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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Metamodern God

Sophisticated Repackaging of Old Ideas

Frank Visser / Grok

Introduction: When Jargon Masquerades as Depth

In the YouTube discussion “Metamodern Spirituality | God: A Metamodern Perspective” (2024) with Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey, two articulate thinkers attempt to resurrect the concept of “God” for a post-postmodern age. They deploy terms like “surplus cohesion,” second-person ultimate reality, and dynamic becoming to navigate between traditional theism, atheism, and everything in between. The result is an hour-plus of dense, optimistic speculation that sounds profound but, stripped of its metamodern wrapping, offers little more than psychological reinterpretation and wishful integration.

This essay cuts through the terminology to examine the core claims. Far from a groundbreaking synthesis, the conversation largely recycles process theology, integral theory, and pragmatic psychology under new branding. It dodges hard ontological questions while promising cultural renewal.

Surplus Cohesion: Just Integration by Another Name

Pascal's flagship idea—“surplus cohesion”—posits that spirituality arises when cognitive, emotional, and other subsystems align, creating an “excess” of meaning that feels numinous or sacred. Harmonizing reason and intuition, or science and art, supposedly generates this overflow, explaining religious experiences without invoking the supernatural.

This is unobjectionable as psychology. People do feel elevated during moments of personal integration—flow states, insight, aesthetic awe. But labeling it “surplus cohesion” and elevating it to explain the divine adds no explanatory power. It's a descriptive redescription of well-known phenomena from cognitive science and positive psychology. Why not call it what it is: successful pattern recognition, emotional regulation, or neural synchronization?

The framework's weakness is circularity. Spiritual experiences are defined as outcomes of integration, which then validate the model of integration. It explains nothing about why such experiences point beyond the self to something transcendent, or why they have historically involved claims about reality (creation, moral order, afterlife) that go far beyond subjective “excess.” It psychologizes the sacred into a self-generated high, comfortable for secular audiences but unsatisfying for anyone seeking truth rather than therapeutic coherence.

Second-Person God: Relational Cosplay

A key move is reframing God as “ultimate reality” encountered in the second-person—“Thou”—as a relational stance justified by complexity and evolutionary trends toward personhood-like qualities. This supposedly honors religious phenomenology without crude anthropomorphism.

This is clever but evasive. Relating to the universe or “maximal horizon of becoming” as if it were a person leverages our social cognition for emotional benefits. Fair enough as a coping strategy or meditative practice. But it concedes the point: there is no actual personal agent there. It's intentional stance-taking (à la Dennett) applied poetically to the cosmos. Traditional theism claims a real divine person or ground of being; this metamodern version offers simulated relationship with emergent processes. The emotional affordances may be real, but the ontology is thin air.

Critics of projection theories (Feuerbach, Freud) noted long ago that humans personalize the unknown for comfort. Pascal and Dempsey update this with complexity science and “stacks” of reality, but the core remains: we're talking to ourselves in an elaborate mirror. “God in quotation marks” signals the awareness of this fiction while trying to retain the feels. Quotation marks do not magic a referent into existence.

Dynamic Becoming and the Evasion of Creator

The pair critique static, external Creator images, favoring immanent, evolving divine potency within a dynamic reality. God as Alpha/Omega becomes virtual steering functions in an unfolding present, not literal origin or telos. This draws on process thought while staying “metamodern”—pluralistic and non-totalizing.

This dissolves classical theism's strengths. If God is fully immanent in the system, “God” becomes synonymous with “the universe doing its thing,” minus any explanatory surplus for fine-tuning, consciousness, or moral realism. Why invoke “divine” language at all? It risks pantheism without the rigor (Spinoza's substance) or panentheism's distinctions. The “strong transcendence with preeminent immanence” sounds like having it both ways—transcendent enough for awe, immanent enough to avoid supernatural commitments.

Practically, it updates faith for those already deconstructed by science and criticism. But it risks alienating actual believers while failing to convince skeptics. A “God” reduced to emergent potential or maximal signifier is not the God of Abraham, Jesus, or the Upanishads—it's a motivational metaphor for personal and cultural growth.

Metamodern Oscillation: Irony as Cover

The broader metamodern approach—oscillating between sincerity and irony, integrating all prior stages with “both-and” thinking—promises a mature reclamation of religion. “God” with quotes, pluralistic mysticism, mythic participation without literalism.

This is the tell. Postmodern deconstruction dismantled grand narratives and metaphysical claims. Metamodernism wants the emotional and communal benefits back but without the epistemic commitments. The result is sophisticated play-acting: treat stories as if real for their functional value. It's useful for meaning-making in a fragmented age, but intellectually dishonest about trade-offs. You cannot indefinitely “oscillate” without eventually landing on whether the claims are true or false.

Empirically, such approaches often remain elite, insider affairs—retreats at Sky Meadow, podcasts, labs for the highly verbal and philosophically inclined. Scaling to broader culture, where people crave actual belief and belonging, has proven elusive for similar integral/metamodern projects. The jargon-heavy discourse itself signals a subcultural niche rather than a civilizational renewal.

Conclusion: Therapy, Not Theology

Pascal and Dempsey's deliberations offer thoughtful psychological and cultural tools for those grieving lost faith or seeking post-secular orientation. Surplus cohesion, relational stances, and dynamic metaphors can enrich individual practice and dialogue. But as a serious answer to “the God question,” they fall short. They translate ancient ultimacy claims into contemporary self-help and systems language without addressing the underlying realities those claims asserted.

The God of tradition was never primarily about personal integration or emergent complexity. Debunking requires acknowledging that this metamodern God is largely a human construct for navigating modernity's disenchantment. It may generate temporary “surplus” meaning, but it inherits the same vulnerabilities: subjectivism, selective reinterpretation, and eventual drift into whatever feels cohesive next. For those wanting robust truth rather than flexible signification, older frameworks—or rigorous naturalism—remain more incisive. The quotation marks, it turns out, matter.