Evidence · Case 15 · Hinduism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pantheism”
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
The encyclopedia surveys pantheism, the view that identifies the divine with all of reality, and discusses the standard difficulty of accounting for evil and moral value once God and the world are treated as one. It presents this as one of the recognized philosophical pressure points for such views.
Sources
Objections & responses
- This argument applies only to Advaita and popular “we are all one” spirituality, not to Dvaita or the bhakti traditions, which keep a Creator-creature distinction and a real account of sin and grace. Isn’t Advaita being treated as if it were Hinduism?
Correct, and the scope is monist and pantheist forms of Hinduism and their popular Western descendants. The theistic Hindu schools would agree with much of this argument and use it against Advaita themselves; Madhva’s Dvaita is in part a sustained critique of exactly this problem. The Stanford entry also presents pantheist replies to the problem of evil (that evil is a privation, or a perspective-dependent feature of finite parts, as in Spinoza), which deserve a hearing before the Advaita levels reply in the next exhibit. Engaging the real internal debate is better than a flattened target.