2026/08/01 by Fuyao Zhang
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Evolution and Science Education #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Theology and Philosophy of Evil
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11841-026-01165-2
crossref issued 2026/08/01 · crossref published 2026/08/01 · crossref published-online 2026/08/01 · openalex publication_date 2026/08/01 · crossref created 2026/08/01 · crossref deposited 2026/08/01 · crossref indexed 2026/08/01 · openalex created_date 2026/08/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
Abstract Contemporary fundamental physics and classical theistic metaphysics appear to exert opposing pressures on our conception of ultimate reality. Microphysical fundamentalism holds that the structure of the physical world is grounded in microphysical entities and their properties, whereas classical theism is committed to a single, unified ultimate ground that is explanatorily prior to all finite reality. Although not formally inconsistent, these commitments generate a substantive metaphysical tension once questions of categorical underwriting are made explicit. Existing theologically sympathetic responses address this tension only at a cost: micropsychist panpsychism preserves microphysical fundamentality but fragments ultimate grounding in a way that sits uneasily with monotheism, while cosmopsychism secures metaphysical unity at the expense of the bottom-up motivations of microphysical fundamentalism. This paper develops a third option, Unified Categorical Basis Panpsychism (UCBP), which preserves the fundamentality of microphysical entities with respect to physical structure and composition while locating ultimate unity at the level of categorical grounding. The view openly posits a novel primitive: a single, irreducibly mental, internally differentiated categorical basis—identified with God—in virtue of which physical properties have the dispositional profiles they have and conscious experience is metaphysically possible. The paper argues that this posit is theoretically motivated, internally coherent, and explanatorily principled, and that UCBP thereby avoids both the combination problem facing micropsychism and the decomposition problem facing cosmopsychism.