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So, this discovery forced physicists to confront a question they had been avoiding for decades: Why is the universe so well suited to our existence? The strongest answer verges on theism: The cosmological constant is so improbably small that a godlike fine-tuner must have fashioned it into existence. But maybe there is another explanation.

Pantheism, Its Story and Significance Religions Ancient and Modern - leondumoulin.nl

Physicist Steven Weinberg argues that the multiverse explains our existence without appealing to an extra-cosmic creator, because if there are an infinite number of universes, then every possible value is out there somewhere. Of course, the multiverse does not disprove the existence of God. A theist can always argue that God created the multiverse that created the universe. But it seems to me there are other sorts of deities emerging from numerous multiverse scenarios—unexpected figures that we might miss if we are only focused on proving or disproving the father-God of classical theism.

Take, for example, the simulated universe scenarios, where the gods are reborn as the omnipotent techies running the simulation. In these multiverse cosmologies, we find a creative principle that is the ever-evolving universe itself. This sort of theology, which identifies God with the physical universe, is a position historically known as pantheism.


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A lthough various pantheisms can be found in Hindu philosophy, Buddhist cosmology, and ancient Greek Stoicism, the idea also has its modern scientific precursors. Whether theistic or atheistic, these critics assume that the only thing God can be is an extra-cosmic, masculine monarch. 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.

The following paragraphs illustrate four examples of such reasoning. 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. The view that the world could not exist—even for a second—without God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence, not really an autonomous entity.

Oakes 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 divine—that it all comes from a single place—tends 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. 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 In both cases the reasoning runs that this necessary being must be all-inclusive and, hence, divine.


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    • To begin with it is necessary to raise two ambiguities in the logic of 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. 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. 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 , ch. They may be co-referring but they are not synonymous; indeed, they are utterly incommensurable. Even accepting a classical conception of identity and difference, there remain issues to settle. If we think of pantheism negatively as a rejection of the view that God is distinct from the cosmos, we would face four possible schemes by which we might represent their merelogical relation: we might understand God as proper part of nature, we might take nature as a proper part of God, we might regard the two domains as partially overlapping, or else we might hold that they are strictly identical.

    Reflecting upon the ambiguities of the previous two paragraphs, it might be argued that only where we find strict classical identity do we have 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.

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    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.

    Pantheism, Its Story and Significance / Religions Ancient and Modern

    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.

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    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. Eriguena, 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.


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      • 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.

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      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.

      2. Arguments for / drives towards pantheism

      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.