naturalistic panpsychism comparative to traditional physicalism is the ontological room that naturalistic panpsychism makes for intrinsic properties. These are what Aristotle called the formal and final causes of essences or natures that modern philosophers like Descartes and Hume were quick to dismiss since they cannot be observed in physical objects and subsequently described by the laws of physics. What is important about these properties however is that they account for the teleology—the ordered directedness in purpose or function—that we see in nature. David Chalmers speculates how a naturalistic panpsychism could account for these:
[I]t is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical—the properties that causation ultimately relates—are themselves phenomenal properties.[22]
Thus, similarly to the non-naturalistic panpsychist, the naturalistic panpsychist is able to account for the being and becoming as well as the orderly causal interaction that we see in nature. Hence, unlike substance dualism, naturalistic panpsychism does not admit the existence of objects or entities that can be fully described by the laws of physics. This works in its favor.
Naturalistic panpsychism is not without problems, however. For one, it suffers from the combination problem, i.e., the problem of how sophisticated human consciousness can arise from the combination of the primitive consciousnesses of more fundamental entities (i.e., fundamental particles). This problem is just the problem of emergentism reborn. Emergentism is the physicalist theory of mind that holds phenomenal consciousness arises out of physical systems once they reach a certain level of complexity. Something akin to this must also be held for naturalistic panpsychism. For emergentism, the explanation is usually nomological necessity, which is just to assert that natural processes determine the advent of sophisticated consciousness under certain conditions. However, this isn’t an explanation so much as just naming the problem to be explained. It is more rational to hold that the human self, the subject of sophisticated unified consciousness, is a mereological simple and comes into existence as a primitive unity.[23] This works against naturalistic panpsychism, however, and more in favor of non-naturalistic panpsychism and substance dualism, views not without their own problems.
Second, naturalistic panpsychism assumes consciousness is ubiquitous for no particular reason other than through a commitment to naturalism. If we know phenomenal consciousness exists in human beings through introspective evidence, and if we have a commitment to naturalism, then it must be the case that consciousness is ubiquitous in the natural world. However, there is no evidence other than a commitment to naturalism that would lead the naturalistic panpsychist come to conclusion that inanimate objects like rocks and blades of grass have experiential consciousness. That is, there is no reason given by the rocks and blades of grass themselves for this conclusion. The naturalistic panpsychist might counter that the causal interactions that rocks and blades of grass enter into give us reasons to believe they have intrinsic properties not described by the laws of physics. I would agree, but I counter that it is a leap of logic to conclude that these intrinsic properties must be mental properties.
5. Where Does the Discussion Go From Here?
It is my contention that panpsychism as traditionally described by both the non-naturalist and naturalist is not compatible with the Christian worldview. The non-naturalist loses too much of the Creator-creature distinction, whereas the naturalist has no explanation for the origin of the simple human self, at least no explanation that is an improvement on emergentism. I think what panpsychism in general gets correct, however, is in denying a fundamental distinction between physical and non-physical stuff. Panpsychism sees the limitation of modern science and rejects the laws of physics as accurately describing fully any entity. And if we are unable to accurately describe any entity fully with the laws of physics, then we cannot claim to know there is any kind of metaphysical distinction to be made between physical and non-physical stuff.
What we are left with then is a commitment to a monist view that rejects physicalism. One of the ways we can improve on this monist view is to stop conflating consciousness with “soul” or intrinsic properties. Thus, I reject the panpsychist analysis that says consciousness is ubiquitous. Instead, properties that are not described by the laws of physics are ubiquitous.[24] This is a claim that Christian philosophers can easily affirm. The alternative, that consciousness is ubiquitous, leads to dubious claims about inanimate objects and can possibly lead us down the path of idealism.[25]
So where does the discussion go from here? I think what needs to be developed is a non-physicalist monist view of the mind and body that takes the self to be simple and primitive. A primitive and simple self reflects the biblical soul and thus is compatible with the Christian worldview. However, we cannot make a mistake that has been made by so many by conflating the mind with soul. Thus, consciousness should not be viewed as fundamental, as is the tendency of both dualists and panpsychists. Instead, along the lines of Aquinas, I think consciousness should be considered the exercise of a capacity—or, in other words, the manifestation of a power.[26] Only the simple self or soul is fundamental, the most fundamental unit of creation being the simple substance. The most fundamental metaphysical distinction between ways of being, therefore, is the Creator-creation distinction.
Moreover, under this non-physicalist monist view the body would not be fundamentally distinct from the soul but would be the actualization of some potentiality of the soul, and thus may also be considered the manifestation of a power. Hence, we can imagine a “disembodied state” where the power of being “embodied” is not being manifested, but the soul along with the capacity of being “embodied” exists just the same. I think developing this kind of view of the “mind and body” would get us further to a true Christian metaphysic than substance dualism, so influenced by modernist philosophy, has gotten us thus far.
[1] John W. Cooper, Panentheism The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 18.
[2] Cooper, Panentheism, 18. It should be pointed out that, even though he had this view, Plato’s view was not the modern concept of a soul existing in a material body akin to Cartesian dualism. Cooper points out that for Plato, the body existed in the soul.
[3] Cooper, Panentheism, 19.
[4] Cooper, Panentheism, 124.
[5] Cooper, Panentheism, 125.
[6] Cooper, Panentheism, 150.
[7] Cooper, Panentheism, 151.
[8] Cooper, Panentheism, 155.
[9] Cooper, Panentheism, 156.
[10] Cooper, Panentheism, 155.
[11] Cooper, Panentheism, 156-157.
[12] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 107.
[13] Hart, The Experience of God, 235.
[14] David Bentley Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 7.
[15] Hart, All Things Are Full of Gods, 6.
[16] Hart, The Experience of God, 235.
[17] See Cooper, Panentheism, 23.
[18] Galen Strawson, “Mind and Being: The Primacy of Panpsychism,” in Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 81-83.
[19] David J. Chalmers, “Panpsychism and Protopanpsychism,” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 8 (2013): 1.
[20] Strawson, “Mind and Being,” 80.
[21] Galen Strawson, “Real Materialism,” in Real Materialism: and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20.
[22] David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 217.
[23] See David Barnett, “You are Simple,” in The Waning of Materialism, ed. Robert C. Koons and George Bealer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 161.
[24] I want to credit Robert Koons with helping me think along these lines in response to a question of mine during a Q&A session after an Evangelical Philosophical Society Annual Meeting panel discussion in 2023.
[25] Galen Strawson himself admits his view of panpsychism is suggestive of idealism. See Strawson, “Real Materialism,” 23, 49.
[26] Therese Scarpelli Cory, “The Nature of Cognition and Knowledge,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Eleanore Stump and Thomas Joseph White (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 154-155.