Professor Yujin Nagasawa has been awarded a John Templeton Foundation Research Grant, for ‘The Pantheism and Panentheism Project’.
Professor Nagasawa will co-lead this research with Professor Andrei Buckareff from Marist College, US. The three-project has been awarded £154,000 and starts in January 2017.
According to classical religion, God is an all-knowing, all-powerful and morally perfect being who is distinct from the cosmos and created it out of nothing. This view is presumed in nearly all debates in analytic philosophy of religion.
In a pilot project running between 2011 and 2013, titled ‘Alternative Concepts of God’, professors Nagasawa and Buckareff shed light on a wide range of alternative views to classical theism. This new, larger-scale project focuses on pantheism and panentheism, two alternatives which many philosophers and scientists consider the most attractive. The project will address three of the most pressing challenges for these two views: the problem of personhood, the problem of unity, and the problem of evil. The research will widen the scope of analytic philosophy of religion and deepen understanding of the nature of the divine and its relationship to the universe.