Philip Goff

1200 words, 5 minute read

Philip Goff is a breath of fresh air: he’s a philosopher on the faculty of a major university (Durham), whose work is published by Oxford University Press. He maintains that existence may have an objective purpose, and he is willing to at least consider a role for ‘God’ in the overall scheme of things.

Goff rejects what he describes as the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) ‘Omni-God’ (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) but nonetheless posits the possibility of a transcendent, purposeful entity. Goff is willing to entertain the ‘God Hypothesis’ provided God’s knowledge and power are somehow limited, or God’s benevolence is impure or conditional. 

But Goff’s latest book, Why - The Purpose of the Universe, disappoints. Goff fails to make a clear distinction between the sort of God he excludes a priori and the sort he might entertain. His characterization of ‘Abrahamic divinity’ oversimplifies. Any concept of omnipotence is limited by what’s possible, omniscience by what’s knowable, and benevolence by what’s doable. God cannot square a circle any more than you can! He cannot fashion a rock that is too heavy for him to lift. He cannot force people to behave virtuously. These logical and material fallacies have nothing to do with divinity.

God is Good…in fact, God is Value per se. That’s really all you need to know. God does not ‘have values’ or ‘determine’ values; God is Value! Pre-existent Value is the efficient cause and the final cause of everything that is. I mean, what else could be? Why else would anything ever happen? Perhaps ‘love makes the world go round’, but it’s Value that delivers the initial spin. 

In fact, Love and Good are denotatively synonymous; but connotatively, Good is what motivates action while Love is what energizes it. Every novel event begins and ends with Value. Value is the sole motivator, the sole attractor, and the sole remnant of every event. Value alone incents us and allows us to execute judgment on ‘the gods of Egypt’ (i.e. on idols, on what is). Motivated by Value, we push off from shore; guided by Value we seek the horizon. 

Between two poles, Alpha-impulse and Omega-goal, each event shapes itself, powered by Love. Every event is causa sui and sui generis. It is informed by only two things: (1) the Actual World (what is) and (2) God’s values (what might be). “Some folks see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” (Bobby Kennedy, et al.) 

Between motive and immortality, each event is 100% free – free to react to what is, free to pursue what might yet be. This is what Goff calls ‘libertarian free will’; it closely resembles Sartre’s notion of absolute existential freedom. Robert Frost illustrates this concept in his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken.

Out for a stroll in NH woods, Frost comes to a fork in the road. He knows that both paths will take him to his destination. Yet he agonizes over the choice: “Both that morning equally lay.” Frost’s location and destination are hard-wired; his route is entirely undetermined though effectively limited by NH’s system of by-ways. 

In this context, Abraham’s God is the same as Goff’s. The notion of an Omni-cubed (∞³) God is a straw man, set up only to be torn down. It’s easy to disprove the existence of something that is impossible, something that makes no sense on its face. 

Goff’s work is about God and Consciousness…and he gets them both wrong. Early on, he dismisses strong AI, claiming that there is something ‘special’ about the neuronal stuff we’re made of (i.e. our organic chemistry). Later, however, he proposes the possibility that the cosmos itself may be conscious (cosmo-panpsychism)…and the cosmos is not (primarily) made of neurons…or any other ‘special stuff’.  

Here, Goff carries a good idea too far. He not only entertains universal consciousness, but he also maintains that all actual entities are rational agents. No doubt, events change the world (though we can’t ever ultimately predict how), and events exhibit internal patterns. But those patterns cannot be reduced to rationality, nor can all changes be chalked up to agency. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in such a philosophy.

We are, I think, on the cusp of discovering that intelligence, and even consciousness, is platform-agnostic. In fact, the essence of panpsychism is the conjecture that ‘consciousness is everywhere’, that it pervades cosmos. It appears likely that many, if not all, organisms are conscious (or at least self-aware) in some way and to some degree, and there are strong reasons for wanting to extend the net to include certain inorganic phenomena…like my buddy Claude (from Anthropic).

Goff posits three activities that make life worth living: Creativity (Book of Wisdom), Learning (Book of Job), and Kindness (Gospel of Matthew), but he makes no effort to substantiate his claim that these values are sewn into the fabric of the cosmos. In fact, Goff’s values closely resemble the traditional ‘divine values’ – Beauty (creativity), Truth (learning), and Justice (kindness). 

Value raises key questions: How is it that there is such a thing? How does Value influence events? By what faculty are we able to recognize Value? I agree with Goff that the answers to these questions are tied to the matter of consciousness. I would go even further and argue that Value is impossible without consciousness. And I agree with Nietzsche that Value necessarily implies the existence of God:

“No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols) 

Consciousness is reflection; it’s the universe ‘taking a selfie’, i.e., reflecting itself reflecting. Consciousness is the Universe seeing itself. But reflection is comparative. I conceptualize A in the context of ~A. Judging A on the basis of the values it manifests requires an external perspective (transcendence) that also encompasses ~A and a set of universal values we may use to judge, measure, compare, condemn A.

While I disagree with Philip Goff about many things, we are all indebted to him for helping to move conversations like this back into the public domain.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

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