Category Archives: Pantheism

There are several different ways to think about pantheism. (1) Many of the world's religious traditions and spiritual writings are marked by pantheistic ideas and feelings. This is particularly so for example, in Hinduism of the Advaita Vedanta school, in some varieties of Kabbalistic Judaism, in Celtic spirituality, and in Sufi mysticism. (2) Another vital source of pantheistic ideas is to be found in literature, for example, in such writers as Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers. Although it should be added that, far from being limited to high culture, pantheistic themes are familiar, too, in popular media, for example in such films as Star Wars, Avatar, and The Lion King. (3) Thirdly, as it is in this article, pantheism may be considered philosophically; that is, a critical examination may be made of its central ideas with respect to their meaning, their coherence, and the case to be made for or against their acceptance.

A good way to understand any view is to appreciate the kind of drives that may push someone towards it. What arguments may be given for pantheism? Although there are a great many different individual lines of reasoning that might be offered, generally they may be placed under two heads; arguments from below, which start from a posteriori religious experience, and arguments from above, which start from a priori philosophical abstraction.

Following the first type of argument, pantheistic belief arises when the things of this world excite a particular sort of religious reaction in us. We feel, perhaps, a deep reverence for and sense of identity with the world in which we find ourselves. Epistemically it seems to us that God is not distant but can be encountered directly in what we experience around us. We see God in everything. The initial focus of attention here may be either our physical environment (the land on which we live, our natural environment) or else our social environment (our community, our tribe, our nation or, generally, the people we meet with) but further reflection may lead to its more universal expansion.

In the second kind of argument, reasoning starts from a relatively abstract concept whose application is taken as assured, but further reflection leads to the conclusion that its scope must be extended to include the whole of reality. Most typically, the concept in question is that of God, or perfect being, in which case pantheism appears as the logical terminus or completion of theism. The following paragraphs illustrate four examples of such reasoning.

(1) Traditional theism asserts the omnipresence of God and, while it strongly wishes to maintain that this is not equivalent to pantheism, the difference between saying that God is present everywhere in everything and saying that God is everything is far from easy to explain. If omnipresence means, not simply that God is cognisant of or active in all places, but literally that he exists everywhere, then it is hard to see how any finite being can be said to have existence external to God. Indeed, for Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke divine omnipresence was one and the same thing as space, which they understood as the sensorium of God. (Oakes 2006)

(2) The traditional theistic position that God's creation of the universe is continuous can easily be developed in pantheistic directions. The view that the world could not existeven for a secondwithout God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence, not really an autonomous entity. (Oakes 1983) Moreover, to further develop this argument, if God creates every temporal stage of every object in the universe, this undermines the causal power of individual things and leads to occasionalism, which in turn encourages pantheism; for in so far as independent agency is a clear mark of independent being, the occasionalist doctrine that all genuine agency is divinethat it all comes from a single placetends to undermine the distinction of things from God. Both Malebranche and Jonathan Edwards have found themselves charged with pantheism on these grounds, and it was for this reason that Leibniz, in attempting to refute the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, felt it most important to assert the autonomous agency of finite beings.

(3) Alternatively it might be argued that God's omniscience is indistinguishable from reality itself. For if there obtains a complete mapping between God's knowledge and the world that God knows, what basis can be found for distinguishing between them, there being not even the possibility of a mismatch? Moreover, were we to separate the two, since knowledge tracks reality we know something because it is the case and not vice versa then God would become problematically dependent upon the world. (Mander 2000)

(4) Arguments of this general type may also proceed from starting points more philosophical than theological. For example, Spinoza, the most famous of all modern pantheists starts from the necessary existence of something he calls substance. By this he means that which exists wholly in its own right, that whose existence does not depend upon anything else. The notion of the Absolute, or wholly unconditioned reality, as it figures in the philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and the British Idealists may be considered a related development of the same philosophical starting point. In both cases the reasoning runs that this necessary being must be all-inclusive and, hence, divine.

The pantheist asserts an identity between God and nature, but it needs to be asked in just what sense we are to understand the term identity? To begin with it is necessary to raise two ambiguities in the logic of identity.

(1) Dialectical identity. It is important to note that many pantheists will not accept the classical logic of identity in which pairs are straightforwardly either identical or different. They may adopt rather the logic of relative identity, or identity-in-difference, by which it is possible to maintain that God and the cosmos are simultaneously both identical and different, or to put the matter in more theological language, that God is simultaneously both transcendent and immanent. For example, Eriugena holds that the universe may be subdivided into four categories: things which create but are not created, things which create and are created, things which are created but do not create, and things which neither create nor are created. He argues that all four reduce to God, and hence that God is in all things, i.e. that he subsists as their essence. For He alone by Himself truly has being, and He alone is everything which is truly said to be in things endowed with being (Periphyseon, 97). But nonetheless, for Eriugena, the uncreated retains its distinct status separate from the created, not least in that the former may be understood while the later transcends all understanding. In consequence, he insists that God is not the genus of which creatures are the species. Similarly, the Sufi philosopher, ibn Arabi identifies God and the universe, suggesting in a striking metaphor that the universe is the food of God and God the food of the universe; as deity swallows up the cosmos so the cosmos swallows up deity. (Bezels of Wisdom, 237; Husaini 1970, 180) But Ibn Arabi in no sense regards such claims as preventing him from insisting also on the fundamental gulf between the unknowable essence of God and his manifest being. We must distinguish between the nature of God and the nature of things, between that which exists by itself (God) and that which exist by another (the universe), but since the nature of God just is Being itself, no parallel distinction may be drawn between the being of God and the being of things. Nothing real exists besides God who discloses himself in and through the universe. (Chittick 1989, ch.5) Again, Nicholas of Cusa's celebrated doctrine of the coincidence of oppositeswhich he memorably illustrated by pointing to way in which, upon infinite expansion, a circle must coincide with a straight lineallows him to say both that God and the creation are the same thing and that there exists a fundamental distinction between the realm of absolute being and the realm of limited or contracted being. (Moran 1990) Even Spinoza goes to great lengths to show that the two attributes of thought and extension by which we pick out the one substance as God or nature are nonetheless at the same time irreducibly different. They may be co-referring but they are not synonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Such a dialectical conception of unity, in which there can be no identity without difference, is a strong element in Hegel's thought, and also one aspect of what Hartshorne meant by dipolar theism; the opposites of immanence and transcendence are included among those which he thinks God brings together in his being.

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Pantheism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Pantheism is the belief that the universe (or nature as the totality of everything) is identical with divinity,[1] or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God.[2] Pantheists thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.[3] Some Asian religions are considered to be pantheistically inclined.

Pantheism was popularised in the West as both a theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza,[4]:p.7 whose book Ethics was an answer to Descartes' famous dualist theory that the body and spirit are separate.[5] Spinoza held the monist view that the two are the same, and monism is a fundamental part of his philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man," and used the word God to describe the unity of all substance.[5] Although the term pantheism was not coined until after his death, Spinoza is regarded as its most celebrated advocate.[6]

Pantheism is derived from the Greek pan (meaning "all") and Theos (meaning "God"). There are a variety of definitions of pantheism. Some consider it a theological and philosophical position concerning God.[4]:p.8

As a religious position, some describe pantheism as the polar opposite of atheism.[5] From this standpoint, pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God.[2] All forms of reality may then be considered either modes of that Being, or identical with it.[7] Some hold that pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position. To them, pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical.[8]

The first known use of the term pantheism was in Latin, by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697.[9] In De spatio reali, Raphson begins with a distinction between atheistic panhylists (from the Greek roots pan, "all", and hyle, "matter"), who believe everything is matter, and pantheists who believe in a certain universal substance, material as well as intelligent, that fashions all things that exist out of its own essence.[10][11] Raphson found the universe to be immeasurable in respect to a human's capacity of understanding, and believed that humans would never be able to comprehend it.[12]

The Catholic church regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy.[13]Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk who evangelized about an immanent and infinite God, was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Catholic Church. He has since become known as a celebrated pantheist and martyr of science.[14] Bruno influenced many later thinkers including Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which pantheism spread.[15]

The term was first used in the English language by the Irish writer John Toland in his work of 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno, and used the terms 'pantheist' and 'Spinozist' interchangeably.[16] In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin, envisioning a pantheist society which believed, "all things in the world are one, and one is all in all things ... what is all in all things is God, eternal and immense, neither born nor ever to perish."[17][18] He clarified his idea of pantheism in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz in 1710 when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".[19][20][21]

Although the term "pantheism" did not exist before the 17th century, various pre-Christian religions and philosophies can be regarded as pantheistic. Pantheism is similar to the ancient Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism) to the extent that the 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker remarked that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus."[22]

Others include some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander.[23] The Stoics were pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism.[24][25] The early Taoism of Lao Zi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic.[21]

In 1785, a major controversy about Spinoza's philosophy between Friedrich Jacobi, a critic, and Moses Mendelssohn, a defender, known in German as the Pantheismus-Streit, helped to spread pantheism to many German thinkers in the late 18th and 19th centuries.[27]

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Pantheism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does pantheism relate to free will?
From my experience, it seems to me that different religions have different definitions of God. Most that I have come across are heavily free will based. They...

By: Chandler Klebs

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Does pantheism relate to free will? - Video

Are you searching for a path which focuses on Earth and the Cosmos, rather than some imaginary beyond? Are you more concerned with saving the planet than saving your eternal soul? With making the best of your one life here, rather than longing for life in an imaginary paradise?

Do you find it hard to believe in supernatural gods, and difficult to conceive of anything worthier of the deepest respect than the beauty, power and mystery of the Universe?

Do you feel a deep sense of peace, belonging, and wonder in the midst of Nature?

Are you looking for a spirituality that respects individual choice and the rights of all living things? One that values reason and science over adherence to ancient scriptures?

If so, then you will feel at home in the World Pantheist community.

In the World Pantheist Movement we revere and care for Nature, we accept this life as our only life, and this earth as our only paradise, if we look after it. We revel in the beauty of Nature and the night sky, and are full of wonder at their mystery and power.

By spirituality and spiritual we don't mean any kind of supernatural or non-physical activity. We mean our deeper emotions and aesthetic responses towards Nature and the wider Universe - our sense of our place in these, and the ethics and values that these feelings imply.

We take the real Universe and Nature as our starting and finishing point, not some preconceived idea of God. We feel a profound wonder and awe for these, in some ways similar to the reverence that believers in more conventional gods feel towards their deity, but without anthropomorphic worship or belief that Nature has a mind or personality that we can influence through prayer or ritual.

Our ethics are humanistic and green, our metaphysics naturalistic and scientific. To these we add the emotional and aesthetic dimensions which humans need to cope with life's challenges and to embrace life's joys, and to motivate their concern for Nature and human welfare.

Our beliefs and values reconcile spirituality and rationality, emotion and values and environmental concern with science and respect for evidence. They are summarized in our Pantheist Statement of Principles, which embodies the following basic principles:

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Is your spiritual home right here on Earth? | World Pantheism

The Higher Pantheism
The Higher Pantheism By Alfred, Lord Tennyson The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains,- Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who...

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by Paul Harrison. A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)

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When you look at the night sky or at the images of the Hubble Space Telescope, are you filled with feelings of awe and wonder at the overwhelming beauty and power of the universe? When you are in the midst of nature, in a forest, by the sea, on a mountain peak - do you ever feel a sense of the sacred, like the feeling of being in a vast cathedral? Do you believe that humans should be a part of Nature, rather than set above it?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then you have pantheistic leanings.

Are you sceptical about a "God" other than Nature and the wider Universe, yet feel an emotional need for a recognition of something greater than your own self or than the human race?

If so, then pantheism is very probably your natural religious home. If you want to see why others chose it, then check out Why I am a pantheist.

Pantheism is older than Buddhism or Christianity, and may already count hundreds of millions among its members. Most Taoists are pantheists, along with many Chinese, Japanese and Western Buddhists, deep ecologists, pagans, animists, followers of many native religions, and many Unitarian Universalists. The central philosophical scriptures of Hinduism are pantheistic. Many atheists and humanists may be naturalistic pantheists without realizing it.

Scientific or natural pantheism is a modern form of pantheism that deeply reveres the universe and nature and joyfully accepts and embraces life, the body and earth, but does not believe in any supernatural deities, entities or powers.

At the heart of pantheism is reverence of the universe as the ultimate focus of reverence, and for the natural earth as sacred.

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PANTHEISM: Nature, universe, science and religion

From New World Encyclopedia

Pantheism (from Greek: pan = all, and theos = God) refers to the religious and philosophical view that everything in existence is of an all-encompassing immanent God, or that the universe, or nature, and God are equivalent (i.e., that "all is God"). There are two types of pantheism: "classical" and "naturalistic" pantheism. In equating the universe with God, classical pantheism does not strongly redefine or minimize either term, still believing in a personal God, while naturalistic pantheism redefines them, treating God as rather impersonal, as in the philosophy of Spinoza. In any case, what is stressed is the idea that all existence in the universe (the sum total of all that is, was, and shall be) is of the same essence as the divine. Pantheists, then, typically deny God's transcendence. The problem of evil, which is a problem for theism, is not a problem for pantheism in the same way, since pantheism rejects the theistic notion of God as omnipotent and perfectly good.

The term "pantheism" is a relatively recent one, first used by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work, Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. Although concepts similar to pantheism have been discussed as long ago as the time of the Ancient Greek philosophers, they have only recently been categorized as such retrospectively by modern academics. Despite its lack of mainstream support, many followers of pantheism believe that their ideas concerning God are needed as a corrective in the way humans think about God and themselves.

Religious and philosophical scholarship typically distinguishes between two kinds of pantheism: 1) "classical pantheism," which equates the world with God without strongly redefining or minimizing either term, as in many religious and philosophical traditions such as Hinduism, Platonism, and Judaism; and 2) "naturalistic pantheism," which equates the world and God by redefining them in a non-traditional, impersonal way, as in the relatively recent views of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and John Toland (1670-1722) as well as contemporary scientific theorists. So, classical pantheists generally accept the premise that there is a spiritual basis to all reality, while naturalistic pantheists generally do not. The vast majority of persons who can be identified as "pantheistic" are of the classical type, while most persons who do not belong to a religion but identify themselves as "pantheist" are typically of the naturalistic type.

The division between the two types of pantheism remains a source of some controversy in pantheist circles. The nature of pantheism has been a topic of much contention in religious and philosophical discourse, spurring many debates over the implications of its doctrines. However, most pantheists agree on the following two principles: 1) that the universe is an all-encompassing unity; and 2) that natural laws are found throughout the universe. Some pantheists also posit a common purpose for nature and humanity, while others reject the idea of teleology and view the universe as existing for its own sake.

An oft-cited feature of classical pantheism is that each individual human, as a part of the universe or nature, is a part of God. This raises the question of whether or not humans possess free will. In response to this question, variations of the following analogy are sometimes given by classical pantheists: "You are to God, as an individual blood cell in your vein is to you." The analogy maintains that while a cell may be aware of its own environs and may even have some choices (free will) between right and wrong (such as killing a bacterium, becoming cancerous, or perhaps just doing nothing among countless others), it likely has little awareness of the fact that it is also determined by the greater being of which it is a part. Another way to understand this relationship is the Hindu concept of Jiva, wherein the human soul is an aspect of God not yet having reached enlightenment (moksha), after which it becomes Atman. However, it should be noted that not all pantheists accept the idea of free will, with determinism being particularly widespread among naturalistic pantheists.

A common criticism of pantheism is that it, especially of the naturalistic type, can be reduced to atheism. Rudolf Otto, a famed Christian theologian, claimed that pantheism denies the personality of the deity, and therefore represents disbelief in the traditional concept of God. Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer commented that by referring to the natural world as "God," pantheists are merely creating a synonym for the world, and therefore denying the essence of God and rendering their belief atheistic. However, pantheists reply to these arguments by claiming that such criticisms are rooted in a mindset holding that God must be anthropomorphic. Pantheists such as Michael Levine see this kind of presupposition as "stipulative" and illustrative of an attitude that "unduly restricts the extent to which alternative theories of deity can be formulated."[1] Even among the pantheists themselves are similar questions about the nature of God. Classical pantheism believes in a personal and conscious God who unites all being. Naturalistic pantheism, in contrast, does not believe so.

Pantheism should not be confused with some other closely related concepts in religious classification. Most notably, the relationship between pantheism and panentheism, (which is considered to have two different types), needs to be clarified. There is definitely a pantheistic element in the panentheism of the type which holds that the universe is contained within God as a part of God. Obviously, both pantheism and the panentheism of this type consider the universe to be of the same ontological essence as God. The difference is that pantheism equates the universe with the whole God, while the panentheism of the type in question considers it to be only a part of God. The former conceives God to be synonymous with nature, while the latter conceives God to be greater than nature alone. The latter, then, is partially pantheistic. Thus, many of the major faiths described as panentheistic (such as Hinduism) could also be described as pantheistic. Although some find this distinction unhelpful, others see it as a significant point of division. Needless to say, not pantheistic at all is the panentheism of another type, which clearly sees the ontological distinction, and no ontological overlapping, between the universe and God, when it argues for their mutual immanence in each other.

Pantheism should not be confounded with monism, either. Monism refers to the metaphysical and theological view that the totality of existence is derived from a single, uniform essence, principle, substance or energy; so, it is often seen as synonymous with pantheism. However, pantheism can be differentiated from monism since, for the pantheist, the essence which underlies the universe is distinctly identified as divine. Whereas a monistic explanation could reduce all things to a non-spiritual principle (such as in materialist theories which reduce all phenomena to physical processes), pantheist beliefs always conceive reality as singularly infused with the divine.

The ancient Greeks were among the first to lay out pantheistic doctrines, at least in philosophical form. Among the physicists and philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., monistic uniformity became a popular concept. These thinkers commonly noted the idea that all things must spring from some common source. Such a primordial substance was sometimes vaguely described as alive or animate in nature. Anaximenes believed it to be air; Thales thought the substance was water. Later on, Aetius interpreted Thales to mean that the god in all things was the divine energy of the water and hence, such an idea could be interpreted as an inchoate form of pantheism. In the works of Anaximander, this concept became more obvious, as the author proposed the existence of an uncreated and indestructible being which was indeterminate, yet had all things embedded within it. This being embraced all things and ruled them all; thus, it could be classified as divine and therefore pantheistic. Diogenes of Appolloni furthered these pantheistic tendencies by claiming that reason must dwell in the air, since the air travels everywhere and is present in all things.

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