Second, and obviously enough, not just any notion of containment in terms of which

(*) If A contains B, and P(B), then P(A)

or

(TC) If A contains B and B contains C, then A contains C

is true will do. If it is to relevantly engage a panentheist, or panentheism more generally, it should be a notion of containment that fairly explicates the relationship between God and the world to which that, if not the, panentheist cleaves.

Finally, I chose the sorts of containment I did — spatial, mereological, set-theoretic — because these strike me generally as fairly clear and reasonably well understood. (Your mileage will vary, of course. Mereologists will disagree on the matter of whether or not the is a part of relation is transitive.) And at least the latter two can plausibly lay claim to being species of ontological containment. Sets, for example, are ontologically dependent on the elements in their transitive closure; in which case, since sets also have their memberships essentially, it follows that sets that contain any contingent objects are themselves contingent.

Parthood or set-theoretic membership at all events seem fairly clear — clearer, I should think than the relationship between Harry and his body, or that, on a bundle theory, between a substance and the more basic entities of which it consists. Now, James does offer a sufficient condition for what he takes to be the relevant notion of containment:

(OC) If the being of B can be considered in some non-trivial sense the being of A, then A contains B

This is less than fully clear. Is it sufficient, on (OC), that the being of B simply be considered (or non-trivially considered) the being of A, or is the idea rather that the being of B just is the being of A? And what is the modality here?

However (OC) is spelled out, I think the trouble here is that this notion of containment doesn’t support James’ argument. For evil is no more the being of the world than is that infection the being of Harry’s body or redness the being of the bundle of compresent properties that is that apple. (That there is evil in the world is beyond doubt. We learn in Romans, indeed, that all of creation has been infected by sin and groans under its weight, waiting for liberation from this bondage. But this evil is not the being, the nature, of creation as such. Similarly with the infection or redness. There might be containment of a sort here, but it is not containment in the sense of (OC).) But then the latter do not contain the former and the application of the transitivity of containment doesn’t arise.

Thanks again for carrying on the conversation as long as you did. I was pretty disorganized, and looking back I see that I was downright confused on certain points, so it’s cool that you were willing to put up with that.

Anyway, I thought maybe I could persuade you to answer two last (and related) issues for me, if you have time:

First of all, on your view, how do we represent God’s proposition-thoughts with our thoughts? That is, if propositions are thoughts in the mind of God (external to us), and we cannot have those thoughts ourselves, then what is the relationship between our thought “of” a proposition and the proposition itself which exists as a thought in God’s mind?

I’m tempted to treat thoughts, at least for the most part, as sort of self-contained things which have a characteristic structure, and which can satisfy a “type” (this is probably better terminology than “similarity class”). So we could represent God’s thoughts by having thoughts of sufficiently similar structure to His. Or, if not exactly that, at least we could say that our thoughts represent God’s thought if they both belong to something like the same thought type. I’m not sure how else we could make sense of *representation*.

This brings me to my second issue. For if that’s how representation works, or close enough, then it seems odd that we should need an existing external object to embody the ideal structure or type we have in mind when we evaluate the structure/type of our own human thoughts. So for instance, if I have a thought, it seems to me that I recognize it to be “of” the law of noncontradiction by evaluating it against whatever standard I have in mind for distinguishing between thoughts of the law of noncontradiction and other thoughts. Maybe I say, “look, there I go mentally manipulating these logical symbols in this particular way I associate to ‘noncontradiction.’ ” But in the end it’s still my own standard I have to check. I don’t see why I need anything external to myself to do that.

So my second question is, do you agree that we don’t (always) need an external object of reference to privately distinguish between one type of thought and another? Or do you maybe think we really do need an external embodiment of a *type* of thought before we can talk about types of thoughts?

I’m not sure if this will interest you, so if not then no worries. But it concerns me, so I thought I’d ask.

Thanks,
–Ben

“For in him. I grant that the apostles, according to the Hebrew phrase, do oftentimes take this preposition in for per, or by or through; but because this speech, that we live in God, hath greater force, and doth express more, I thought I would not change it; for I do not doubt but that Paul’s meaning is, that we be after a sort contained in God, because he dwelleth in us by his power. And, therefore, God himself doth separate himself from all creatures by this word Jehovah, that we may know that in speaking properly he is alone, and that we have our being in him, inasmuch as by his Spirit he keepeth us in life, and upholdeth us. For the power of the Spirit is spread abroad throughout all parts of the world, that it may preserve them in their state; that he may minister unto the heaven and earth that force and vigor which we see, and motion to all living creatures. Not as brain-sick men do trifle, that all things are full of gods, yea, that stones are gods; but because God doth, by the wonderful power and inspiration of his Spirit, preserve those things which he hath created of nothing. But mention is made in this place properly of men, because Paul said, that they needed not to seek God far, whom they have within them.”

If we are “after a sort contained in God,” and “have our being in him,” then how is that much different from panentheism?

Nevertheless, I highly doubt that Calvin meant that we are “contained in God” in the same sense as panentheists do. For if panentheism requires us to be “ontologically contained” in God, or a “constituent” of God’s essence or being (which appears likely), then surely it must be rejected from a Biblical standpoint. Scripture plainly teaches that God is eternal and immutable in nature, whereas we have been created by God at a point in time. Therefore we cannot possibly be a “constituent” of God’s essence or being. No passage of Scripture can be legitimately construed to teach that.

If A contains B, and A is neither a set nor a mere collection, and B contains C, then A contains C.

On panentheism, I assume God is neither a mere collection nor a set.

So for mere collections, say, a soccer team. If the team contains me, and I contain my heart, the team doesn’t contain my heart.

But, for things that are not sets, like, say, a carpet, then if the section or part of the carpet we’ll call (5, 6) contains a wrinkle, the carpet contains a wrinkle.

Or, no?

(*) If A contains B, and P(B), then P(A)

and let P be the property of containing C (for specific C). Then of course, so specified, this just is a statement of the transitivity of containment (assuming the same notion of containment is used throughout). More generally (as you write):

(TC) If A contains B and B contains C, then A contains C

Is this better? Does this make the original case against panentheism more clear?

Not obviously. Consider set membership, where A, B and C are sets. Does it follow that C is a member of A provided B is a member of A and C is a member of B? Pretty clearly not; for let:

C = {0}
B = {{0}} = {C}
A = {{{0}}} = {B} = {{C}}

Then B is a member of A, and C is a member of B, but C is not a member of A. Now no doubt, you might add, C is a member of the transitive closure of A; but that is a different set; and the fact remains that C is not itself — not directly, you might say — a member of A. So (TC) is false when containment is understood as set membership.

Much the same goes, I think, for mereological containment, i.e., for the the parthood relation. (Shane himself is part of the soccer team; but his two feet, while directly part of Shane are not thereby directly parts of that team. See, e.g., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/ and the references there for discussion.) But the real issue lies in a different direction, for I think that the underlying intuition here is that if the universe or world were somehow contained in the being of God, then God himself would be infected by any of the evil displayed in that world; that evil would attach to God directly in virtue of the containment, however exactly that containment is understood. Again, there are properties of the world or universe or cosmos — most notably, the evil displayed therein — that transfer directly to God given that containment.

This is why I put the relevant inferential principle — (*) — in terms of property transference under containment, instead of (say) in terms of the transitivity of containment. But as we have seen (I say), neither principle holds in general, as it fails for such species of ontological containment as set membership and mereological parthood.

In any event what we have here is a statement of a panentheistic problem of evil. I don’t say that there’s no relevant problem here; or even that panentheism doesn’t founder on the rocks of inconsistency. With respect to classical theism, there are issues here to which Christian theists have attended for centuries.

I’m trying to link what I know of logic so far in a clear framework. I appreciate the insight you’ve provided.