The Many Faces, and Causes, of Unbelief - Apologetics Press

principle of causality. In its picture of God and the
world there is constant change. Potentials are actualized,
but the cause is missing. This is a particularly
embarrassing deficiency when it comes to its understanding
of God.... Either his or her God is the metaphysical
impossibility of a potential that actualizes itself
(akin to the coffee cup which fills itself) or there
has to be a cause outside of God (a God behind God)
that actualizes His potential. This would mean that
God is no longer in any recognizable sense. Either an
impossible God or a God who is not really God; this
is the panentheist’s dilemma. It boils down to practical
atheism (Corduan, 1993, pp. 97,98, emp. and parenthetical
comments in orig.).
In other words, panentheism needs theism’s God in order
to “actualize” its God—which turns out after all not to be God
but instead some sort of giant “creature” that needs a more ultimate
and real cause than itself. The entire panentheistic scenario
becomes the old “which came first, the chicken or the
egg” routine. If the potential pole came before the actual, how,
then, was anything actualized? Yet the actual pole certainly
could not have come first, because it had no potential to become.
As Geisler and Brooks have pointed out, when it comes
to “potential” poles and “actual” poles
[p]anentheists would say that they always existed together,
but then we have to face the fact that time cannot
go back into the past forever. The only answer
can be that something else created the whole ball of
wax. It took a creator beyond the process.... It took a
transcendent God to create a chicken who would lay
eggs (1990, pp. 50,51).
Third, panentheism is the grand example of man creating
God in his image, rather than the reverse (which no doubt is
why Norman Geisler titled his book critiquing panentheism,
Creating God in the Image of Man?). Panentheists make the mistake
of confusing God’s unchanging attributes with His changing
activities. And once that fatal error has been committed,
God then is viewed as what He does rather than what He is.
As Geisler has warned, with such a system
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