Mutability and Relationality: Towards an African Four-Dimensionalist Pan-Psychism

Abstract

This article challenges a certain Theist conception of God as immutable. I argue that the idea that God is immutable can be challenged on the grounds of its metaphysical groundwork. More precisely, I contend that the idea that God is immutable entails endurantism, which I demonstrate to be mistaken. This view cannot be right because it potentially involves three absurd implications: (a) a violation of the principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (b) the idea that God becomes a different God with any change that occurs (c) the view that only the present is real and there is no future and past. As these solutions are absurd, the endurantist view ought to be abandoned. I then suggest an alternative theory that does not meet the same problems, which I call African four-dimensionalist Pan-Psychism. This theory I advance maintains that God is the sum of His spatial and temporal parts, is mutable and has relational properties (e.g., He changes with the occurrence of evil or good in the world). I uphold that this view does not have the absurd implications of its competitors.

African Philosophy of Religion: Concepts of God, Ancestors, and the Problem of Evil

“…Unlike Gyekye and proponents of traditional theism, Wiredu asserts that the Akan God and, by extension, the African God, is quasi‐material and limited by the universe of which God is a part. Similarly, Cordeiro‐Rodrigues upholds that God is a conscious force present in every material part of the world (Cordeiro‐Rodrigues, 2021). 2 While proponents of the limitation view, for example, Wiredu, Oladipo and Cordeiro‐Rodrigues, concede that Africans traditionally conceive God as a powerful and knowledgeable being, they deny that the African God can be equated with the Hellenic Christian God and imbued with the superlative qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omni‐benevolence.…”