## 1. Conceptual Foundations and Motivations


### 1.1 Definition of "ultimate"



Brahman, the Dao, emptiness, God, the One, Reasonableness--there,
in alphabetical order, are names of the central subjects of concern in
what are commonly parsed as some of the world's religions,
philosophies and
 quasi-religious-philosophies.[1]
 They are all names for what is ultimate, at least on some uses of the
names (for instance, "God" is not always taken to be
ultimate, more soon). But what is it to be ultimate, in this
sense?



To answer in terms of its use, the term "ultimacy", meaning
the state or nature of being ultimate, has Brahman, the Dao, emptiness
etc. as instances. To answer semantically, with a meaning, is
difficult for at least two reasons. First, though there is abundant
precedent in the literature for collecting these subjects as ideas of
 ultimacy,[2]
 doing so presupposes they have some shared characteristic or family
resemblance that makes them count as ultimate. But *is* there a
shared core idea of being ultimate? "Particularists" among
others argue no: the diverse range of cultural and historical contexts
from which these subjects come, coupled with how hard it is to talk
across such contexts, makes them all "separate cultural
islands" (Hedges 2014: 206; see also Berthrong 2001:
237-239,
 255-256).[3]
 The second concern is related, and not far from one Tomoko Masuzawa
(2005) among others has raised about religion: even if we found a
substantive account of ultimacy visible in multiple traditions, such
an account necessarily will be borne from a cultural conceptual
context. Thus, far from delivering the notions at work in other
traditions, such an account actually risks de-forming them.



Regarding the first concern, John H. Berthrong, among others, is far
more optimistic than the particularists that concepts not only can be
shared across cultures but in fact are



> 
> 
> already comparative, having been generated by the interactions of
> people, texts, rituals, cultural sensibilities and the vagaries of
> history and local customs. (2001: 238)
> 
> 
> 



Other theorists explore factors that could detail or add to
Berthrong's list--e.g., trade and conquests (Gayatriprana
2020), shared human evolutionary biology (Wildman 2017), and the
evolution of moral development (Wright
 2010).[4]
 Still, most take the second concern about enculturation to stick and
thus to temper the optimism: there is *both* a shared humanity
*and* real cultural difference to own in reaching a global idea
of ultimacy. Raimon Panikkar says it well:



> 
> 
> *Brahman* is certainly not the one true and living God of the
> Abrahamic traditions. Nor can it be said that Shang-ti or
> *kami* are the same as *brahman.* And yet they are not
> totally unrelated. (Panikkar 1987 [2005: 2254])
> 
> 
> 



The Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project, run by Robert
C. Neville and Wesley Wildman from 1995-99, balanced the overlap
and difference when they concluded that an account of ultimacy should
be a "properly vague" category: it needs enough shared
content to count as a category, but enough vagueness to cover the
disparate instances generally taken to be
 ultimates.[5]
 There are multiple contenders for such vague categories, including,
e.g., Paul Tillich's "object of ultimate concern"
(1957a, e.g., 10-11), John Hick's "the Real"
(1989: 11ff); Keith Ward's "the Transcendent"
(1998); and the Project's own proposal as "that which is
most important to religious life because of the nature of
reality" (Neville & Wildman 2001, see 151ff for an
explanation of each part of the phrase).



Informed by the Project's finding, this entry will
"vague-ify" the content of John Schellenberg's
account of what is ultimate to use as a cross-cultural core idea of
ultimacy and as an organizing principle. To paraphrase, Schellenberg
takes being ultimate to mean being that which is (1) the most real,
(2) the most valuable, and (3) the source of deepest fulfillment among
all that is or perhaps could be. More carefully, and in
Schellenberg's words, being ultimate requires being ultimate in
three ways: (1) metaphysically ultimate, i.e., the "most
fundamental fact" about the nature of things (2016: 168), (2)
axiologically ultimate, i.e., that which "has unsurpassably
great value" (2009: 31), meaning greatness along all its
categories of being, and (3) soteriologically ultimate, i.e.,
"the source of an ultimate good (salvific)" (2009: xii,
also 2005: 15), meaning being the source of salvation or liberation of
the kind practitioners of the world's religions and philosophies
ardently seek (e.g., nirvana, communing with God, moksha, ascent to
the One, etc.), whether these all amount to the same salvation (e.g.,
Hick 1989: Ch. 14) or constitute radically distinct types of
salvations (Heim 1995: Ch. 5). Schellenberg's choice of these
three terms is insightful: most extant takes on ultimacy *per
se* and on Brahman, God and the Dao in particular are variations
on a theme of Schellenberg, as scrutiny of even the brief definitions
above as well as the models in
 Section 2
 will bear
 out.[6]



Schellenberg's account of what it takes to be ultimate is
already somewhat vague: he recommends no further precisification of
his three terms in order to stay open about what counts as ultimate as
our knowledge grows (2009: 31). This entry will loosen his account
further by placing a disjunction between its terms instead of a
conjunction. That is, Schellenberg takes metaphysical, axiological and
soteriological ultimacy to be severally necessary and jointly
sufficient for something to count as ultimate; he requires
"triple ultimacy", as James Elliott calls it, for ultimacy
*per se* (2017: 103-04). Those who agree in principle
include, e.g., Clooney 2001 and Rubenstein
 2019,[7]
 as well as, e.g., Aquinas, Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, who in fact
argue that, given the entailments between the terms, there is triple
ultimacy or none at
 all.[8]
 Others take double or even single ultimacy to be not only possible
but also sufficient for being ultimate. For example, Neville defines
ultimacy in strictly metaphysical terms as "the ontological act
of creation" (2013: 1); Elliott and Paul Draper each take
soteriological ultimacy to be sufficient for ultimacy (Elliott 2017:
105-109; Draper 2019: 161); and John Bacon takes his
understanding of God as "<Creator, Good>" to be
metaphysically and soteriologically ultimate though a "let-down
axiologically" (2013: 548). Moreover, requiring triple ultimacy
stops some of the paradigmatic models of Brahman, God and the Dao from
counting as ultimacy, as
 Section 2
 will demonstrate (see also Diller 2013b). Thus, this entry will take
some combinations of the three types of ultimacy to be sufficient for
being ultimate, without settling which, provided nothing else in a
system has more. Note that replacing Schellenberg's conjunction
with a disjunction makes the field of ultimates a family resemblance
class.



Even disjunctivized, the Schellenbergian view adopted here is clearly
an inheritance from Abrahamic perfect being
 theology,[9]
 so two cautions about scope. First, when we look outward and find
that some non-Abrahamic traditions have ultimacy in the sense
here--as we will in
 Section 2
 for Hinduism and Daoism--we should acknowledge that this result
comes framed from the outside. Second, not all non-Abrahamic
traditions will have ultimates in the sense just adopted. For
instance, to offer just one example, Barbara Mann suggests that in
non-colonized interpretations of Native American spiritualities there
is nothing that is ultimate in Schellenberg's sense (2010:
 33-36).[10]
 So ultimacy as just defined may be widespread in the world's
religions and spiritualities, but it is not universal.



Finally, three points of clarification about terminology. First,
talking about ultimacy does not entail that anything ultimate exists.
The concern that it might is related to "the problem of singular
negative existential statements", to which Frege and Russell
offered solutions that in turn have been enshrined in predicate logic,
though not without complaint (for more see Kripke 2013 and the SEP
articles on
 existence
 and on
 nonexistent objects).
 Second, the term "ultimate reality" could be taken to
mean *how reality ultimately is*--i.e., that which is
metaphysically ultimate, perhaps a part of every complete
ontology--instead of meaning the richer sense of
"ultimacy" at issue here, which is not a part of every
complete
 ontology.[11]
 To avoid confusion, this entry will reserve the term "ultimate
reality" for metaphysical ultimacy *per se* and use
"ultimate" and variants for the combinations of the
Schellenbergian
 disjunction.[12]
 Thus framed, the distinction leaves open this central question: is
ultimate reality ultimate? Lastly, regarding the choice of the term
"ultimate" and its variants, there is a syntactic parallel
to the semantic issue above: we need a sufficiently vague kind of
speech to cover the diverse ontological kinds implicit in accounts of
ultimacy, including concrete or abstract particular things (e.g., God
or Brahman on some views); states of being (e.g.,
Existence-Consciousness-Bliss for Brahman, see
 Section 2.1);
 properties (e.g., everything is empty on Buddhism or divinely
intentional for Karl Pfeifer, see
 Section 2.2);
 actions and events that things perform or undergo (D. Cooper models
God as "a verb" as in "God-ing", 1997: 70; cf.
Bishop & Perszyk 2017); and grounds of being that are meant to be
category-less (e.g., as in "the creative source of the
categories themselves", Vallicella 2006 [2019], see also, e.g.,
Tillich in
 Section 2.2,
 the Dao in
 Section 2.3).
 Though no term is quite right given the diversity, this entry uses
the adjective form of being "ultimate" as primary, to
describe *x* as metaphysically, axiologically or
soteriologically ultimate per above, whatever *x*'s
ontological kind (cf. with the more familiar term from Abrahamic
monotheism of "divine"). It also uses "ultimacy"
as a noun for the nature or state of being ultimate (cf.
"divinity"), the nouns "the ultimate", "an
ultimate" or "ultimates" to function flexibly both as a
mass noun (such as "water" or "butter") for
the property or uncountable substance of being ultimate and as a count
noun for things, events and grounds of being (cf. "God" or
"gods"); and "to ultimize" as the verb form,
if ever we need
 it.[13]


### 1.2 Definition of "model"



A "model" of what is ultimate is a way it can be conceived.
In general, a model is a representation of a target phenomenon for
some purpose. For instance, R. Axelrod developed a computational model
that represented a target of two "agents" caught in an
iterated prisoner's dilemma, with the purpose of solving the
 dilemma.[14]



The term "model" in religious and philosophical contexts
is related to but not identical with its use in scientific contexts,
in ways Ian Barbour (1974) foundationally traced. Though there is some
disagreement between the fields on whether models describe their
target or not and what the point of modeling is, importantly, in both
contexts, the term "model" (1) connotes that its target is
somehow out of reach--not able to be directly examined--and,
perhaps by force of this, (2) encodes a conceptual distance between
the target and the model. In particular, the model is not a copy of
the target but rather chooses revealing aspects of the target to relay
by leaving out or distorting other
 aspects.[15]
 Think of a model of a city that is by design not to scale, precisely
so viewers can see the relationships between the city's streets,
buildings and neighborhoods. Models are thus simultaneously
epistemically instructive and humble.



Thus understood, "model" captures well the ways people
have thought about what is ultimate. Taking a model's target to
be obscured per (1) and the model itself to be fallible per (2) is not
only apt but also crucial for thinking about what is ultimate given
our necessarily limited knowledge of it (see
 Section 1.4).
 Moreover, among the choices on the linguistic menu,
"model" is a middle way. It is more specific than
"idea" understood in the Cartesian sense as
"whatever is immediately perceived by the
 mind",[16]
 since a model is the more particular kind of idea just relayed. At
the same time, "model" is general enough to cover the very
diverse kinds of extant linguistic accounts of what is ultimate in the
literature, including, e.g., "concepts" understood in the
classic sense as necessary and sufficient conditions for being
ultimate, such as Anselm's idea of God as "that than which
no greater can be conceived;" "conceptions" which
are "more particular fillers" for more general concepts,
such as Richard Swinburne's verdict about what it would take to
be that than which nothing greater can be
 conceived;[17]
 sustained "metaphors" such as Ramanuja's Brahman as
the "Soul" of the cosmos (see
 Section 2.1)
 or Sallie McFague's "God as Mother, Lover and
Friend" (1987); and "indexical signs" that point to
an indeterminate ultimate visible in Neville (2013). This entry will
call all these linguistic types "models" of what is
ultimate, given that they each in their own way represent or aim at a
target of what is ultimate for various purposes, at least as much as
language can (more in
 Section 1.4).[18]



As
 Section 1.5
 will detail, some models of what is ultimate nest, e.g.,
Shankara's idea of Brahman is a species of Vedantic ideas of
Brahman which in turn are species of Hindu ideas of Brahman. To
simplify, this entry will use the term "model" for ideas
of what is ultimate at all levels, and take a model's target to
be "the ultimate" if the modeler thinks what is ultimate is
single or uncountable (as in models of e.g., Brahman, God and the Dao)
or "ultimates" if multiple (as in polytheistic or perhaps
communotheistic models).


### 1.3 Motivations



Understanding the scope of the work on modeling what is ultimate is
central in multiple ways for assessing claims about its existence.
First, the meaning we have in mind for "*x*" can
decide our take on whether *x* exists. For example, in the case
of God, some are convinced by arguments from suffering that there is
no God, but such arguments, even if they succeed, generally apply only
to God conceived as an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent
("OOO") person and as written do not apply to God
conceived differently ("generally" since there are notable
exceptions, e.g., Bishop 2007 and Bishop & Perszyk 2016). Further,
the act of abandoning one model while being aware that there are
alternative models can set up an exploration into the field of models
of the ultimate or ultimates. For example, if one decides there is no
OOO personal God, one might ask: are there any *other* models
of God genuinely worth the name "God" without these
properties? If not, are there perhaps any non-theistic (non-God)
models of what is ultimate without these properties? In other words,
for those who have a limited sense of what it takes to be ultimate
(e.g., what is ultimate is a OOO God or nothing at all), a search of
extant models can open up the range of options on their menu and
position them to see whether any are philosophically palatable. In
fact, such a search may be required in order to settle the question of
whether anything ultimate exists, because it is invalid to conclude
that there is nothing ultimate on the basis of arguments against
specific models of ultimacy if there could still be genuine ultimacy
of another kind (see Diller 2016: 123-124).



In addition to their pivotal role in deciding questions of existence,
notions of what is ultimate profoundly impact questions about
religious diversity, such as whether multiple religions can have
simultaneously true core beliefs. For example, on "plenitude of
being" models--where the ultimate is infinitely full of
incommensurable content--multiple religions are taken to be
grasping different aspects of it accurately. So multiple religions can
have true beliefs about what is ultimate, even if each has only a part
of the truth. Finally, models of what is ultimate are also intimately
bound up with philosophical questions of meaning, e.g., in
meaning's "Cosmic" and "Ultimate" senses
as Rivka Weinberg explains them, though she decides that even if there
were something ultimate, it would not finally deliver meaning in
either sense (2021).


### 1.4 Challenges



Though some model what is ultimate, others object to the entire
project of modeling it. There are three main kinds of concerns in the
literature: about the existence of ultimacy, about the coherence of
the very idea of ultimacy, and about whether talk and knowledge of
ultimacy is humanly possible, even assuming the idea is coherent. The
first concern is motivational: for those who think there is nothing
ultimate, there seems no point worrying about how it has been
conceived. However, as indicated in
 Section 1.3,
 it is invalid to conclude that there is nothing ultimate without
having some sense of the range of what it might be. So even those who
think there is nothing ultimate are thrown into the project of
modeling it--at least enough to license the conclusion that this
work is not worth doing.



To offer just one example of the second challenge, Stephen Maitzen
(2017) argues against the concept of ultimacy on multiple fronts,
including, e.g., that nothing can be metaphysically ultimate in
Schellenberg's sense because it would need to be simultaneously
*a se* *and* concrete so that it can be metaphysically
independent *and* explain concrete things, respectively. But no
concrete thing can explain itself because (to shorten the argument
considerably) even the necessity of such a thing is not identical to
itself so it is not explaining itself (2017: 53). If Maitzen is right,
nothing can be metaphysically ultimate in Schellenberg's sense,
and thus not metaphysically, axiologically and soteriologically
ultimate at once.



The third kind of concern is more widespread--that it makes no
sense for us to model what is ultimate because it is beyond human
language (ineffable) or beyond human cognitive grasp (cognitively
unknowable), or both. Why think this? To combine a few common
arguments: what is ultimate (1) goes beyond the world, (2) is in a
class by itself, and (3) is infinite, while our predicates are
(1') suited to describe things in the world, (2') classify
things with other things, and (3') are limited (see, e.g.,
Wildman 2013: 770; Seeskin 2013: 794-795). Thus, for any
*P*, a statement of the form "ultimacy is
*P*" seems necessarily false, if it is meaningful at all.
Ineffability and unknowability are related: if we can say nothing true
about ultimacy, then we can know nothing about it--at least
nothing that can be said in words.



That last hesitation--"at least not in
words"--leaves room for, e.g., embodied ways of knowing by
way of religious, mystical or spiritual experiences which are reported
in the world's religious traditions and more generally (whether
such experiences actually happen or not, see, e.g., James 1902
[1961]). Still, the combined arguments above and the gut intuition
behind them represent an enormous challenge to the whole enterprise of
modeling what is ultimate *in words*. There are those who opt
for silence in the face of these arguments, and thus understandably
but alas "literally disappear from the conversation"
(Wildman 2013: 768, "alas" because they are missed). One
main move of those who do keep talking is to distinguish what is
ultimate as it is in itself, which they concede we can never talk
about or know, from it as it affects our experience, which they think
we *can* talk about and know. So some distinguish, e.g., the
absolute from the relative Dao (*Daodejing,* chapter 1); the
Godhead from God as revealed (Meister Eckhart, e.g., Sermon 97;
Panikkar 1987 [2005: 2254]); the noumenal from the phenomenal Real (Hick
1989) etc. and talk or make knowledge claims only about the latter
(see also, e.g., Paul Hedges 2020
 [Other Internet Resources]).[19]



Some also claim to make true statements about what is ultimate by
restricting those statements to certain kinds of claims about it. One
tactic is to talk about how ultimacy is related to us or to other
parts of the natural (or non-natural) world instead of talking about
how it is in itself, i.e., to talk about its extrinsic vs. intrinsic
properties. For example, Maimonides suggests that one way to make
"ultimacy is *P*" true is to make *P* an
"attribute of action", i.e., an "action that he who
is described has performed, such as *Zayd carpentered this
door*..." (*The Guide of the Perplexed*,
I.52-3, italics added), an attribute which says nothing about
Zayd's intrinsic properties save that he has what it takes to
carpenter this door. An analogue of this for ultimacy is, e.g.,
*the Dao generated being*, again an attribute which indicates
only that the Dao, whatever it is or is not, can and has generated
being. Other possible ways of speaking truly about ultimacy include
famously the *via negativa* ("God is not
*P*", Shaffer 2013: 783), the *via eminentia*
("God is better than *P*"), the way of analogy
("God is perfectly *P*", Copleston 1952: 351 on
Aquinas, e.g., *Summa Theologica* I, 13 and *Summa contra
Gentiles* I, 30, see also Kennedy 2013: 158-159), the way of
super-eminence ("God is beyond *P* or not
*P*", Pseudo-Dionysius, Shaffer 2013: 786ff)
and--though this seems doable in theory only--equivocal
predication ("God is *P*\*" where *P*\* is a
predicate outside of human language, Shaffer 2013: 783). What does all
this really allow us to say, know, and do philosophically, though?
More than one might think, says Neville: though ineffability might
seem to stop metaphysics, it actually tells us how to do the
metaphysics, e.g., "the *dao...*can be discussed
mainly by negations and indirections" (2008: 43), or in these
other ways.


### 1.5 Philosophical categories of ultimacy



For those who decide to model what is ultimate in the face of or
informed by these challenges, there are several common categories, or
"model types" as Philip Clayton once called them, which
distinguish kinds of models of what is ultimate from each other.
Knowing these categories can organize what might be an otherwise
haphazard array of models, in something like the way knowing what an
oak, maple and birch are can help sort the sights on a walk through a
forest. The categories of ultimacy are best grasped by framing them
with a question. For example, Hartshorne and Reese (1953) categorized
models of God in particular as the logically possible variations on a
theme of five questions, whose positive answers get symbolized by
ETCKW:


* E: Is God eternal?
* T: Is God temporal?
* C: Is God conscious?
* K: Does God know the world?
* W: Does God include the world?



To use models that will be discussed in
 Section 2,
 Shankara's pantheism is ECKW since he takes Brahman to be an
"Eternal Consciousness, Knowing and including the World"
but which is atemporal and never changes; Hartshorne and Reese's
own panentheism is ETCKW, etc. (see their 1953 [2000: 17] and Viney
2013 for more examples). Wildman (2017) has his own set of questions
and entire system built out of them (more in
 Section 3),
 which adds another important question that ETCKW leaves out or
perhaps merely implies: Is what is ultimate
personal/anthropomorphic--i.e., is it aware and does it have
intentions--or is it impersonal/non-anthropomorphic? One might
also look for functional categories: is what is ultimate the
efficient, material or final cause of the universe?, does it intervene
in it?, does it provoke religious experience?, and more.



Another question that may be asked about a particular model is: How
many ultimates does the model conceive ultimacy to be? Though the very
idea of plural ultimates sounds contradictory--wouldn't one
thing need to beat out all competitors in order to satisfy the
superlatives "most fundamental" fact,
"highest" value, "deepest" source of
fulfillment?--those who model "ultimate multiplicity"
see a tie for first place. Some models of Zoroaster's view, for
instance, take there to be two ultimates, the good Ahura Mazda and the
evil Angra Mainyu engaged in fundamental battle (though such models
will have to explain why Ahura Mazda is not the true ultimate given
his apparent axiological edge on Angra Mainyu). John Cobb and David
Ray Griffin at least some of the time take there to be three distinct
ultimates: the Supreme Being experienced in theistic experiences,
Being Itself (or emptiness) experienced in acosmic experiences, and
the Cosmos experienced in cosmic experiences (Griffin 2005:
 47-49).[20]
 Monica Coleman models what is ultimate in traditional Yoruba religion
as a "communotheism", in which "the Divine is a
community of gods who are fundamentally related to each other but
ontologically equal", including
*Olodumare* and the 401
*orisa* (2013: 345-349). All the
models we will look at in
 Section 2
 will be "ultimate unities" although there will be some
diversity in the unity for the panentheisms in particular. George
Mavrodes also cautions us to be wary of the unity/multiplicity
distinction:



> 
> 
> there are monotheisms that seem to include an element of
> multiplicity--e.g. Christianity with its puzzling idea of the
> divine trinity--and views of divine multiplicity--such as
> the African religions [have]--that seem to posit some sort of
> unity composed of a large number of individual divine entities. (2013:
> 660)
> 
> 
> 



Probably the most frequently-used categories to sort models from each
other are the logically exhaustive answers to the question: How does
the ultimate or ultimates relate to the world? Though the answers (and
question actually) are commonly framed with the word
"God", as the *theos* root in some of the category
names below belies, their descriptions at least are framed here with
"ultimacy" to include non-theistic ultimates,
 too:[21]


* *Monism* (literally, one-ism): There exists just one thing
or one kind of thing (the "One" or "Unity"),
depending on how the monism is read: either ultimacy is identical to
the world, or all there is is ultimacy, or all there is is the world.
*Pantheism* is a species of monism in which the one thing or
kind of thing is God, or as Linda Mercadante once said in
conversation, it is a monism in which the emphasis is on the divinity
of the world instead of on the worldliness of the divine. Baruch
Spinoza's view of "God, or Nature" (*Deus sive
natura*) is often deemed a
 pantheism,[22]
 though some experts deem it a panentheism (1677, Part IV.4; see,
e.g., Edwin Curley 2013).
* *Panentheism* (all-in-God-ism): The world is a proper part
of ultimacy. I.e., though the world is in ultimacy, ultimacy is more
than the world. Panentheism is a wide tent since there is ambiguity in
the "in", but R. T. Mullins, for example, offers one
disambiguated panentheism: take space and time to be attributes of
God, and "affirm that the universe is literally in God because
the universe is spatially and temporally located in God" (2016:
343).
* *Merotheism* (part-God-ism): Ultimacy is a proper part of
the world. I.e., though ultimacy is in the world, the world is more
than ultimacy. This type is rare, but see, e.g., Alexander 1920 and
Draper 2019 (more soon).
* *Dualism* (two-ism): Ultimacy is not the world and the
world is not ultimacy, so there are two fundamentally different things
or kinds of things, depending on how the underlying ontology is read.
Dualism includes both the view that ultimacy and the world are
disjoint (they share no parts) and the view that they bear a relation
of proper overlap (they overlap in part, but not in
 whole).[23]



The various models of God, Brahman and the Dao in
 Section 2
 taken together will instantiate all four of these categories.


## 2. Models of Brahman, God, and the Dao



This section turns to multiple models of three ultimates extant in
living world traditions: Brahman in the Hindu traditions indigenous in
India, God in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and
Islam) indigenous in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, and
the Dao in the Daoist and Ru (Confucian) traditions indigenous in
China. The sections here are ordered historically, with the idea of
Brahman surfacing first in the Rig Veda ca. 1000-1500 BCE, the
idea of the Dao during the Warring States period ca. fifth century
BCE, and the idea of God in the Jewish tradition shifting from a
henotheistic to monotheistic deity somewhere in between.



A main point of looking at these models is to grasp some ways people
across the globe have conceived and are conceiving of what is most
real, most valuable or most fulfilling to them--knowledge worth
having for its own sake. Looking at the models also deepens
understanding of ultimacy in general, by seeing how it plays out in
the specifics. Finally, studying the models is a window into how they
relate. Specifically, as we go, look for (1) the wide
intra-traditional disagreement about how to model what is ultimate
(e.g., there are Hindu monisms, panentheisms and dualisms) and related
(2) the significant inter-traditional agreement about it (e.g., there
are Hindu, Christian, and Daoist panentheisms). The amount of
disagreement *within* a tradition makes talk about "the
idea of Brahman" or "the idea of God" ambiguous, and
crucially so in some contexts, as indicated in
 Section 1.2.
 The amount of agreement *between* traditions creates strange
bedfellows across the landscape of models--strange because the
modelers disagree about their religious or philosophical tradition,
but bedfellows all the same because they agree about which
philosophical categories from
 Section 1.5
 best suit what is ultimate (see Diller 2013a). The existence of such
agreement at the very heart of diverse traditions is an important
fact.



One perplexing issue before we encounter the models is the range of
their connection to a lived religious tradition. The "religious
models" purport to provide an understanding of reality as it is
believed (or held by faith) to be in a particular tradition--as
evidenced by their efforts to capture as much as they can of a
tradition's key texts, figures, practices, symbols
etc.--while "philosophical models" do not do this.
For example, the models of the Dao in
 Section 2.3
 seem to be religious models given the regular citations of the
*Daodejing* and the *Zhuangzi* and liturgical practices
in explication and defense of the models. Some philosophical models
include Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or divine *Nous*
(*Physics* Bk. VIII, *Metaphysics* Bk. XII),
Plato's Demiurge in the *Timaeus* (29-30) or
Plotinus' One in the *Enneads*. None of these modelers
turn to traditional sources to explain or defend their views; indeed,
it is not even clear what traditional sources would be germane.
Perhaps there are intermediate "quasi-religio-philosophical
models", e.g., Spinoza 1677 or Hegel 1832, which have some
salient connection with a religious tradition, either because of the
model's status as a revision of a traditional model or because
they share some key features of ultimacy within a religious
tradition.



The puzzle: are all these modelers modeling the same thing? This
question may be just a rehash of the "God of Abraham Isaac and
Jacob" vs. "God of the philosophers" issue (see
 Section 2.2).
 The answer to it is yes in the vague-categorial sense that both
philosophical and religious models are talking about that which is
fundamentally real, valuable or liberating, but no in the sense that
philosophical models are about what is ultimate *per se* while
the religious models are about what is ultimate as it appears in their
tradition. In any case, *nota bene*:
 Section 2.3
 (Models of God) houses several recent philosophical models because
they use the term "God" to name the ultimate they are
modeling. Perhaps they are misnamed and should be renamed models of
"the ultimate" and housed in an entirely different
section. Or perhaps they are rightly named "God" and God
is not dead as Nietzsche had it, but is becoming increasingly unhinged
from the lived religious traditions.


### 2.1 Models of Brahman



Though the term "Hinduism" and its variants was originally
a foreign imposition during the British Raj in India, they have become
widely used in the public realm to refer to forms of religiosity and
spirituality that had their start in the Indus River valley at least
since 2000 BCE and have endured with great internal diversification
ever
 since.[24]



The idea of Brahman was birthed in the Rig Veda (ca. 1000-1500
BCE), was defined in the Upanishads (ca. 500 BCE), came to full flower
in the Bhagavad-Gita (ca. 200 BCE) and the Brahmasutras (400-450
CE), and has been refined in commentaries about them for over the past
millennium, first by Adi Shankara (788-820 BCE) and then by many
others after him which constitute the Vedanta system of Hindu
philosophy (*Vedanta* = "end of the
 Vedas").[25]
 Vedanta has been dominant among the traditional six Hindu
philosophical systems for at least the last 500
 years.[26]



All the Vedanta schools agree on three things about Brahman, or
ultimacy (here is this entry's first, very general model of an
ultimate). First, Brahman's nature is essentially
*sat-chid-ananda*, "Existence-Consciousness-Bliss",
which means that the metaphysical rock bottom of reality
is--surprise, given the phenomenal mess--a blissful
consciousness. Second, most of the schools take Brahman to be what
Jeffery D. Long calls a "theocosm": (1) God and (2) a
cosmos, meaning a universe/multiverse of all natural
 forms.[27]
 The original Sanskrit in the Vedantic texts is conceptually precise
and better than what we have in the God-world relations in
 Section 1.5
 because there is a name for God and the world put together: the
theocosm gets called "Brahman", God is
"Ishvara" (or "Narayana" or
"Krishna" etc.), and the cosmos is "samsara",
and the whole thing and each part are
 eternal.[28]
 Third, the Vedanta schools all agree that their view about Brahman is
associated with (1) an epistemological license in direct experience,
either in texts heard by spiritual adepts (*sruti*) or in
proponents' own firsthand spiritual experience (for much more,
see Phillips 2019), and (2) a life expression that lives out such
experience and the view so deeply that it is hard to know which came
first, the life expression or the metaphysical commitments that enable
it.[29]



What the Vedanta schools disagree about is the kind of link between
God and the cosmos in the theocosm. These disagreements spread them
out in a range.



On one end is the Dvaita (*dvaita* = "two") Vedanta
school, which is *dualistic* in its ultimate-world relation and
not far from the classical monotheistic views (model 2 in this entry).
It reads the theocosm to be two really distinct things, viz., God and
the cosmos, with no organic link between them. Though there is no
creation *ex nihilo* in Dvaita or any other Vedanta school,
Ishvara (God) is the Divine creator and sustainer of the distinct
cosmos and ensouls it and resides within it. The ultimate is the two
eternally co-existing, like an eternal dweller eternally content to
live in an eternal house It built out of something other than Itself.
Of the four traditional Hindu yogas, Dvaita is a deeply
bhakti-oriented system (*bhakti* = "devotion"),
generally practicing devotion to Vishnu/Krishna.



On the other end of the range is the Advaita Vedanta school
(*advaita* = not two) which is well-known in the West but not
as dominant in India. It reads the theocosm/Brahman as one/non-dual,
and takes God and the cosmos not to be really distinct, i.e., God =
the cosmos. The paradigmatic filling out of this view, often and
perhaps mistakenly attributed to Shankara, is *pantheistic* and
 world-denying.[30]
 Specifically (here is model 3), such classical Advaitans hold that
since reality is one and the cosmos is many, the cosmos cannot be
real. It *looks* as if there is a cosmos filled with many
things, but the cosmos is merely an appearance (*maya),* and
taking it to be reality is like taking a rope at dusk to be a snake
(Shankara's famous metaphor, see, e.g., Tapasyananda 1990: 34).
With the cosmos out of the picture, the theocosm is just the
"*theo*" part; to use the metaphor above, the
ultimate is all dweller, no house. That move makes the terms
"Brahman" and "God" interchangeable, and on
it, God-Brahman is generally read as impersonal. The epistemological
license in direct experience for this view is *samadhi*, a
state of spiritual absorption in which all dualities vanish and one
experiences just infinite bliss. Since the classical Advaitan view
denies the world, Anantanand Rambachan, a contemporary Advaitan, takes
its best life expression to be that of the renunciant
(*sannyasi*) who lives out that denial (2006: 69).



In the middle range between Dvaita and Advaita are a dozen subtly
distinct schools of mainstream Vedanta, often called the "Bhakti
schools" given their emphasis on devotion (the distinctions
between them make a dozen distinct models here). These schools are all
*panentheistic* and world-affirming. Their best representative
is Ramanuja (ca. 1017-1157), the first comprehensive critic of
Shankara, who synthesized Advaita with bhakti in a system called
Vishishtadvaita (meaning "non-duality of the qualified
whole", model 4 for this
 entry).[31]
 Like classical Advaitans, Ramanuja takes the theocosm/Brahman to be
non-dual because it is all God, but unlike them, he takes the cosmos
and the many things within it to be real and distinct from Brahman.
How can the ultimate be one but have parts? Ramanuja's
*panentheistic* answer: the cosmic parts form an
"inseparable and integral union" (*aprthaksiddhi*)
with Brahman, like the union of body and soul (*sarira* and
*sariri*): Brahman is the cosmos' soul, and the cosmos is
Brahman's body--a body which, to use Ramanuja's
illustration from a quote from the Upanishads,



> 
> 
> "is born in, sustained by, and is dissolved in
> Brahman"....[just] as pearls strung on a thread...are
> held as a unity without impairing their manifoldness. (Tapasyananda
> 1990: 6)
> 
> 
> 



So for Ramanuja, Brahman builds a house not out of something else as
in Dvaita but out of Brahmanself, and eternally dwells in this eternal
Brahman-house which (here is the mark of panentheism) depends on
Brahman for its existence but not vice versa, i.e., (Brahman -
the cosmos) but not (the cosmos - Brahman). Ramanuja also takes
Brahman to be not impersonal but the Divine Person, known under
different sacred names, e.g., "Vishnu",
"Narayana", "Isvara", etc. The moves to a real
cosmos and divine personality have Ramanuja deciding that
Brahman's essential nature as *sat-chid-ananda* is filled
out with countless extrinsic "auspicious properties"
("qualities manifested in him in relation to finite
beings"), among them some of the classical perfections such as
omnipotence, omniscience and immutability, as well as compassion,
generosity, lordship, creative power, and splendor (1990:
36-37).The experiential epistemological licenses for
Vishishtadvaita are the combination of *samadhi* (which
justifies the non-dual piece) and *darsan* (visual contact with
the divine through the eyes of images, which justifies the
qualification to non-duality). Its best life expression is the
practice of bhakti yoga, supported by the reality and personality of
both devotee and devoted in Ramanuja's metaphysics, and
exemplified by the Alvars' passionate devotion to Vishnu from
the second to eighth century CE (Tapasyananda 1990: 33).



In the midst of this centuries-long dispute between the Dvaitans,
Advaitans and Bhakti schools, a key modern figure arose: Ramakrishna
(1836-86), sometimes called "the Great Reconciler"
because he attempted to integrate all the schools into one
pluralistic, non-sectarian approach. His major insight (birthing model
5 for this entry) is that "God is infinite, and the paths to God
are infinite", and the schools are among these infinite paths
(Maharaj 2018: frontispiece). Ramakrishna came by this view firsthand
when, after being in a state of *samadhi* for six months, which
he said was "like reaching the roof of a house by leaving the
steps
 behind",[32]
 he had a divine command to come down and stay in a state he called
"*vijnana*" (intimate knowledge),
during which he could see the roof but also see that "the steps
are made of the same material as the roof (brick, lime, brick
dust)". In other words, in *vijnana* he saw
that Brahman is both non-dual *and* dual, and thus began to
affirm the "spiritual core" of *both* schools, and
eventually of all the Hindu schools and Christian and Muslim ones, too
(Long 2020: 166). He decided they all must be contacting different
"aspects" of one and the same reality, and that this
reality thus must be deeply, indeed infinitely complex in order to
make such diverse experiences possible (Maharaj 2018: Chapter 1, part
3, tenets 1 and 3; see also interpretive principle 4 and
 K422/G423).[33]
 Because he affirms the core of all schools, Ramakrishna is hard to
classify, but his view is probably best read as panentheistic and
world-affirming since he says over and over again that "all is
Brahman" and that Brahman "has become everything",
i.e., Brahman - the cosmos but not vice versa (Long 2020,
especially 163).



Contemporary Vedanta is alive and well. To offer just three examples:
Long recently merged Ramakrishna's thought with
Whitehead's to develop a Hindu process theology that offers an
ultimate unity behind the God-world relations that was missing in both
Whitehead's and Griffin and Cobb's interpretations (see
 Section 2.2
 and Long 2013, our model 6). Ayon Maharaj has systematized
Ramakrishna's thought (no small task!) and put it into
conversation with major Western philosophers to advance global
philosophical work on the problem of evil, religious pluralism and
mystical experience (2018). Finally, Rambachan, a present-day
Advaitan, moves Advaita closer to Vishishtadvaita when he asserts that
"not-two is not one" (2015): non-dualism is not
pantheistic but rather panentheistic because Brahman is the
cosmos' material and efficient
 cause;[34]
 Brahman intentionally self-multiplies to make the
 cosmos.[35]
 The cosmos is thus not *maya* but rather a finite
"celebrative expression of Brahman's fullness"
(Rambachan 2006: 79). This reading (model 7 here) opens up Advaitic
theology to help heal a variety of human problems from low self-esteem
to the caste system because there is real power in re-seeing people as
infinite-conscious-bliss, so worthy of respect (Rambachan 2015).



Much of the explicit discussion among the schools is debate over
metaphysical ultimacy in general and over the Brahman-God-cosmos
relation in particular. Still, there is an implicit drumbeat in all
the schools that one can find ultimate fulfillment in Brahman, whether
that is in a state of *samadhi*, *vijnana*
or devotion (e.g., the "profound and mutual sharing in the life
of God...creates unsurpassed bliss [for the devotee]", Long
2013: 364). So Brahman seems to be soteriologically as well as
metaphysically ultimate. What is less clear is whether Brahman is
axiologically ultimate, especially in the moral category of being.
There are suggestive phrases sprinkled through the texts in the
affirmative, but as Alan Watts says:



> 
> 
> reason and the moral sense rebel at pantheistic monism which must
> reduce all things to a flat uniformity and assert that even the most
> diabolical things are precisely God, thus destroying all values.
> (Hartshorne & Reese 1953 [2000: 325], quoting Watts 1947)
> 
> 
> 



Though this sentiment is softened by the panentheistic readings in
several of the schools since the world can take the fall, in the end,
all the schools affirm that Brahman is everything, in some sense. And
if Brahman is everything, and not everything seems to be good, then
Brahman seems not to be good, at least not full stop. There is no
question that Brahman is still the ultimate in Vedantic schools even
if Brahman is not axiologically ultimate; as indicated at the start,
metaphysical and soteriological ultimacy are sufficient for ultimacy
when nothing else in a system has all three marks. But it is jarring
and a real contribution to global thought about ultimacy to consider
dropping axiological ultimacy from the trio: what is most deeply real
may not be all good, though contact with it may still manage to
fulfill us deeply all the same.


### 2.2 Models of God



As in Vedanta, the extant models of God disagree about the
ultimate-world relation and those disagreements spread them out in a
range, with dualisms on one end and monisms on the other, and
panentheisms and--for the first time in this
entry--merotheisms in between. The idea of God seems to be
nothing if not flexible. Even the relatively common view that God is
by definition a personal ultimate--an ultimate that is conscious
and self-aware--has been on the move for millennia and is hotly
debated today.



The most venerable model of God that is often read dualistically is
known as "perfect being theology", which bears traces of
its origin in its name (this is model 8--a general model, species
coming). The idea fully grown, as we have it today, defines God as
that which is perfect (whether personal or not), where perfection is
typically taken to entail being unsurpassable in power, knowledge, and
goodness, and several models add being immutable, impassible, *a
se*, eternal, simple and necessary in some sense. Most perfect
being theologians take God to have created the universe out of nothing
(*ex nihilo*), and that view can be taken to entail dualism for
a variety of reasons. To offer one, as Brian Davies says, "God
makes things to be, but not *out* of anything" (italics
his), including not out of Godself, so the cosmos is entirely fresh
stuff--a second kind of stuff, distinct from and radically
dependent on God (2004:
 3).[36]
 Perfect being theology was birthed during the Hellenistic era from
the fusing of the Jewish idea of a single God that acts in history
(the *theos* in "perfect being theology") with the
Greek philosophical idea of perfect ultimacy ("perfect
 being").[37]
 From the very start, there were conceptual tensions in the
combination: how can the God who led us out of Egypt, who hears our
prayers and who intervenes in the world as the Jews say (Cohen 1987:
44) also be immutable, impassible and *a se* as the Greeks say
(e.g., Guthrie 1965: 26-39, 272-279; Guthrie 1981: 254-263)? This
question is sometimes framed: how can "the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob" be the "God of the philosophers?" Even
after perfect being theology had passed for centuries from Judaism to
Christianity to Islam--with an important handoff in the midst by
Anselm who amped up the Greek perfection by taking God to be that than
which no greater can be conceived--the great medieval theologians
in all three faiths were still hitting up against the tensions and
finding ways to tamp them down. For instance, on the issue of
anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Bible and the Quran, both
Maimonides and Aquinas read them as negations and said that God
"is not a body" (Dorff 2013: 113; Kennedy 2013: 158) and
both Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and al-Ghazali parted with
"theologians who took all these descriptions literally"
because "beings that have bodily form...have
characteristics incompatible with a perfect being" (Hasan 2013:
142).



The tensions continued into the modern era and are still felt in our
time. Perhaps as early as 1644, perfect being theology split into two
camps over them (see Davies 2004: chapter 1, and Page 2019). Both
camps take God to be absolutely perfect, but disagree over what it
takes to be perfect: "classical theists" deny or weaken
God's personhood to save the Greek perfections such as
impassibility, immutability and simplicity, while "theistic
personalists" (a species of "neoclassical theists")
conversely deny or weaken the Greek perfections to save God's
personhood. "Open theists" (model 9 in this entry), for
example, are theistic personalists: they call for new readings of,
e.g., omnipotence and omniscience and drop immutability and
impassibility to comport with God's desire "to be in an
ongoing, dynamic relationship with us" (Basinger 2013:
264-268, see also, e.g., Clark 1992; Pinnock et al. 1994;
Sanders
 1998).[38]
 Other neoclassical theists aim merely to resolve inconsistencies
among the perfections, as in Nagasawa's Maximal God Theism
(2008, 2017; model 10). In addition to its old challenges, perfect
being theology also hit new ones in the modern era from advances in
science. When it met Newtonian mechanics (and more) during the
Enlightenment, the combination spawned "deism", the idea
that God set the initial conditions of the universe and then left it
to play out on its own (model 11). Deism is a dualism because it
assumes God *can* leave the world behind and thus is neither
"in" it as in panentheism nor identical with it as in
pantheism. Picture all these theistic dualisms as close to Dvaita
Vedanta's image of the eternal builder building a house out of
something different from itself and dwelling in it as it pleases, but
make the house not necessarily eternal (it may have had a start and
may end), and for classical theism, give the builder all the
perfections; for neoclassical theisms, give it a few less and perhaps
have it throw better parties in the house; and for deism, have the
builder abandon the house altogether once it is built and leave it to
its own devices, like an "absentee landlord" (Mitchell
2008: 169).



On the other end of the spectrum from these varieties of theistic
dualism, we find pantheism, the species of monism that takes the One
to be God (a general model, 13). All monisms face a problem of
*unity*: how are the many things in the world integrated enough
to call them One? But pantheisms face an additional problem of
*divinity*: even if all is truly One, does the One have what it
takes to be God? Here we will focus on two contemporary pantheisms,
both in Buckareff & Nagasawa (2016): what we might call a
"one-thing" pantheism by Peter Forrest (2016) (a specific
pantheism, model 14), where the One is a count noun (as in "a
walrus is sleeping over there"), so the cosmos as a whole is One
thing, and a "one-stuff" pantheism by Karl Pfeifer (2016)
where the One is a mass term (as in "that little lamb is made of
*butter*"), so everything in the cosmos is made of the
same kind of One-stuff (model 15). Unlike the Advaita pantheists who
take the universe to be a mere appearance, Forrest and Pfeifer
definitely take the universe to exist. So for them (and pantheists
like them), the One will have to be identical to the universe, and the
work is to show how the universe can be identical to God. In other
words, this is not all builder no house as in Advaita; the builder is
the house, and the builder-house is special enough to call it
"God". Forrest's main move to effect this is to take
the universe to be a conscious self, by way of a "properly
anthropocentric" non-reductive physicalism: just as our brain
processes correlate with our mental states, so also the
universe's physical processes correlate with universal mental
states, which on the model involve a unity of consciousness and thus a
sense of self. Forrest has a strong reply to the problem of unity
here: the One is an integrated Self precisely because of what emerges
from the processes of the many. But is the Self conscious in high
enough ways to meet the problem of divinity, to count as God? Though
Forrest does not argue like this, the resources for nascent
perfections are here, such as omnipotence (the Self has all the power
in the universe), omniscience (It could know the entire universe by
biofeedback), good will for all (since to hurt any part of the
universe is to hurt Itself) etc.--enough in theory to count as
God in the classical or at least neoclassical sense. For
Pfeifer's view, instead of picturing the universe as a person,
picture it as an "intentional field", like an
electromagnetic field except spread physical dispositional states
across space instead of magnetic forces and electrons. Because those
physical dispositional states have the same extension as intentional
 states,[39]
 intentional states are effectively spread everywhere too. That
spreading means there is a kind of "panintentionalism",
and if the intentions are divine enough, then a panGodism, i.e.,
pantheism. So if Forrest is right, the universe is God itself, and if
Pfeifer is right, the universe is made of God-stuff, this field of
divine intentional states--both strong thoughts. How plausible,
though? On the plus side, Forrest's view is an instance of
"cosmopsychism" ("the cosmos as a whole is
phenomenal", i.e., the Cosmos as a whole has conscious states)
and Pfeifer's an instance of "panpsychism"
("everything in the cosmos is phenomenal", every
particular in the cosmos is conscious), both of which are receiving
growing attention in philosophy of mind since, e.g., cosmopsychism may
solve physicalism's problem of strong emergence and
panpsychism's combination problem at once (Nagasawa 2019, for
more on these views and their link with Hinduism and Buddhism see,
e.g., Shani 2015, Albahari 2019, Mathews 2019). However, even if
either the cosmo- or panpsychic aspect of Forrest's or
Pfeifer's views turns out to be true, the divine part seems
doubtful for a reason Pfeifer enunciates: the kind of intentionality
the universe would have within it (on Pfeifer's view) or that
would supervene on it (in Forrest's view) seems likely to be at
best the consciousness of an animal, or a comatose or schizoid human,
etc.--not even close to the kind of consciousness that would make
it count as God (see Pfeifer's footnote on 2016: 49).



In the middle, between the theistic dualisms and the pantheisms, stand
the merotheisms and the panentheisms (two general kinds of models, 16
and 17, again, species coming). As indicated above, the merotheisms
are rare, the "odd bird" idea that God is in the world,
but the world goes beyond God. Though the term
"merotheism" was coined only recently by Paul Draper for
his own view (2019: 160), merotheisms have been around well before,
for example, in divine emergence theories such as Samuel
Alexander's (1920, a specific model 18) on which the world is
metaphysically ultimate and God arises in
 it.[40]
 So on the metaphor, the house comes first, then God grows within it.
Alexander, for instance, thinks the rock-bottom reality is space-time,
and that when "patterns" or "groupings" of it
become complex enough, matter comes to evolve in it, then life, then
mind and then deity (257). The universe now is at mind, so we are
waiting for deity to emerge, not from small "groupings" of
things as with the other levels, but from the universe as a whole.
Because things can think only about the things *below*
themselves in the hierarchy, we cannot know what deity will be like
when it comes (Thomas 2016: 258)--a nice way to explain why God
is ineffable and unknowable, albeit one that gives no (other) content
to say why Alexander's "deity" should count as God.
In contrast to the emergence merotheisms, Draper (2019) offers a sheer
"meros" one (model 19), in which nature, instead of
growing God, always has God as one proper part. Specifically, nature
is composed of two parts which are both metaphysically ultimate:
fundamental matter, and fundamental mind. So what there is not only
all the familiar material stuff but also one and only one immaterial
mind, i.e., God--"the single subject of all phenomenally
conscious experiences", located in and coextensive with space
(2019: 163). Assuming that minds are the source of value, this one
mind is the fundamental "source of all the value there
is", and hence is axiologically ultimate (2019: 163).
Interestingly, just like prisms immersed in sunlight naturally
diffract the electromagnetic spectrum (2019: 167, originally from
William James), our brains, which are with everything else immersed in
this omnipresent universal mind, naturally diffract what we might
think of as the divine spectrum--displaying aspects of the
universal consciousness by generating one of its "multiple
streams", "making use" of it for our own ends,
tuning in to it in mystical experiences, etc. (2019: 163, 170). So
brains don't produce consciousness--they tap into
it--and God doesn't make the universe or emerge in
it--God is the mental part of it that gives it value, and gives
us a hope for a form of life after death because the consciousness
that runs through our brains and that we mistakenly call our own
continues to live on after the brain dies as the aspect of the
enduring universal consciousness it always was. This hope secures some
soteriological ultimacy: though it makes sense to mourn our deaths, we
should "not despair" (2019: 170) since, if we ally
ourselves with our consciousnesses, we are even after death still what
we always were, an aspect of the mental fundamental reality, as
Shankara and Ramakrishna and others would tell us.



Panentheistic models of God (on which the world is in God but God goes
beyond the world) have been popular for millennia, to the point that
John Cooper calls them "the other God of the Philosophers"
in the title of his book on panentheism (Cooper 2006, a general model,
#20 in this entry). There are literally too many panentheistic models
of God to count, from a star-studded list of historical thinkers
including Plato, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart,
Nicholas of Cusa, Kant, Hegel, Peirce and more, with a resurgence in
the last decade owing at least in part to Yujin Nagasawa and Andrei
Buckareff's Pantheism and Panentheism Project (2017-19
 [see Other Internet Resources]). Though some complain
that the "in" in panentheism is so ambiguous it is not
obviously a single view (see Gasser 2019), Chad Meister suggests that
the recent appeal of panentheism is a direct result of (1) some of the
neoclassical revisions to the idea of God (more immanent, more
passible, etc.) which can be explained by the world's being in
God, as well as (2) the advent of emergentist theories in science
which make room not only for the emergence merotheisms sketched above
(on which God emerges from the world) but also for their converse, the
emergence panentheisms (on which the world emerges from God), among
other reasons (Meister 2017: section 4).



Hartshorne's process theology is a great example of the first
impulse Meister identifies (so it is a specific panentheism, model
21). Hartshorne's process view begins with Whitehead's
metaphysics from *Process and Reality*--with the idea that
the world is dynamic, not static, and indeed that the fundamental
units are events, "actual occasions", not substances,
which



> 
> 
> do not endure through a tiny bit of time unchanged but [take] a tiny
> bit of time to become...concrete ("concresence", Cobb
> & Griffin 1976: 15)
> 
> 
> 



and which are thus dynamic all the way down. Hartshorne then places
this dynamic world of events in God, by taking a page from
Ramanuja's book and saying that all of it--this
"totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole *is
God's body, the Soul of which is God*" (Hartshorne
1984: 94, quoted in Meister 2017: section 5, italics added)--a
move which cements his view as a panentheism, since the world is
literally in God, but God, as Soul of the world, goes beyond the
world. The practical pay dirt of the view is that, in the same way we
feel our bodies, so also God as the Soul of the world feels the
world--feels every last "drop of experience" as
Whitehead says, every last bit of change happening in every last
actual occasion. Moreover, just as we respond to what we feel in our
bodies, so also God responds to each felt occasion, and in that
instant does two things: runs through a catalog of all possible next
occasions, next moves as it were, and then "lures the world
forward" with suggestions for the best next moves to actualize
in the next occasion. The world can "listen" or not to
these suggestions as the next occasion concresces, and then God will
regroup again, moment after moment after moment. This is the dynamic
process of perfecting--from the world to God back to the world
again--which gives process theology its name, and makes it a kind
of "becoming-perfect-being" theology.



John Bishop and Ken Perszyk (2016, 2017) propose a panentheism they
call a "euteleological conception of divinity" (model 22
here), on which (1) divinity is the property or activity of being the
supreme good ("*eu*" in
"euteleological") and (2) realizing this property or
activity is the point ("*telos*" or final cause) of
the universe. In addition--inspired by an unusual kind of
efficient causation called "axiarchism" on which final
causes can function as efficient ones, an idea visible at least since
Plato and having something of a revival in the last couple
decades--Bishop and Perszyk (3) take concrete realizations of the
supreme good to be the efficient cause of the
 universe.[41]
 Thus, on (2) and (3), these realizations of the good are both the
efficient and final cause of the universe, both *alpha* and
*omega*. This model is, as its authors say, "prone to be
met with incomprehension or blank incredulity" (2017: 613): how
can effects in the universe be the cause the universe, and thus their
own causes? Though Bishop and Perszyk do not answer this question in
2016 or 2017, they do point out the eerie precedent in the Christian
tradition, the model's home context, for efficient causes to
double as final ones: Jesus is both the source and offspring of David,
both "root and flower;" Mary "gives birth to her own
creator;" the Divine word is both "without which was not
anything made that was made" and "born late in time"
(2017: 614). They also identify the supreme good in Christianity as
perfect love, take Jesus to have instantiated it in his person and
time and again in relationships, and take us to do so too when we
"love one another as he has loved us" (2017: 613). Note
such concrete occasions of love are per (1) literally divinity dotting
(and hopefully eventually overrunning) the universe, and that they
deserve to count as divinity because they are triply ultimate:
metaphysically since they are the efficient and final cause of the
universe; axiologically since they are the best of things, and
soteriologically since they are deeply fulfilling (to quote the
Beatles, "all you need is love"). Whether or not the
axiarchism at its heart is a strike against euteleological theism, an
enormous point in its favor is how profoundly it addresses the problem
of evil: it makes God the force in nature that defuses evil instead of
intending
 it.[42]



This section would be incomplete without at least mentioning
Tillich's "ground of being theology" in closing
(model 23). His view is not filed into the range of God-world
relations above because it is famously difficult to categorize:
Christopher Demuth Rodkey (2013) says Tillich has been read variously
as a panentheist, deist (i.e., dualist), and pantheist, and that it is
in fact best to characterize him as none of the above but rather as an
"ecstatic naturalist", where the Power of Being delivers
the naturalism (since this Power is "the power in every thing
that has power") and the Depth of Being delivers the ecstasy
(persons experience this Power of Being ecstatically, as holy). This
interpretation tracks Tillich's method of correlative theology
in *Systematic Theology I and II*: ecstasy is a "state of
mind" which is "an exact correlate" to the
"state of reality" of the power of being which animates
and transcends the finite world (see, e.g., Tillich 1957b: 13). So for
Tillich, God is the power or energy that animates the world which,
when truly encountered, provokes ecstatic response. This view is spare
enough that it is not obvious how someone might work up an
"ultimate concern" about God, another of Tillich's
central ideas mentioned at the start of this entry (1957a, e.g.,
10-11). Tillich will have to hypothesize that the ecstasy
provoked is, for believers, strong enough to rouse such a concern.



These are, then, several models of God, sorted mainly by how they see
the relationship between God and the world. Is the God that is modeled
in each of these ways metaphysically, axiologically and
soteriologically ultimate, in Schellenberg's terms?
Interestingly, the answers differ dramatically for each model. To
offer just two examples, on classical theism we get a yes, yes, yes:
God as single-handed origin of the universe, making everything out of
nothing, is metaphysically the fundamental fact; and, in
Anselm's hands, God as the greatest not only actual but also
possible being in every category of being, is as axiologically
ultimate as anything can be; and in Aquinas' idea, God as our
very *telos*, the point of our being, is soteriologically
ultimate as well. In contrast, God on Alexander's view gets a
no, maybe, maybe. Alexander's deity is not metaphysically the
most fundamental fact in any of the ways collected in the models seen
so far: it is neither the efficient cause of the universe (as in the
dualisms), nor its material cause (as in the pantheisms and some
panentheisms) nor its final cause (as in Bishop and
 Perszyk).[43]
 Alexander also cannot say if deity will be axiologically or
soteriologically ultimate when it arrives, since deity is by
definition unknown for him. Thus, God as modeled in some ways is
ultimate and in others is not.


### 2.3 Models of the Dao



The idea of the Dao (Way, Path, Guide) emerged during the Warring
States period in China (fifth to second centuries BCE), when the
reigning idea of *Tian* (Heaven) as a kind of personal god or
God started to shatter along with the rest of the imperial structures
of the Zhou Dynasty. Chinese thinkers faced their version of the
problem of evil: "Why is *Tian* letting this chaos
persist?" and added "Where is the *dao* to
harmony?" (Perkins 2019; Miller 2003: 37). An extended debate
arose among different schools of thought arguing for different answers
(Zurn 2018: 300ff), including two schools that have endured: the
early Ru (Confucian) thinkers who said the *dao* could be
brought back into the human world by reestablishing right social
relationships and customs, and the early or
 proto-Daoists[44]
 who found a new focus in the *dao* in the impersonal,
consistent patterns of the non-human natural world. The
*Daodejing* (ca. sixth to fourth centuries BCE, hereafter
"*DDJ*") is the earliest Daoist text that reads
these natural patterns as evidence of a single force or principle of
all that there is--as a single metaphysical ultimate--and
"tentatively", as Perkins (2019) says well, names this
ultimate "the *dao*" or in some translations
"the *Dao*" or "*Dao*". Though
this entry will focus mainly on the Daoist tradition and use the word
"Dao" (hereafter not italicized) to refer to it, the
*res* in question runs under other important names and concepts
in both the Daoist and Ru traditions, including *Taiji* (Great
Ultimate or Grand One), *Xuan Tian* (Dark Heaven),
*Zhen* (Truth or noumenal Reality) and conjoined with
*Tian* as *Tiandao* in Ruism.



Gradually, the early Daoist thinkers took the Dao to have multiple
functional roles--metaphysically, as the cosmos' origin,
its pattern or structure (*ti*), its functioning
(*yong*); and soteriologically as a guide through the cosmos
for humans, as Robin Wang says (*DDJ* ch. 25, Wang 2012: 47).
Combining the Dao's role as the origin of all things with its
undeniable unitariness threw Daoist thinkers into the question of how
the One became Many, and thus into a focus on cosmogony. The Daoist
cosmogonists generally agreed, and agree now, on at least six things
about the Dao (the last general model this entry will
showcase)--though there is substantial diversity in
interpretations of each which help constitute various thinkers'
models of the Dao.



First, in a seeming nod to the consistent patterns of the universe
that encouraged postulation of the Dao in the first place, the Dao is
taken to be immanent in everything. As the *Zhuangzi* says,



> 
> 
> There's no place [the Dao] doesn't exist....It is in
> the panic grass....in the tiles and shards...in the piss and
> shit!..."Complete", "universal",
> "all-inclusive"--all point to a single reality.
> (*Zhuangzi*, sec. 22, Watson translation)
> 
> 
> 



Second, because it is capable of singlehandedly originating
everything, the Dao is taken to be necessarily *ziran*, meaning
"self-so" or "spontaneous", which is read as
entailing something like the kind of necessity and aseity of being
*causa sui* in the Thomist tradition (Perkins 2019). Wang
explains the entailment in her explication of a famous passage
("Human beings follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven
follows *dao*, and *dao* follows *ziran*"):
the Dao's following *ziran* arrests the regress because
"following" spontaneity is the opposite of following since
spontaneity is making it up yourself on the fly (*DDJ*, ch. 25;
Wang 2012: 51).



What is the nature of a *ziran* generator of all things, then?
Zhuangzi answers in his inimitable way: "what things things is
not itself a thing" (ch. 11, see Schipper 1982 [1993: 115]). In
other words, the third commonly held claim is that the Dao is no
thing, nothing, nonbeing (*wu*). Bin Song (2018) helpfully
disambiguates several readings of nonbeing, including as (a) sheer
nothingness, a great vacuum "before" time and things; or
(b) abstract forms not yet made concrete, e.g., Zhu-Xi's
"pattern-principles" or Wang's "patterns and
processes of interrelatedness" (2018: 48) or, instead of
nothingness or abstractness, (c) concrete no-thingness, i.e., a
totally undetermined whole of being, stuff without form. Song and Poul
Andersen favor option (c), translating a key phrase in *DDJ* 21
that describes the Dao as a "complete blend" and as having
"murky indistinctness", respectively (Song 2018:
224-230, Andersen 2019: 131-132). Another line in that
chapter also tells against the Dao's being sheer
nothingness:



> 
> 
> yet within it is a substance, within it is an essence, quite genuine,
> within it, something that can be tested. (*DDJ*, Lau
> translation)
> 
> 
> 



On any of these readings of nonbeing, it is clear why the Dao is taken
to be impersonal: the Dao is not only not anthropomorphic; it is not
even thingmorphic. It is also clear why it is taken to be ineffable:
it is not just because its being is beyond us; it is also because it
is not a being at all, and most uses of words (to talk like Zhuangzi)
thing it. So we find Daoist texts using the tricks of the ineffability
trade to talk about the Dao, including famously, e.g., a use of the
*via negativa* in the opening line of the *DDJ*:
"the way that can be spoken of is not the constant
way..." Also, in an expression that is perhaps less about
the Dao's ineffability and more about the futility of finding it
intellectually, there is Zhuangzi's dynamic *semper
negativa* of "continuous self-negation" or
"unsaying", visible also in the Buddhist tradition and in
Tillich millennia after and oceans away:



> 
> 
> There is being, there is no-being, there is not yet beginning to be
> no-being, there is not yet beginning to be not yet beginning to be
> no-being. (*Zhuangzi*, sec. 2; on Tillich, Rodkey 2013:
> 491-493)
> 
> 
> 



The fourth and fifth widely held views of the Dao are both about how
nonbeing generates being, namely with *wu wei*
("non-action"), and in stages. Andersen describes *wu
wei* more fully: "the Way does not cause [things] to come
into being but provides a gap that allows things to emerge"
(2019: 131). To reveal *wu wei*, Daoist literature frequently
uses images of the female and infants, e.g., twice over in
*DDJ* 10, where *wu wei* is likened first to
"keeping the role of the female" who with no apparent
(anyway) action naturally nurtures the fetus and then, to use
Andersen's words, provides a gap to allow it to emerge in birth;
and second to "being as supple as a babe" who is the
epitome of the *wu wei* ruler since a baby does not do anything
but gets everyone else to act to please it (Zurn in
conversation; see also Erkes and Ho-Shang-Kung1945: 128).



The Dao is also taken to generate in stages, and actually in four of
them (*DDJ* 40, 42; Perkins 2019; Robson 2015: 1483; Wang 2012:
48; etc.). There are various readings of the sequence, but one
prominent view takes 0 as nonbeing, the Dao; 1 as unity, Being; 2 as
duality,
 *yinyang*;[45]
 and 3 as multiplicity, namely heaven, earth and human beings. In a
prescient recognition of how natural (heaven and earth) and social
(human) constructions combine to make reality, 3 burgeons into 4,
i.e., the 10,000 or myriad things that comprise the universe.
Crucially, 4 returns to 0--to use the feminine imagery, returns
to the womb where everything is possible and everything
develops--and then the sequence repeats (Pregadio 2016 [2020:
sec. 4], Wang 2012, 51 citing the *Huainanzi*). This
world-to-Dao-and-back cycle is reminiscent of the
occasion-to-God-and-back cycle in process theology, though on a grand
vs. momentary
 scale.[46]



Interestingly, in general, Daoists read the sequence as strictly
cyclical (so 4 returns to 0, i.e., 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 1, ...) while
Ruists read it as an "endless advance to novelty" so that
we never step into the same cycle twice (i.e., 0, 1, ..., 0',
1', ..., 0'', 1'', ... etc.) (Song 2018:
230-232). Moreover, there is an open question whether the
sequence is temporal or ontological (Song 2018: 225-226) which
is sometimes crystallized into a debate about whether 0 is temporally
(and thus ontologically) prior to 1 or merely ontologically so. If the
move from 0 to 1 is temporal, then 0 happens before 1 and they are
really distinct; as Andersen argues:



> 
> 
> the One is a product of the Way, not the Way itself... [because]
> identity and stability as a thing in the world depends on being one.
> (Andersen 2019: 180)
> 
> 
> 



If, on the other hand, 0 is only ontologically prior to 1, then
nonbeing and being are always co-existing as two eternal aspects of
what there is, with being still depending for its existence on
non-being like a burning eternal candle depends for its existence on
its eternal flame. The ontological-only reading seems licensed by
*DDJ* 1 which talks about "the nameless [who] was the
beginning of heaven and earth" and "the named [who] was
the mother of the myriad creatures....*these two are the same
but diverge in name* as they issue forth" (italics mine, for
more see Pregadio 2016 [2020: sec. 4.1])--assuming that the
passage implies that they diverge in name "only". The
dispute about how nonbeing and being relate is vexing enough that it
is a relief, actually, when *DDJ* 81 throws up its hands and
says: "their coexistence is a mystery"!



Grasping all this together--that the Dao is the origin of all,
immanent in all, *ziran*, essentially nonbeing, generating
forms of being by *wu wei*, generating stage by stage until we
reach the roiling boil of being in the myriad things--we are able
to catch the last and perhaps deepest thought of all about the Dao:
that it is generative by nature, or as Neville says: "nonbeing
is simply fecund from the perspective of being" (2008: 3). This
idea hails back to the *I Ching*, which takes "the
foundation of the changes" to be *sheng sheng*, literally
meaning "life life" or "generating
generating", sometimes glossed with the phrase *shengsheng
buxi* "generating generating never
ceasing!"--held as the highest metaphysical principle by
Ruists (especially neo-Ruists) and not far from Spinoza's
*natura naturans* (Gao Heng 1998: 388 cited in Perkins 2019).
Thus, at the bottom of it all, there is just endless, unformed,
spontaneous life stuff, which is generating increasingly formed
spontaneous life stuff which, because it is shot through with the Dao,
in turn generates even more, even further formed, spontaneous life
stuff, and we are off and running to the 10,000 things, until, as yang
wanes to yin, life life goes back to 0 (death death?), and all is
still until it waxes to yang again. In spite of the cycle that always
sends it back to yin, it is fitting to call the Dao "life
life" because it always waxes to life again; the life force is
irrepressible, no matter how many times it temporarily dies.



Though the Daoist literature does not use these philosophical
distinctions much, and though occasionally it is read there as a
monism in passing, the standard model of the Dao just recounted is
best understood as an impersonal panentheism--as are the
classical theisms and Bishop and Perszyk's model of God
 (Section 2.2).
 The Dao-world relation has the asymmetry that defines panentheism:
all the forms of being at 1-4 (or at least 2-4, if Being
is read as identical to the Dao) depend for their existence on the
Dao, but the Dao does not depend on them, or anything, for its
 existence.[47]
 In addition, if we take the theme of immanence in a full-throated way
so that really there is nowhere down the line of the stages that the
Dao is not, then the Dao is both the efficient and material cause of
the universe, as we saw in the Bhakti Vedanta views. So the view of
the Dao traced here is close to the idea of Brahman as the builder of
a house out of Brahmanself, who eternally dwells in this eternal
Brahman-house which depends on Brahman for its existence but not vice
versa. But "builder" is too intentional for the Dao, and,
at least on the temporal reading of the sequence, there is no eternal
house and thus no eternal dwelling in it. So try this: think of the
Dao as an eternal seed for a house. The seed sprouts naturally in
stages into a house filled with 10,000 things which depends on the
seed but not vice versa, until the house dies back into the seed,
which then lies dormant, pregnant with being, until it sprouts into
being again, and so on, eternally.



After all that has been said, the Dao is clearly metaphysically
ultimate in Schellenberg's sense: it is "the most
fundamental fact about the nature of things" (2016: 168). The
Dao is soteriologically ultimate as well, but, as with Brahman, it is
not clearly axiologically so. Regarding axiology, first, if we
understand axiology as greatness along all the categories of being, we
can see immediately that the Dao, at least understood as 0, has
greatness along no category of being since it is not being at all (for
more see Kohn 2001:
 18).[48]
 Moreover, if we narrow the idea of axiology just to the moral
category of being, the Dao is still not axiologically ultimate. In
multiple texts, the Dao is taken to be neither good nor bad; it is
taken to be what is. Famous among them is *DDJ*, ch. 5
("Heaven and earth are not kind, they treat the ten thousand
beings as straw dogs", see also chs. 18, 62). Interpreters take
these passages to mean that the Dao is either amoral--as
nonbeing, not the kind of thing that has moral interests in the first
place; or "value-contrarian" (Hansen 2020); or, to add a
thought, perhaps "ananthropocentric", having moral
concerns that are not human-centered (see Mulgan 2015 and 2017). Wang
Bi's commentary on the straw dogs passage suggests that these
amoral or anti-moral moments spring from the Dao's and the
sage's *wu wei*:



> 
> 
> The one who is kind necessarily creates and erects, impacts and
> transforms. He shows mercy and acts. If someone creates and erects,
> impacts and transforms things, then these things lose their true
> reality. If he shows mercy and acts, then these things are not
> entirely there. (quoted in Andersen 2019: 130)
> 
> 
> 



In other words, acting *wu wei* actually requires not being
kind in the usual sense. But if Wang Bi is right, maybe there is an
axiology after all to treating the myriad things like straw dogs:
being kind in the traditional sense may not be being kind deeply since
it destroys a thing's power to be itself.



Regarding soteriology, it is agreed that a--or even
the--central goal of Daoist practices such as inner alchemy,
t'ai chi, etc. is to return to the Dao (*fandao,
huandao*, *DDJ* 16 and 40; Andersen 2019: 126), and
specifically to return to nonbeing, which is the Dao at its most
creative, powerful and sublime, on the crest of becoming being (Song
2018: 234-5). If we can return to 0, we embody this power and
sublimity in human form and, as Andersen says, also do our part to
return the cosmos to the start for a new beginning (2019: 123). There
are specific rituals Daoists do in communal contexts to return. In one
of the important rites in Daoist liturgy called *bugang*
("walking along the guideline"), a Daoist high priest
walks through the ritual space, with the audience making their own
occasional movements too, to embody a complete motion of return with a
successful arrival back to 0 by the end of the rite, when



> 
> 
> the forces that animated the universe at the beginning of time may
> once again be channeled into the community on behalf of which the
> ritual is performed. (2019: 118-123)
> 
> 
> 



Practitioners outside of ritual contexts also try to return by
inwardly cultivating the skill of acting as the Dao does when it
generates being: with *wu wei*. Miller reminds us that *wu
wei* is not some loose form of letting go, but is rather a
specific "spiritual technology" of intervening very gently
at the right time, in the right place--as Neville says, with
"a subtle infinitesimal dose" when there is a rare
"opening for spontaneity [in the otherwise hard-to-beat]
inertial forces of the Dao" (Miller 2003: 140; Neville 2008:
47-51). Andersen's take on these efforts is haunting:



> 
> 
> An accomplished Daoist resides in the gap between being and nonbeing.
> The fundamental truth of Daoism is in this gap, in the Way and its
> manifestation as true and real. (2019: 130)
> 
> 
> 



This thought suggests an answer to the puzzle that surfaced about
Brahman--about why contact with a metaphysical ultimate that is
not axiologically so might still be fulfilling to us. At least for
those seeking awareness of Brahman and harmony with the Dao, our whole
desire looks like it is to be in the presence of what is true and real
(*Zhen*), whether what is true and real is bad or good or
neither or both. We are fans of unvarnished reality.


## 3. Responses to the Diversity of Models of What is Ultimate



After surveying these many models of Brahman, God, and the Dao, and
recognizing that they are just a small sample of the range of options
for modeling Brahman, God, and the Dao, which are in turn a small
sample of the range of ultimates that could be modeled, one may
wonder: What should one do with all this information?



People respond in various ways after grasping the diversity of the
models. Some abandon the models altogether, either exhausted by their
complexity (embodied in Watt's wonderful phrase "the which
than which there is no whicher", 1972: 110), or convinced by
their number and inconsistency that some models logically must be
making a mistake, and it will be very hard to tell which ones. In
other words, one response to the diversity is to decide more deeply
that the nature of what is ultimate is indeed beyond us, if there is
anything ultimate at all, so it is not worth thinking about it.



In sharp contrast, others actually embrace the diversity of models as
part of the path to understanding what is ultimate. The comparative
theologians, for example, study novel models in order to carry fresh
insights from them back to their own tradition and re-see their own
models more deeply (see Clooney 2010 for an introduction and, e.g.,
Feldmeier 2019 for the method applied to Buddhist and Christian models
of the ultimate). An emerging movement, Theology Without Walls (TWW),
draws on the models to understand the nature of a globally shared
ultimate, one to which all the models may be intending to refer,
reading the body of models as data and their number and
inconsistencies as an interpretive challenge instead of a deal breaker
(see, e.g., Martin 2020). Ramakrishna offers one such interpretation
in the TWW spirit: he decides there is no need to choose between the
models because each is a finite start on the "infinite paths to
an infinite reality" (see
 Section 2.1)--each
 is news about an ultimate whose nature is so full that we actually
need all the models to help us see it. Both TWW and Ramakrishna will
have to explain how it is possible for many or all the models to
deliver news of what is ultimate given their inconsistency, e.g., by
relying on perspectivalism, a phenomenal/noumenal distinction, the
models' incommensurability, etc. (see Ruhmkorff 2013 for a
survey of options).



Others fall somewhere between abandoning and embracing the plurality
of models by recommending that we hold the models loosely somehow,
that we attenuate our commitment to them. Kierkegaard for instance
tells us to move our focus from the content of our model to our
orientation to what we are attempting to model: it is better to pray
to a false God truly than to a true God falsely (paraphrase of 1846,
Part Two, Chapter II).[49] 
 Similarly, J.R. Hustwit cautions us to
"balance engagement with non-attachment" to models to
avoid ego-reinforcement and more (2013: 1003-1007)--not far
perhaps from Zhuangzi's and Tillich's *semper
negativa* of holding and letting go model after model, a view
which converts the pile of models into grist for the mill of a
spiritual practice. For his part, Schellenberg suggests that instead
of having faith in a specific model of, e.g., Brahman, God or the Dao,
we do better to have it in the more general thing (*res*) that
underlies them all--the axiological, soteriological, and
metaphysical ultimate which has been the organizing principle of this
entry. One advantage of reading ultimacy in Schellenberg's way
is that the general ultimate is more likely to exist than any of the
particular ultimates it covers, since it exists if any of them
 do.[50]
 A second advantage is that Schellenberg's general ultimate is
by design the core, the overlooked "heart" of the many
models--the same thing that the particular models it covers are
about, just at a higher level of description. So faith in
Schellenberg's ultimate permits a "faith without
details" (2009: ch. 2) in many of the world's religions
and philosophies at once.



For those who, after this long journey through the landscape of models
and now these responses to them, still hope to discover which model is
philosophically the best of them all, know that Wildman (2017) has a
plan for "think[ing] our way through the morass" (2017:
viii). In brief:


1. identify the models worth your time;
2. place them in a "reverent competition" that scores
them on "comparative criteria" (2017: viii-ix, ff.),
then
3. adopt the winner, at least provisionally, since the entire inquiry
is "fallibilist" (2017: 161 and elsewhere).



Wildman demonstrates his plan by following it himself (2017).
Interestingly, he frames his options for step 1 in terms of
"entire systems of thought" comprised of combinations of
models of what is ultimate (which he calls "U types") plus
"ontological cosmologies" ("C types")--an
idea which may really do a better job of identifying our choices than
the models *per se* do, given their fuller capture of an entire
worldview. His U types include agential models on which the ultimate
is personal, ground of being models on which it is impersonal, and
"subordinate deity" models such as process theology on
which it is "disjoint:" one or more personal deities
operate in an impersonal ultimacy (2017: 13, 165, 182). His C types
include supernaturalism, which involves disembodied agency;
naturalism, which does not; and monism. Combining the U and C types
produces nine U + C views, and to live out step 1 of his plan, he
chooses his top three to place in competition: supernaturalist
theistic personalism (God as a personal perfect being), naturalist
ground of being (think, e.g., the panentheistic impersonal Dao), and
Whitehead's or Hartshorne's process theism. For step (2),
he then subjects these three views to his comparative criteria, which
include coherence, ability to handle the problems of evil and the One
and the Many, fit with the sciences, and most importantly
non-anthropomorphism, his main criterion since he takes
anthropomorphism to result from misapplying human cognitive structures
that were naturally selected for mere survival purposes to ideas of
ultimacy (2017: 217).



When Wildman ran his competitors against these criteria, the
naturalist ground of being system won. But it is obviously up to each
of us interested in such a project to run our own competitions on the
models we take to be worth our time, with comparative criteria we
think make a model truth-conducive, in order to light on the most
philosophically satisfying model of what is ultimate that we can. That
model would be the one to then subject to the best arguments for and
against the existence of God and other ultimates, to discover in a
fully researched and now clarified way, whether there is anything
ultimate.