particles and connections (General)

by dhw, Thursday, February 09, 2017, 15:12 (2846 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God is connected to all animate organisms as a universal consciousness, even if those organisms have no consciousness. He is most closely connected to those with some degree of consciousness.

dhw: As you will have realized, I am probing your nebulous panentheistic concept of God being “within and without”. Why have you suddenly limited your God's universal consciousness to animate organisms? A pebble is not an animate organism. If your God is not within it, then he is not “within” everything. And of course that would extend to all inanimate objects, such as rocks, oceans, stars and solar systems (unless you believe them to be animate.) So are you now saying that your God is ONLY within living organisms? If not, once again: how is he "within" the pebble?

DAVID: I doubt very much he is inside inanimate objects. But He is control of the objects in the universe, such as galaxies with contents since He created the universe.

So just to clarify: “within and without” the universe and everything in it (which I understood as being the essence of panentheism) is almost certainly wrong, then. Your God is only “within” the living organisms we know on Planet Earth, and he simply manipulates matter from the outside, presumably by psychokinesis.