Why believe in pantheism

For if the universe is not wholly divine we have mere immanentism , while if God includes but is not exhausted by the universe then we have rather panentheism. Now, certainly it may be allowed there are metaphysical schemes for which the range of overlap between divinity and the cosmos is so small that they fail to capture the spirit of pantheism.

For example, a world-view in which God were understood as the vital spark which animates an otherwise dead and motionless cosmos, or a world-view in which the cosmos were merely one small fraction of the being of God would indeed seem far from the spirit of pantheism.

Such theorists may also reject the charge that their way of thinking is panentheistic , maintaining that the proper lesson to draw is not one of the transcendence of the holistic view but rather one concerning the degree of unreality or abstraction involved in any distributed view. In short, does any admission of difference between the world as common-sense experiences it and the divine cosmos as pantheism understands it amount to a concession either that there are aspects of experience which fall outside deity or aspects of deity which fall outside experience?

In the end, rather than attempt to draw sharp but artificial and contentious lines it seems more fruitful to maintain that the boundaries of demarcation between immanence, pantheism, and panentheism are vague and porous.

This approach has the further advantage of keeping together historically cognate thinkers. To say that God is identical with the world as a whole is not self-explanatory and, although often the matter is left disconcertingly vague, examination of the literature reveals a variety of different understandings of the identity relation being asserted here. A further problem with the terminology of parts is that many pantheists have wanted to claim that God or nature is not just the whole or totality of things, but is somehow the inner essence or heart of each individual thing.

This may be expressed in the idea that somehow the whole is present in each of its parts, a suggestion whose meaning has often been left metaphorical or obscure. Giordano Bruno, for example employs the two illustrations of a voice heard in its entirety from all sides of the room, and that of a large mirror which reflects one image of one thing but which, if it is broken into a thousand pieces, each of the pieces still reflects the whole image.

Bruno , 50, A thesis of the complete interpenetration or interrelation of everything, the claim being made here is related to that defended by Leibniz who was not a pantheist that each monad is a mirror to the entire universe. There is a long theological tradition in which God is regarded as being itself , rather than as one being among others, and insofar as it treats God as something to be found inseparable from and at the very root of all that is, such a conception may be used to express pantheism.

The identification of God with being itself is a common Christian view, from Augustine to Tillich, but it is not exclusive to Christian thought. A third way to express the identity of God and nature is by reference to the thought that all things come from God, rendering them both identical with each other and with the one source from which they came. But although it would be tempting to contrast creation ex nihio as theistic and emanation as pantheistic, such thoughts are probably too simple.

Eriugena, by contrast, has an emanation-theory that is more genuinely pantheist but, given his apophatic conception of God as marked by both being and non-being, he regards this position as wholly compatible with the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

To Eriugena, God is precisely the nothing from which all things were made. Spinoza approaches the question of origin from a rather different angle. Arguing that God is the immanent cause of all things, he draws an important distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata ; between the universe considered in active mode as cause and the very same universe considered in passive mode as effect Ethics 1p29s.

This is an important doctrine not least for the way in which it links with necessity. Modelled more on the way in which the theorems of geometry derive from its axioms than on the sense in which a work of art results from the free or spontaneous activity of its artist, pantheistic creation of this second type courts a determinism that threatens to rule out free will. And that has been a very common objection to pantheism. Religious world views in which it is the ultimate destiny or purpose of the cosmos to achieve oneness with or to fully express deity provide a fourth model for understanding pantheistic claims of identity.

The true identity of the universe is that which is revealed at the end of all things. By way of objection to such teleological conception of identity it might be challenged that something can only become merged with God, or become God, if it is no w different from God. But against this it could be replied that, if the notion of teleology be taken seriously, a thing more truly is what it is destined to become than what it currently seems to be , for everything about it is to be explained in terms of its telos or goal.

It may also be responded that anything which can be converted into God cannot be finally different from God. With respect to the cosmos this may be seen in the stress pantheists typically put on the unity of the cosmos. A distinction may be drawn between distributive pantheism, the view that each thing in the cosmos is divine, and collective pantheism, the view that the cosmos as a whole is divine.

Oppy, And if polytheism in general is coherent there is no reason in principle why we should exclude the possibility of a distributive pantheism. But as in pursuit of explanatory unity and coherence belief in many Gods tends historically to give way to belief in single deity, while it would be technically possible to identify the universe with a collection of deities, in practice monism tends to win out, and it has been characteristic of pantheists to stress heavily the unity of nature.

Thus pantheism typically asserts a two-fold identity: as well as the unity of God and nature, it urges the unity of all things with each other. Is the intuition that the cosmos constitutes a single integrated whole a contributory factor in thinking it divine, or reflecting the traditional idea that God is unique and simple or without parts is the intuition that it is divine the reason for regarding it as such a unity?

The kind of unity which the pantheist thinks to find in nature can vary from a very strong metaphysical oneness, like that of Parmenides, which excludes all diversity or difference, to a much looser systematic complex of distinct but inter-related elements, but the four species of unity most commonly defended are: 1 the unity of all that falls within the spatio-temporal continuum under a common set of physical laws, 2 the reductive unity of a single material out of which all objects are made and within which no non-arbitrary divisions can be made, 3 the unity of a living organism, or 4 the more psychological unity of a spirit, mind or person.

Besides commitment to the view that the cosmos as a whole is divine, pantheists as a general class hold no specific theory about the nature of that cosmos. There are three main traditions. Many pantheists argue that physical conceptions are adequate to explain the entire cosmos. This is an ancient form of pantheism, found for example in the Stoics, for whom only bodies can be said to exist.

Soul they understood as nothing more than a specific form of pneuma , or breath, the active power to be found throughout nature. This is also a form of pantheism popular today—often termed, scientific or naturalistic pantheism.

Such worldviews make no ontological commitments beyond those sanctioned by empirical science. During the nineteenth century, when pantheism was at its most popular, the dominant form was idealist. According to Absolute Idealism, as defended by such figures as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and many of the British Idealists, all that exists is a single spiritual entity, of which the physical world must be understood as a partial manifestation.

The search for that which may be asserted without condition or qualification leads to the conclusion that all variety is the expression of an underlying unity, and that nothing can be real in the absence of mind or spirit. On some versions of this sort of doctrine the physical world starts to look more like an appearance of the ultimate spiritual or possibly unknown reality beneath.

Hegel himself rejects this sort of doctrine —which he terms acosmism —and while it certainly amounts to a view that there exists nothing besides God, in view of its basic denial of the reality of the world we all experience it hardly seems like a kind of pantheism. The pantheism of Spinoza is of neither these types. For Spinoza, there is one thing which expresses itself, or which may be understood, in two different ways, either as thinking substance or as extended substance.

The principle difficulty of any such position is to further specify that ambiguous relationship, whilst simultaneously avoiding the twin but opposed pitfalls of reductionism and dualism. Pantheists holds that whatever exists falls within God.

This places them in disagreement with any theory of the supernatural. But such opposition must not be misunderstood, for to say that there is no supernatural realm is not in itself to delineate the range of what is natural. This is important, for while many contemporary pantheists have been epistemologically conservative, there is no reason in principle why the pantheist should oppose the idea of that which is epistemically transcendent to us, no reason that is why he should seek to limit the compass of the universe to the known universe.

For example, Spinoza held, not only that the realms of thought and extension must stretch indefinitely beyond our finite grasp, but that, as well as in the two known realms of thought and extension, the one substance must exist also in an infinity of other dimensions completely beyond our power to conceive.

It is clear that the more naturalistically the cosmos is conceived the stronger that objection must seem, but to estimate more carefully its validity the following six sections take in turn a number of characteristics which the cosmos possesses or might possess and which could be thought to make it divine.

We may proceed from the least to the most contested, noting that not all pantheists will agree on all marks. Most straightforwardly it has been maintained that the One is holy because we feel a particular set of religious emotions towards it. Levine , ch. On this view, all that distinguishes a pantheist from an atheist is feeling ; a certain emotional reaction or connection that we feel to the universe.

It would become akin, say, to the difference between one who loves art and another who is relatively indifferent to it. Prima facie , however, this approach puts the cart before the horse; rather than say that the One is divine because we feel a set of religious emotions towards it, it seems more appropriate to suppose that we feel those emotions towards it because we think it is divine.

Religion gives meaning to human lives by assigning them a certain definite place within a grander scheme or narrative. It gives its adherents a sense of their part in a coherent universe. It tells us that the universe is not a random conjunction of brute facts, but a whole in which we have our proper location.

The pantheist may regard the cosmos as divine for very similar reasons. Historically the majority of pantheists have regarded the universe as Infinite, metaphysically perfect, necessarily existent, and eternal or some subset thereof and—taking these attributes as the characteristic marks of divinity—that has formed one very important reason for thinking that the universe itself is in fact God. Any methodology which limits itself to empirical science will presumably find it hard to attribute anything like infinitude or necessary existence to the cosmos, while approaches which do find a role for such features will need to be careful that they understand them in an appropriate fashion.

For example, it is doubtful that mere infinite extent, or infinite divisibility, in space and time would be sufficient to merit that the universe be called divine. But with these caveats aside the pantheist is not without arguments for believing that the universe as a whole displays marks of metaphysical perfection.

Insofar as we can construct his reasons, he argued that some such boundless potentiality was need to ensure the continual coming to be and passing away in the world that characterises the passing of time.

As something thus immortal and indestructible, Anaximander concluded that the infinite was also divine. Aristotle, Physics , b. It is notable that much of the same reasoning that theists employ in the Kalaam cosmological argument for the existence of God may be used for the universe itself. If we inquire into the origin of the universe, it may be suggested 1 that it simply began without reason, 2 that it was somehow self-creating, or 3 that its origin requires a prior cause which in turn calls for an infinite causal chain.

Each of these answers has sufficient problems such that one might well prefer to argue instead, 4 that the universe in fact exists necessarily. But perhaps the most commonly used argument among pantheists has been the ontological argument. As employed by classical theism this line of argument has been much criticised, but the forms in which it has been put forward by pantheists such as Spinoza and Hegel are interestingly different.

On their way of thinking, the more perfect an idea becomes the less room there remains for any gap between it and its instantiation, but no idea becomes perfect simply by defining itself to be so. This can be shown only by a full development of its content amounting to nothing less than a complete philosophical system.

Harrelson A fourth feature commonly taken to mark the divinity of God is his ineffability. If he is so much greater than anything else, anything we say of him would limit or falsify him, so we can speak at best in negatives, or simply conclude that he is an ineffable mystery.

It would be hard to think of a line of reasoning less congenial to the rationalist spirit that has characterised many pantheists, for example scientific pantheism. At the same time it must be allowed that there is a strong apophatic streak in much pantheism. The essence of God considered in himself, the universal ground of being cannot itself be captured by any of the limited categories which flow out from it.

Even Spinoza suggests that the highest stages of knowledge consist in a form of intuitive insight, which transcends mere reasoning or conceptual knowledge in that it enables us to grasp the essence of individual things. Einstein was a pantheist but rejected any notion of a personal God. Einstein , And like Einstein, for many pantheists rejection of a personal deity is the definitive mark or most important element of their position.

Levine ; Harrison However, the matter calls for more considered attention. It should also be recognised both that the notion of personhood is itself deeply problematic, and that a not inconsiderable number of traditional theists would only with considerable qualification be prepared to allow that God is personal.

These points made, while it is true that traditional theism has regularly opposed pantheism on the grounds that it tends to be impersonal, and true also that many pantheists would deny that God is personal, it is nonetheless the case that many other pantheists have thought mind-like attribution of some form or other to the cosmos absolutely central to their position.

It is clear that pantheistic systems which start from the theistic God which they then find to be all-inclusive, or Absolute Idealist systems which derive all reality from a spiritual principle, will find it easier to attribute something like personhood to the cosmos than will those which are more naturalistically motivated.

When Democracy Runs Wild. Basketball: Myths and Puzzles. Achieving a Measure of Insanity. Philosophy of Trash. Compromise and Slavery.

Philosophy and Shelley's Frankenstein. Race Matters. To Retract or Not to Retract. A Moral Case for Meat. FrancisOnFilm: Battle of the Sexes. Decolonizing Philosophy. Privacy and the Internet of Things. Harmful Jobs, Net Impact. Frege: The Invisible Anti-Semite. How does Consciousness Happen? On Our Cosmic Insignificance. Getting Rid of "Racism". Should Hate Speech be Protected?

The Limits of Free Speech. Automation and the Future of Work. How Will Racism Be Eradicated? Social Status. Should You Fear AI? Women in Philosophy. Transitions in Philosophy Talk. Credibility and Gender. Are Bosses Like Dictators? Your Question: Changing Physical Laws. The Best of Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Creativity and Character. Which Statues Should Go? Dennett vs. Papineau on Consciousness.

Is James Franco Rescuing Philosophy? Mental Health and Assisted Suicide. FrancisOnFilm: Dunkirk. Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis. Robots and Sexthics. Superpredators Old and New. When Driverless Cars Must Choose. Fast Lane Ethics. Rumor, Suspicion, and Misinformation. The Offensive Peter Singer.

In Praise of Reading. Sex and Global Consequences. Cognitive Bias. Philosophy in The Simpsons. To Game or Not to Game. Philosophy Majors: Unexpectedly Employable.

Your Question: Habermas and Factions. Habermas, Rationality, and Democracy. The Unnatural is the Political. Pawns of ISIS. Habermas and the Fate of Democracy. Racial Profiling and Implicit Bias. FrancisOnFilm: Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Psychopathy and Evil. Conceptual Penises and Failed Hoaxes. Should Philosophers Get Political? Truth and Progress in Philosophy. Ai Weiwei: How Censorship Works.

A Deep Dive into Democracy. Nietzsche, Schmitt, and the Alt-Right. The Lifespan of a Genre. Envisioning Eastern Hegemony. Because You Are, I Am. Watered-down Philosophy for Tech Bros. Nozick, Libertarianism, and Philosophy. The Limits of Medical Consent. Defense of Transracialism Goes Awry.

Is Human Monogamy Genetic? All Machine and No Ghost. Slower Reading for Better Philosophy. Why We Need Public Philosophy. FrancisOnFilm: Cezanne et Moi. Art, Origins, and the Fearless Girl. Why Vote? Tricks for Political Persuasion. A Virtual Walden's Pond. Transcending Intersectionality. Foucault's Concept of Power. Aesthetics for Dogs? Muscles and Marxism. Some Thoughts on Problematic Arguments. FrancisOnFilm: Get Out. Getting from Space and Time to Space-time.

Space, Time, and Space-time. Cruelty in American Politics. Descartes, Elisabeth, and My Left Foot. Take the Mirror Test. Queer and Christian? So Did Plato. Art and Obscenity. To 'Get' a Piece of Art?

Maybe 20 Minutes. A Country is a Country. Why Is Analytic Philosophy Dominant? Is Milo Really a Conservative? Free Speech on Campus. Are Self-Help Books Useless? The Responsibility of Intellectuals. The Philosophical Dimensions of Reparations. Ask a Comedian. Arendt on Totalitarianism. How to Honor Black History Month. Philosophy Behind Bars. In Defense of Polyamory. The Case For and Against Reparations.

RIP Bharati Mukherjee. The Emperor Has No Philosophy. Deadly Thought Experiments. Confessions of a Cassandra. FrancisOnFilm: Authenticity at Sundance. FrancisOnFilm: What is a Documentary? Stanley Cavell and Public Philosophy. Ta-Nehisi Coates Reflects on Obama. Hail to the Chief of Philosophy. Outrage or Pity? The Value of a College Education. Empathy for Deplorables? Introducing: Francis on Film. Derek Parfit. December Against Santa.

The Examined Year Triumph and Defeat. Is Donald Trump Lying or Bullshitting? The Mystery of the Multiverse. The Dark Side of the Cosmos. Trust and Mistrust. Dewey's Democracy. Magical Thinking. Do Religions Deserve Special Status? Election Special — Uncut. Dangerous Demographics. Neuroaesthetics - Your Brain on Art. A Big Bang Blog. The Philosophy of Puns. The Mystery of Music. Identity Politics.

The Morality of Revenge. Struggles of Democracy. The Limits of Self Knowledge. Stagehands in the Theatre of Life. The Philanthropy Trap. Sleeping, Dreaming, and the Well-Lived Life. Dream Incubation Instructions. Life as a Work of Art. The Moral Lives of Animals. Altered States of Consciousness. Lessons from the Trolley Problem. How Many Children? Memes and the Evolution of Culture.

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. Why Does Anything Exist? Oneness is a Mystery. Extreme Altruism. People with Guns. Freedom, rights and technology Why Free Software is Important. Gun Control. The Science of Happiness. The Ancient Cosmos. Simone de Beauvoir.

The Debt Crisis. Are we a white supremacist nation? Finding Meaning in a Material World. Justice Scalia and Judicial Diversity. White Privilege and Racial Injustice. Freedom and Free Markets. Religion and the Art of Living.

Nations and Borders. The Divine Shape Shifter. Sartre's Existentialism. Life and Death in Prison. The Examined Year: - Uncut. Good, Evil, and the Divine Plan.

Two Concepts of Safe Space. Self and Self-Presentation. Gun violence, advocacy, and the NRA. Perception, Memory, and Justice. The Demands of Morality. Will Innovation Kill Us? A Nietzschean Defense of Ben Carson. Collective Immortality: Living on Through Others.

What is Cultural Appropriation? The Logic of Regret. Social media, knowledge of others, and self-knoweldge. Bioethics — Myths and Realities. Dance as a Way of Knowing. Technological Immortality. What is a Culture of Victimhood? The Changing Face of Feminism. Ashley Madison, accommodation, and silencing. The Ethics of Drone Warfare.

Has Science Replaced Philosophy? Education and the Culture Wars. Are Some People Better than Others? The Last "Universal Genius". The Fine-Tuning Argument for God. Does Science Advance? The Power and Perils of Satire. Does Neuroscience Threaten Free Will? The Ethics of Whistleblowing. Science and Politics: Friends or Foes? The Paradoxes of Ideology. Why Propaganda Matters. Unconditional Love. When Democracies Torture. The Bone that Changed China. A new multi-level hierarchy of ethics and morality.

The Nature of Wilderness. The McDonalds-ification of Education. Democracy in Crisis. Forbidden Words. Ethical Relativism. Disorders of the Mind - The Philosophy of Psychiatry.

The More Good the Better? Camus and Absurdity. The Evolution of Storytelling. Political Activism in the Digital Age. The Psychology of Climate Change Denial. Regulating Bodies. Food Justice. Could Race be in Your Genes?

Categorizing Humans. December The Sex Trade. Violating the Humanity of Others. Gut Feelings. Immortality: Hume and Boswell. The Moral Costs of Climate Change. Transformative Experiences.

Identities Lost and Found in a Global Age. Intuitions Are a Guide to…Look Here! The Fairness Fixation. Philosophy as Therapy. Freedom, Blame, and Resentment. Corporations and the Future of Democracy. Second-Guessing Ourselves. Babies and the Birth of Morality. Neuroscience and the Law. Is Intuition a Guide to Truth? Remixing Reality: Art and Literature for the 21st Century. The Race Delusion. Privacy and The New Surveillance Society. Tainted by the Sins of Our Fathers?

Anatomy of a Terrorist. The Problem of Other Minds. Being Human is Like Being Here. The Reality of Time. The Metaphysics of Color. Risk and Rationality. Conspiracy Theories. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Acting Together. Science and Gender. Inspiration for Evil. The Legacy of Freud. Memory and the Self. Moral Luck. An Anti-Determinist Argument. Confessions of a Conflicted Carnivore. The Ethics of Soda. Tennis as a Way of Knowing. A New Wrinkle on an Old Problem.

The Dark Side of Science. Latin-American Philosophy. Diogenes the Cynic. Richard Fletcher, Historian. My Discovery of the X-Files. Science, Philosophy, and Theology.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. Teaching Philosophy. What is philosophy? The Psychology of Partisan Politics. The Self. The Linguistics of Name Calling. December Turbo-charging the Mind. How Fiction Shapes Us. Economics: Cult or Science? Mind Reading. Poetry As a Way of Knowing. Epicurus and the Good Life. On Being Normal. The Dionysus Awards. Black Solidarity. The Right to Privacy. Philosophy in Fiction. Is Democracy a Universal Value? The Examined Year: December Nihilism and Meaning.

What would Jesus do? A Blog for Christmas. Is it wrong to wreck the earth? To Forgive and Forget. The Military: What is it Good for? Is Nothing Sacred Anymore? Thinking Inside the Box. Cooperation and Conflict. From the Minds of Babies. Morality and the Self.

War, Sacrifice, and the Media. Deconstructing the College Admissions Rat Race. Schizophrenia and the mind. Health Care — is it a right or a privilege.

Time, Space, and Quantum Mechanics. The State of Public Philosophy. Philosophy and Everyday Life. What Are Words Worth? Atheism and the Well-Lived Life. Lincoln as a Philosopher. The Language of Responsibility.

Gay Pride and Prejudice. Summer Reading The Prison System. Beliefs Gone Wild. Cities, Gentrification, and Inequality. Should Marriage Be Abolished? The Extended Mind. What is an adult? Social Networking. Is it All Just Relative? Free Will. John Locke. A dialogue on Biracial Identity. Different Cultures, Different Selves. Derrida and Deconstruction.

The Moral Costs of Markets. December The Philosophy of History. Nominations open for the Third Annual Dionysus Awards! Children as Philosophers. The Power of Thought. Things have changed, however. Nowadays, such lines fly off the screen and past the viewer with scarcely a notice. Granted , Infinity War has a cosmic setting in which talk of the universe might come with the territory. But similar quotes pop up everywhere, from crime dramas to romantic comedies to celebrity interviews.

Actors and the characters they portray routinely praise the universe for their good fortune or express fear that the universe will pay them back for their bad choices. Equating God with the universe is not a new idea, of course. Pantheism is a basic concept in various Eastern religions and other philosophical systems, and has made inroads in popular Western thought over the past few decades.

It has a variety of forms, but they all boil down to the belief that the universe is God, or at least indistinguishable from God.

According to this view, God is not a personal being independent of His creation, but rather an impersonal all-encompassing force, made up of all things and all creatures in the natural order. In short, God is everything and everything is God. Pantheism is no newcomer to the world of entertainment, either. The force in Star Wars , the circle of life in The Lion King , and the worship of nature in Avatar to name a few well-known examples were all inspired by pantheistic ideas.

The strange part about this popular embrace of pantheism is that its assumptions about the universe are diametrically opposed to those of materialism, which is often touted as the default worldview in a secular society. In a strict sense, the materialist narrative has no room for God or gods of any sort, even for an impersonal mystical force that pervades all things.

Matter and energy are all that exist, the products of random chance, without plan or reason. Concepts such as right and wrong, justice and purpose, as well as the mind itself, are mere illusions created by brain chemistry.

And yet even some prominent atheists, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris among them, view pantheism in a favourable light, as a belief system that encourages care for nature, at least in their opinion. Apparently, belief in a transcendent universal force is more palatable and pragmatically useful to atheist thinking than belief in a personal God — an opinion echoed by a steady stream of voices in popular culture.

But why this cultural disconnect between two contradictory worldviews?