The considerations of this paper do not establish a case for qualified over unqualified pantheism. And I shall ignore the qualification, considering the Universe as it was before there were any non-divine minds. In that situation the physical universe is taken to be God’s body but God is personal in the sense of being a conscious agent.

There are several standard conceptions, to which Personal Pantheism is an alternative. Some are neo-Platonist and Thomist conceptions of God as the One, the Beautiful, the Good, Pure Being, Pure Act, or in accordance with divine simplicity all of these identified. Rather different is the conception of God as an omnipotent, omniscience person who, excepting Incarnation, has no body (Swinburne 2004). These standard conceptions all differ from pantheism by taking God to have created the Universe ex nihilo and to be a spirit in the stipulated sense of a substance (as opposed to a property or relation) that is not essentially embodied.

By contrast, Personal Pantheism is materialist in the weak sense of denying that there are any spirits, divine or otherwise. The standard conceptions often come with the qualification that what we say of God in a positive fashion is by analogy, either in the Aristotelian pros hen sense or in the sense of similitude. The conception that I am advocating is a literal one subject to two qualifications.

These standard conceptions all differ from pantheism by taking God to have created the Universe ex nihilo and to be a spirit in the stipulated sense of a substance (as opposed to a property or relation) that is not essentially embodied.