Have there been any modern philosophical defenses of polytheism?

Question

Modern philosophy of religion seems to be "Abrahamic-centric" with all of the discussion centered around problems specific to Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In particular most arguments for the existence of God, and attempts to place faith and religious doctrine on a modern rational footing seem to be concerned only with Western monotheism and its various accompanying beliefs.

• Have similar discussions and defenses been made in favor of any polytheistic systems and their beliefs?
• Do any non-western religions have an active apologetics community the way Christianity and Islam have?
• Has any modern philosopher argued that polytheism is superior in some way or another to monotheism?
• Has anyone tried to provide and argument for the existence of multiple gods instead of just one? (In a philosophy of religion lecture I listened to, it was stated that nature and history seem to justify polytheism more so than monotheism, but that was the extent of the argument - the rest of the discussion was all about monotheistic beliefs).

Answer 1

Unfortunately your question is far too common among Western philosophers of the last 25 years. There are no apologists for polytheism in Eastern religions as there is no polytheism in Hinduism or Buddhism. It is Westerners who have not studied Eastern philosophies that have this distorted view of the East. Eastern religions are either nihilistic, monistic, or monotheistic. There is no polytheism.

There are different monotheistic systems within Hinduism, but each one of these sects follow their view of God as being God; the other 'gods' they dismiss as out of hand just as a Westerner would dismiss their concept. Within the monotheistic camps the two predominant ones are the ones that see Shiva (Shavites) as the Supreme Godhead and the ones that see Vishnu (Vashnavites) as the Supreme Godhead. Shavites dismiss Vishnu as either being a manifestation of Shiva or just dismiss him, the same way a fundamentalist Christian would dismiss him. And the Vashnavites are vice-versa.

Monists assert that everything is One, and not in a pantheistic way, that the different names of God are due to different viewpoints of different people, that all the different names of God are just manifestations of the One. So Shiva, Vishnu, the Christian God, are all the same God viewed through different colored lenses.

The 'gods' of Hinduism are the Sanskrit devas. gods is a very loose translation of devas; a more exact translation is 'shining ones'. The gods are actually offices, like governor, for different aspects of the current cycle. A individual soul in a human body that aspires to be a god for a cycle can do certain karmic actions to gain the karma to become a god in a new cycle. At the end of that new cycle, however, when the karma is exhausted, the soul that became that god must come back to the earth and once more enter into the system for accumulating new karma.

Suggested reading: The Spiritual Heritage of India by Swami Prabhavananda. It is a clear summary and introduction for Westerners For a comparison of the different monistic Eastern systems, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy by David Loy.

Answer 2

"polytheism" could mean either philosophers supporting the existence of multiple gods or types of animism like Shinto.

Even though I live in Japan (where you've lived before), I haven't met too many shinto apologists (though I've met people who actively called themselves Shinto).

In terms of multiple gods, Heidegger speaks about multiple gods and the fourfold in some of his later works.

I had thought Hinduism might have polytheistic defenders but others tell me otherwise. Some varieties of Buddhism look to me to be functionally polytheistic, but I've never seen a written defense of something like that (mostly because most consider these Boddhisatvas instead of gods)

Answer 3

Nobody less than William James (he is a modern philosopher in the technical sense) has defended polytheism. For example in The Varieties of Religious Experience he writes:

Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals. [...] It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us — [...]

Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still today) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, all is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some porion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. [...] The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part. Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details. [...] I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it.

Also see: The Polytheism of William James by Amos Funkenstein (1994).

Answer 4

Has any modern philosopher argued that polytheism is superior in some way or another to monotheism?

Best answer I can find for this question is here by David Frawley:

Having many names for something is not necessarily a sign of ignorance of its real nature. On the contrary, it may indicate an intimate knowledge of it. For example, eskimos have forty-eight different names for snow in their language because they know snow intimately in its different variations, not because they are ignorant of the fact that all snow is only one. The many different deities of Hinduism reflect such an intimate realization of the Divine on various levels - which non-experiential belief-oriented religions seldom even approach. It is hardly a crude polytheism.

Answer 5

If science gave family names to "forces," we might call it polytheistic.

You are right to point out that the Abrahamic traditions are unique and problematic, to say the least. Jaspers makes a good case for an "axial" shift towards universalism in religion around 200-0 BC.

But "universal" Abrahamic, "Big Dad" interpretations are highly problematic. In my own view, the tragedy of the West was the political attachment of the Old and New Testaments, with a rich hermeneutics but no proper epistemological basis.

Polytheism can pass into "science" with little interpretive difficulty. But the Abrahamic tradition of patriarchal conceptual hierarchy was already there ...in the first texts...fostering the hermeneutical tradition, the necessity of ceaseless interpretation.

For philosophy, the difference between "polytheistic" and "monotheistic" is simply a version of ancient "one-many" discussions.

Answer 6

It depends on how you define "polytheism". As Swami Vishwananda explains, the nature of "divinity" in Abrahamic religions is very different from the nature of divinity in most other religions.

The Atman and Brahman are concepts from the Vedanta branch of Hinduism that represent respectively your individual consciousness and universal consciousness. These are fundamentally pantheistic perspectives.

And while controversial for sure, the notion of universal consciousness is not alien to modern science and can in fact be fit perfectly into a modern materialistic scientific worldview! Notions of the universe as a giant hologram or a giant quantum computer are different more at the semantic level than in their essence, really. How distinct from each other they really are pretty much depends on how you define "consciousness".

The Trimurti - the Hindu trinity - can easily be understood as mere anthropomorphic references to the three primary forces in nature that hold the universe together :

• Brahma (order), the source of creation, can be understood as an anthropomorphic representation of emergence
• Shiva (chaos), the source of destruction, can be understood as an anthropomorphic representation of entropy
• Vishnu (balance), the source of balance, can be understood as an anthropomorphic representation of the laws of thermodynamics

So, once we reduce these principles to their very essence, we're left with concepts that are totally scientific.

Much the same way, Shinto's Kami, Hinduism's Devas and Ásatrú's Götter are all just anthropomorphic Animistic representations of lesser natural phenomena. These, also, are totally distinct from the "God" concept that we find in Abrahamic religon. And here, as well, we can often just reduce these concepts to their essence to be left with either scientific concepts or concepts wholly compatible with modern science!

So, unlike for adherents to an Abrahamic religion, it's actually pretty easy for adherents to so-called "polytheistic" religions to find support for their perspective in light of modern science. All it takes, really, to make sense of their religion is to look beyond folkloristic myths (often created with the explicit purpose of teaching complex ideas to simply folks) and silly superstitions (which are often later additions) and reduce the core religious concepts to their very essence.

What's left, are wholly rationalistic philosophies that can easily be mapped to concepts from or compatible with modern science. Knowing this, it's easy to completely discard Abrahamic religion in favor of any flavor of "polytheism".

See also my article The Atheistic approach to God… or how to bridge the gap between Atheists and Theists where I explain how Atheism, Pantheism, Hinduism, Animism and Shamanism are really just different perspectives on the same core concepts.