Pantheism – 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.

For Pythagoreans, all things were ruled by mathematics and geometry; so, they saw numbers to constitute the essence of all things, responsible for the harmony in the world. Xenophanes believed God to be changeless, undestroyable and unified in all things. This unity was endowed with infinite intelligence, and Xenophanes called this unity "God." The world of plurality, he contended, was merely a manifestation of this great changeless entity. Heraclitus also stressed the process of transformation as the essence of reality, claiming that all things are merely forms of a great primordial substance, which he reduced to "fire." The change upon which all things' existence is dependent, Heraclitus claimed, was simply the act of divine wisdom taking action in the material world. Heraclitus claimed that humans could never truly know of this great force, although it was in them at all times. Plato often referred to the world as a "blessed god,"[2] conceiving of God as the supreme, ideal form embracing all other forms within itself. That is, it represented a unity comprehending in itself all the true essences of things. Each idea as well, Plato conceived to be a unity that comprehends the many manifestations of matter within itself. All ideas are comprehended in the supreme idea of the Good, of which the entire world is a manifestation. However, Plato's ideas cannot be called true pantheism as there is an implicit dualism proposed between good and evil, precluding the possibility that these moral categories originate from a common same source.

It was among the school of Stoicism that the truest form of Greek pantheism developed. The Stoics proclaimed that God and nature are one and the same, and that the universe is the evolution of a "germ of reason" in all things. This "germ" was considered to be "fire" or "breath," the intelligent, purposeful material which represented spirit and matter in absolute union. All elements in the world, even those that were inanimate and lifeless, were simply transformations of this original fire. From the fire, everything arose and proceeded to evolve; further, the Stoics held that everything would return to this state. The fire contains the germ of reason that acts in all things, and this germ proceeds to determine everything. Thus, the Stoic pantheism seems markedly deterministic, as everything is subject to its own predestined fate. However, the Stoics were reluctant to deny humanity free will, claiming that humans could fall away from their fate if they acted in discord with the logic of the pantheistic germ of reason.

The Neo-Platonists also followed a philosophy which could be described as a form of pantheism. While they did not identify God with the world as blatantly as did the Stoics, they did place the world of sensations on the lowest scale in a series of emanations from God. That is, on a gradient of godly perfection, human sensations are of the lowest degree, and God's, on the opposite end of the spectrum, are the most perfect. The Neo-Platonists insisted, however, that humans could potentially attain this level of godly perfection, becoming absorbed in it through subjective sensations of ecstasy. Thus, the neo-Platonists fall into a category academics have labeled emanationistic pantheism, where the multiple phenomena perceived by humans are held to actually be emanations or immediacies of the power of the greater God.

Although early Vedic Hinduism appears to be polytheistic or henotheistic, there are some shades of early pantheistic ruminations similar to those of the early Greeks. For example, the concept of an underlying order to the cosmos is found in the Vedic idea of rta. Furthermore, the god of fire, Agni, appeared frequently in the early Vedas and was seen to be pervasive in all things, since heat was such an important aspect in maintaining health. Throughout the Vedas, many other names are associated with this one pantheistic force, such as hiranya-garbha (the "golden germ"), narayana (the primordial man) and the phrase tat tvam asi, which translates to "that thou art." This concept of "that" refers to the oneness in the universe that subsumes all persons and objects. Finally, nearing the end of the Vedas, the concept of Brahman is introduced, which would go on to become the supreme principle from which all things originated and were maintained.

This notion of Brahman was developed in many later works in the Hindu canon, including the Upanishads, a series of commentaries on the Vedas. In Hindu theology Brahman is both transcendent and immanent, the absolute infinite existence, the sum total of all that ever is, was, or ever will be. As the sun has rays of light, which emanate from the same source, the same holds true for the multifaceted aspects of God emanating from Brahman. The so-called "individual" soul, or Atman, is essentially no different from Brahman. In the sphere of religious practices, each of the individual personal gods is considered to be an aspect of the Divine One; thus, the worship of many multifarious deities by adherents of Hinduism represents a conceivable means by which Hindus can connect to the larger, inconceivable pantheistic force of Brahman. This philosophy has permeated the worship practices of innumerable Hindus from antiquity until today.

The concept of the Dao is one of the best examples of a truly pantheistic belief. The Dao is the ultimate, ineffable principle, containing the entirety of the universe, yet also embodying nothingness as its nature. Further, it is a natural law and a system of self-regulating principles. Thus, the Dao, in its totality, represents the central unifying metaphysical and naturalistic principle pervading the entire universe. This allows belief in it to be classified as a form of naturalistic pantheism.

The Jewish philosopher Philo was deeply influenced by the Neo-Platonists and, as such, he softened the deeply developed Jewish notion of a transcendent God with some pantheistic ideas. He argued that without the continual action of God, the universe could not maintain itself as it does and could not continue to exist. Thus, he concluded that God must be all-pervasive throughout his creation. Philo saw Gods divine ideas, or else his divine word and wisdom, as the preserving force in the world. The world, then, is a copy of divine reason. However, these pantheistic assertions presenting God as the entity who maintains everything also imply that God is responsible for the evil in the world. This was an issue that Philo did not address, and his failure to do so prevented his thoughts from gaining significant measure of credence in the Jewish religious tradition.

It was Spinoza who developed the first system of pantheism in modern Western philosophy. His pantheism was of the naturalistic type. He adhered to the idea that there can only be one unlimited substance with infinite attributes throughout the entire universe. From this he concluded that the natural world and God are merely synonyms referring to identical reality, for if this were not the case, then the combination of God and the world would actually be greater than God alone. Thus, God is as necessary as the world; however, as a corollary, human free will is denied under Spinoza's assertions. Also, there is no room for evil in this divine world. Spinoza's pantheism was generally rejected by the orthodox Jewish communities, although it was highly respected among more secular thinkers such as Albert Einstein.

Spinoza's ideas were supposedly inspired by the decidedly immanent sense of the divine in the Jewish mystical Kabbalah tradition. The standard Kabbalah formulation of the nature of God and the universe contrasts the transcendent attributes of God described in the Torah with God's immanence. Jewish mystics have typically asserted that God is the dwelling-place of the cosmos, while the cosmos is not the dwelling-place of God. Possibly the designation of "place" for God, frequently found in Talmudic-Midrashic literature, is related to this, and even Philo, in commenting on Genesis 28:11, says, "God is called ha makom ("the place") because God encloses the universe, but is Himself not enclosed by anything" (De Somniis, i. 11). Kabbalists interpret this in pantheistic terms, although mainstream Judaism generally rejects such interpretations and instead accepts a more panentheistic view.

Generally, the Christian view of God followed in the Jewish tradition from which it derived, adhering to the belief that God lives apart from the world in heaven, while being able to act in the world whenever he chooses. However, elements of pantheism can be found within Christianity, originating in the gospels. Most notably, Paul refers to Jesus as follows: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). This statement "is strongly pantheistic, though it appears to be not a statement of his own, but rather a quotation from a Greek poet, Aratus, probably influenced by the Stoic Cleanthes, who was a pantheist."[3] In Colossians 1:16-17, Paul states that "For by him all things were created . And he is before all things and in him all things consist." This insinuates that God is fully embedded in the world, sustains the world, and in the case of those who follow Christ he enters into their mind and body and in some sense becomes one with them. Paul uses the expression "in Christ," "in the Lord," and "in him" repeatedly in his letters, usually referring to the idea that Christ is in some way inside Paul or the believer; or that they are inside Christ; or both. At times Paul implies that there is almost a bodily incorporation of Christians into Christ. Thus, God and the world seem to be closely connected; however, this represents anything but world-affirming kind of pantheism, as Paul regarded the earth and the physical body as inferior to God. For example, when he speaks of the body as God's temple, he does not mean that the body should be worshipped and indulged, but rather that its "base" instincts and desires should be kept in check for purposes of maintaining the sanctity of the temple.

Several less mainstream Christian groups and individuals throughout history have entertained pantheistic beliefs. Many Gnostics believed that the universe consisted of emanations from God by way of Pleroma, which refers to the totality of God's powers or fullness. Human wisdom, for example, was one of the weakest manifestations of this power. Much later, the "Brethren of the Free Spirit," a heretical movement, arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which preached that "all things are One, because whatever is, is God." This assertion lead to the rejection the Christian concepts of creation and redemption, on the grounds that since all is God, there can be no sin, and any action whatsoever was permitted as a function of God. The beliefs of the "Brethren of the Free Spirit" were heavily persecuted by the mainstream Roman Catholic Church.

Some modern Christian movements have also incorporated pantheistic elements. Modern Gnostic revivalists such as the "Gnostic Illuminists of the Thomasine Church" proclaim that they follow a more naturalistic pantheism or even a "scientific pantheism." They interpret the "Hymn of the Pearl" to be a 2,000-year-old allegory of M-theory, a contemporary theory of physics which extends superstring theory in order to describes the complex physical roots of reality. Similarly, Creation Spirituality, a set of beliefs about God and humanity promoted by the theologian and Episcopal priest Matthew Fox, emphasizes the pantheistic idea that humans experience the divine in all things and that all things are in the divine. Also, Unitarian Universalists maintain a creedless, non-dogmatic approach to spirituality and faith development, and accept all beliefs. Not surprisingly, numerous Unitarian Universalists consider themselves to be pantheists, among other things.

It seems that pantheism, by equating the world with God, attributes any evil in the world to God, making him an evil God. It seems to theists, therefore, that pantheism does not have an appropriate way of solving the problem of evil, and that the pantheistic attribution of evil to God is "the most absurd and monstrous hypothesis that can be envisaged," as Pierre Bayle, the French critic of Spinoza in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, put it.[4]

The pantheist Michael Levine addresses this criticism, by saying that "the problem of evil is basically a theistic one that is not directly pertinent to pantheism."[5] According to him, the problem of evil does not embarrass pantheists, nor can it do so "since pantheism rejects all of the aspects of theism that are essential to generating the problem." Most notably, pantheism rejects the theistic idea that God is omnipotent and perfectly good. For pantheists, then, the theistic question of why God would not prevent evil in the world, which is a question about logical inconsistency, is not a question. The existence of evil is not incompatible with the pantheistic all-inclusive divine Unity. Even if theism assumes that what is divine should always be good, pantheism doesn't.

This does not mean, however, that evil is not a problem at all for the pantheist. Although it is not the kind of problem that it is for the theist, nevertheless it still is a problem in a different way for the pantheist. Evil is no longer the problem of its logical contradiction with divine omnipotence and goodness, as in theism. It is rather a problem of illusion. The pantheist holds that no matter how virulently it may be experienced, what seems to be evil is in reality only a lack of adequate knowledge or awareness on our part, as Spinoza wrote: "The knowledge of evil is an inadequate knowledge."[6] Evil consists in our inadequate ideas of the all-inclusive divine Unity whereby we mistake lesser goods for the supreme good, and it necessarily happens as an illusion in the all-inclusive Whole that necessarily contains as many different modes of existence as possible, i.e., as many different levels of awareness as possible.

Although pantheist thinkers are found in most religious traditions, orthodox members usually reject them. Due to this fact, pantheism has been frequently discussed in philosophical, scientific, and environmentalist circles rather than in established, mainstream religious traditions. This may serve as an insight into the nature of the belief. While monotheism, polytheism and other religious categorizations refer to conceptions of the divine which are relatively easy to comprehend, pantheism brings with it some difficult philosophical questions which have proved challenging even to some of the greatest human thinkers. Is a belief in a God that is the universe the same as no God at all? Does the conception of an entirely immanent God mitigate the powers of a God more transcendently conceived? How can evil be an illusion when it is necessitated in the pantheistic system? These are just a few of the challenging questions that pantheistic beliefs generate.

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 that these ideas can serve to create a potentially more insightful conception of both our own existence and that of God. Perhaps, pantheism is a pointer to the future eschatological state of unity between God and the created world where the values of creatures are realized and enjoyed, as a pantheist movement states as its first major aim: "To promote the values of environmental concern and human rights."[7]

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Pantheism - New World Encyclopedia

Pantheism | Encyclopedia.com

"Pantheism" is a doctrine that usually occurs in a religious and philosophical context in which there are already tolerably clear conceptions of God and of the universe and the question has arisen how these two conceptions are related. It is, of course, easy to read pantheistic doctrines back into unsophisticated texts in which the concept of the divine remains unclarified, but it is wise to be skeptical about the value of such a reading. Some commentators have confidently ascribed pantheistic views to the Eleatics simply because they assert that what is, is one. But even if one considers Xenophanes, the most plausible candidate for such an ascription, it is clear that considerable care must be exercised. Thales and Anaximenes had some idea of objects in the world being infused with a divine power or substance that conferred life and movement. Xenophanes took over this idea and added to it a critique of Homeric and Hesiodic polytheism, attacking both their anthropomorphism and the immorality in which they involved the gods; his own consequent view of deity remains mysterious, however. Aristotle said that Xenophanes "with his eye on the whole world said that the One was god," but he also complained that Xenophanes "made nothing clear." It seems likely that Xenophanes, like other early Greek thinkers, did not distinguish clearly between asserting that an object was divine and asserting that a divine power informed the object's movement.

A failure by commentators themselves to observe this distinction makes it misleadingly easy to present both earlier pre-Socratic and later Stoic philosophers as recruits to the ranks of pantheism. But even Marcus Aurelius, the only notable thinker among them who can plausibly be represented as a pantheist, when he addressed the Universe itself as a deity did not clearly address it in the sense of all that is rather than in the sense of some principle of order that informs all that is.

As in Greek thought, the approach to pantheism in Indian thought is a systematic critique of polytheism. Although there are also conceptions of a god who reigns as the highest deityIndra at one time held this positionwhat emerged with the growth of theological reflection was the notion of Brahman. Brahman is the single, infinite reality, indefinable and unchanging, behind the illusory changing world of perceived material objects. The equation of plurality and change with imperfection is an assumption of the Vedanta teachings. From it there is drawn a proof of the illusory character of the material world, as well as of its imperfection. Were the material world real, it must, being neither self-existent nor eternal, have originated from Brahman. But if Brahman were such that from within it what is multifarious, changing, and therefore imperfect could arise, then Brahman would be imperfect. And what is imperfect cannot be Brahman.

We take the illusory for the real because our knowledge is itself tainted with imperfections. Our ordinary knowledge is such that knower and known, subject and object, are distinct. But to know Brahman would be for subject and object to become identical; it would be to attain a knowledge in which all distinctions were abolished and in which what is known would therefore be inexpressible. Two features of the pantheism of the Vedanta scholars deserve comment. The first is the affinity between their logical doctrines and those of F. H. Bradley, whose treatment of the realm of appearance is precisely parallel to the Vedanta treatment of the realm of illusion (my ); Bradley's Absolute resembles Brahman chiefly in that both must be characterized negatively. As with Bradley's doctrine, the natural objection to Vedanta pantheism is to ask how, if Brahman is perfect and unchangeable, even the illusions of finitude, multiplicity, and change can have arisen. The Vedanta doctrine's answer is circular: Ignorance (lack of enlightenment) creates illusion. But it is, of course, illusion that fosters the many forms of ignorance.

Yet if the explanation of illusion is unsatisfactory, at least the cure for it is clear; the Vedanta doctrine is above all practical in its intentions. It will be noteworthy in the discussion of other and later pantheisms how often pantheism is linked to doctrines of mystical and contemplative practice. The separateness of the divine and the human, upon which monotheists insist, raises sharply the problem of how man can ever attain true unity with the divine. Those contemplative and mystical experiences, common to many religions, for whose description the language of a union between human and divine seems peculiarly appropriateat least to those who have enjoyed these experiencesfor that very reason create problems for a monotheistic theology, problems that have often been partly resolved by an approach to pantheistic formulations. It is at least plausible to argue that the essence of the Vedanta doctrine lies in its elucidation of mystical experience rather than in any use of metaphysical argument for purely intellectual ends.

The pantheism of the Vedanta argues that because God is All and One, what is many is therefore illusory and unreal. The characteristic pantheism and near pantheism of the European Middle Ages proceeded, by contrast, from the view that because God alone truly is, all that is must in some sense be God, or at least a manifestation of God. Insofar as this view implies a notion of true being at the top of a scale of degrees of being, its ancestry is Platonic or Neoplatonic. It would be difficult to call Neoplatonism itself pantheistic because although it views the material world as an emanation from the divine, the fallen and radically imperfect and undivine character of that world is always emphasized.

However, the translation of Neoplatonic themes of emanation into Christian terms by John Scotus Erigena (c. 810c. 877) resulted in De Divisione Naturae, which was condemned as heretical precisely because of its break with monotheism. It might be argued that Erigena does not seem to be wholly pantheistic in that he did not treat every aspect of nature as part of the divine in the same way and to the same degree. This would be misleading, however, for on this criterion no thinker could ever be judged a pantheist.

According to Erigena the whole, natura, is composed of four species of being: that which creates and is not created, that which is created and creates, that which is created and does not create, and that which is not created and does not create. The first is God as creator; the last, God as that into which all created beings have returned. The second and third are the created universe, which is in process of passing from God in his first form to God in his last form. Erigena wrote as if each class of beings belongs to a different period in a historical unfolding, but he also treated this as a misleading but necessary form of expression. Natura is eternal; the whole process is eternally present; and everything is a theophania, a manifestation of God.

Pope Honorius III condemned De Divisione Naturae in 1225 as "pullulating with worms of heretical perversity," and much earlier Erigena's other work had been described by the Council of Valence (855) as "Irish porridge" and "the devil's invention." Clearly, part of what perturbed them was Erigena's ability to interpret in a pantheistic sense both the biblical doctrine of creation and the biblical notion of a time when God shall be all in all.

A similar problem arose for the Islamic interpreter of Aristotle, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose discussions of the relation of human to divine intelligence aroused suspicion of pantheism and whose assertions of fidelity to the Quran did not save him from condemnation. A Christian Aristotelian such as Meister Eckhart, the Dominican mystic, was also condemned. Both Eckhart and Johannes Tauler spoke of God and man in terms of a mutual dependence that implies a fundamental unity including both. However, in every medieval case after Erigena the imputation of pantheism is at best inconclusive. Only since the sixteenth century has genuine pantheism become a recurrent European phenomena.

Giordano Bruno (15481600) was an explicitly anti-Christian pantheist. He conceived of God as the immanent cause or goal of nature, distinct from each finite particular only because he includes them all within his own being. The divine life that informs everything also informs the human mind and soul, and the soul is immortal because it is part of the divine. Since God is not distinct from the world, he can have no particular providential intentions. Since all events are equally ruled by divine law, miracles cannot occur. Whatever happens, happens in accordance with law, and our freedom consists in identifying ourselves with the course of things. The Bible, according to Bruno, insofar as it errs on these points, is simply false.

Jakob Boehme (15751624) was a shoemaker, a mystic, and a Lutheran whose wish to remain within the church was shown by the fact that to the end he received the sacraments. The pantheism of Erigena or Bruno was founded upon a view that the universe must necessarily be a single all-inclusive system if it is to be intelligible. Their pantheism derived from their ideal of explanation. Boehme, by contrast, claimed that he was merely recording what he has learned from an inward mystical illumination. He saw the foundation of all things in the divine Ungrund, in which the triad of Everything, Nothing, and the Divine Agony that results from their encounter produces out of itself a procession of less ultimate triads which constitute the natural and human world. Boehme made no distinction between nature and spirit, for he saw nature as entirely the manifestation of spirit. It is not at all clear in what sense the propositions that Boehme advanced can have been the record of vision; it is clear that both in claiming authority for his vision and in the content of his doctrine he was bound to encounter, as he did, the condemnation of the Lutheran clergy.

Benedict de Spinoza's pantheism had at least three sources: his ideal of human felicity, his concept of explanation, and his notion of the degrees of human knowledge. His explicit aim was to discover a good that would be independent of all the ordinary contingencies of chance and misfortune. Only that which is capable of completely filling and occupying the mind can be the supreme good in Spinoza's sense. The only knowledge that could satisfy these requirements would be the knowledge that the mind is part of the total system of nature and is at one with it when recognizing that everything is as it must be. Felicity is the knowledge of necessity, for if the mind can accept the necessity of its own place in the whole ordering of things, there will be room neither for rebellion nor for complaint. Thus, from the outset Spinoza's characterization of the supreme good required that his philosophy exhibit the whole universe as a single connected system.

So it is with his concept of explanation. To explain anything is to demonstrate that it cannot be other than it is. To demonstrate this entails laying bare the place of what is to be explained within a total system. Spinoza made no distinction between contingent causal connections and necessary logical connections. A deductive system in which every proposition follows from a set of initial axioms, postulates, and definitions mirrors the structure of the universe, in which every finite mode of existence exemplifies the pattern of order that derives from the single substance, Deus, sive natura (God, or nature). There can be only one substance, not a multiplicity of substances, for Spinoza so defined the notion of substance that the relation of a property to the substance of which it is a property is necessary, and therefore intelligible and explicable; however, the relation of one substance to another must be external and contingent, and therefore unintelligible and inexplicable. But for Spinoza it is unintelligible that what is unintelligible should be thought to exist. Hence, there can be only one substance; "God" and "Nature" could not be the names of two distinct and independent substances.

It follows that God cannot be said to be the creator of nature, except in a sense quite other than that of Christian or Jewish orthodoxy. Spinoza did distinguish between nature as active (natura naturans ) and nature as passive product (natura naturata ), and insofar as he identified God with nature as creative and self-sustaining rather than with nature as passive, he could speak of God as the immanent cause of the world. But this is quite different from the orthodox conception of divine efficient causality. Also, in Spinoza's view, there can be no divine providential intentions for particular agents and there can be no miracles. What, then, of the Bible?

Spinoza regarded the Bible as an expression of truth in the only mode in which the ordinary, unreflective, irrational man is able to believe it or be guided by it. Such men need images, for their knowledge is of the confused kind that does not rise to the rational and scientific explanation of phenomena, let alone to that scientia intuitiva (intuitive knowledge) by which the mind grasps the whole necessity of things and becomes identical with the infinita idea Dei (infinite idea of God). Freed from all those passions that dominated his actions so long as he did not grasp them intellectually, man is moved only by a fully conscious awareness of his place in the whole system. It is this awareness that Spinoza also identified as the intellectual love of God.

In using theological language to characterize both nature and the good of human life, Spinoza was not concealing an ultimately materialistic and atheistic standpoint. He believed that all the key predicates by which divinity is ascribed apply to the entire system of things, for it is infinite, at once the uncaused causa sui and causa omnium (cause of itself and cause of everything) and eternal. Even if Spinoza's attitude to the Bible was that it veils the truth, he believed that it is the truth that it veils. He considered his doctrine basically identical with both that of the ancient Hebrew writers and that of St. Paul. This did not save him from condemnation by the synagogue in his lifetime, let alone from condemnation by the church afterward.

Erigena, Bruno, Boehme, Spinozaeach of these, no matter how much he may have made use of material drawn from earlier philosophical or religious writing, was a thinker who was independent of his specifically pantheist predecessors and who revived pantheism by his own critical reflections upon monotheism. It was only in the eighteenth century that something like a specifically pantheist tradition emerged. The word pantheist was first used in 1705 by John Toland in his Socinianism truly stated. Toland's hostile critic, J. Fay, used the word pantheism in 1709 and it speedily became common. With the increased questioning of Christianity, accompanied by an unwillingness to adopt atheistic positions, pantheism became an important doctrine, first for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, both of whom were influenced by Spinoza, then for Friedrich Schleiermacher, and finally for Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Goethe's aim was to discover a mode of theological thinking, rather than a theology, with which he could embrace both what he took to be the pagan attitude to nature and the redemptive values of Christianity. Suspicious as he was of Christian asceticism, he also recognized a distinctive Christian understanding of human possibility, and his various utterances about Christianity cannot be rendered consistent even by the greatest scholarly ingenuity. In the formulas of pantheism, which he was able to interpret in the sense that he wished precisely because he failed to understand Spinoza correctly, Goethe found a theology that enabled him both to identify the divine with the natural and to separate them. The infinite creativity Goethe ascribed to nature is what he took to be divine; but while the seeds of a consistent doctrine can be discerned in this aspect of Goethe's writings, it would be wrong to deny that part of pantheism's attraction for him was that it seemed to license his will to be inconsistent.

Lessing, by contrast, was consistent. He found the kernel of truth in all religions in a neutral version of Spinozism, which allowed him to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as distorted versions of the same truth, distorted because they confuse the historical trappings with the metaphysical essence.

Schleiermacher's quite different preoccupation was to make religion acceptable to the cultured unbelievers of his own time. The core of religion, on his view, is the sense of absolute dependence; to that on which we are absolutely dependent he gave a variety of names and titles, speaking of God in both monotheistic and pantheistic terms. However, he committed himself to pantheism by asserting that it is the Totality that is divine.

It is clear from Goethe, Lessing, and Schleiermacher that Spinoza's writing had become a major text for philosophical theology, but for these writers he was an inspiration rather than a precise source. With the advent of German idealism, the attempt to criticize the deductive form of Spinoza's reasoning while preserving the pantheistic content became a major theme of German philosophy. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fichte's writing, in which God and the universe are identified because the world is nothing but the material through which the Ego realizes its infinite moral vocation, and the divine is nothing but the moral order that includes both world and Ego. The divine cannot be personal and cannot have been the external creator of the world. Fichte poured scorn on the unintelligibility of the orthodox doctrine of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing). He distinguished sharply between the genuinely metaphysical and the merely historical elements in Christianity. It is the theology of the Johannine Gospel that he treated as the expression of the metaphysical, and to this he gave a pantheistic sense.

Schelling's pantheism was cruder than Fichte'saccording to him, all distinctions disappear in the ultimate nature of things. The divine is identified with this ultimate distinctionless merging of nature and spirit, a unity more fundamental than any of the differences of the merely empirical world.

Hegel was subtler and more philosophically interesting than either Fichte or Schelling. Like Boehme and Schleiermacher, he remained within orthodox Protestant Christianity, claiming to be engaged in the interpretation rather than the revision of its dogmatic formulas. The Hegelian Absolute Idea preexists its finite manifestations logically but not temporally, and it receives its full embodiment only at the end of history, when it is incorporated in a social and moral order fully conscious of its own nature and of its place in history. This phase of self-consciousness is already reached at the level of thought in Hegel's Logic. But the Absolute Idea has no existence apart from or over and above its actual and possible manifestations in nature and history. Hence, the divine is the Totality.

After Hegel pantheism was less in vogue. The critique of Christianity became more radical, atheism became a more acceptable alternative, and Spinoza dominated the intellectual scene far less. In England a poetic pantheism appeared in Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth, but in Shelley it coexisted with something much closer to atheism and in Wordsworth with a Christianity that displaced it. In any case, the intellectual resources of such a pantheism were so meager that it is not surprising that it did not survive in the nineteenth century.

Pantheism essentially involves two assertions: that everything that exists constitutes a unity and that this all-inclusive unity is divine. What could be meant by the assertion that everything that exists constitutes a unity? It is first and most clearly not a unity derived from membership of the same class, the view that seems to have been taken by Boehme. "There is no class of all that is," wrote Aristotle. Why not? Because existence is not a genus. To say that something exists is not to classify it at all. When Boehme asserted that the universe includes both existence and nonexistence, he both anticipated a long tradition that culminated in Martin Heidegger and remained unintelligible. The notion of a unity that includes all that existsor even all that exists and all that does not existis a notion devoid of content. What could be unitary in such an ostensible collection?

The unity might be of another kind, however. In Spinoza the unity of the universe is a logical unity, with every particular item deducible from the general nature of things. There is a single deductive web of explanationthere are not sciences; there is science. About such an alleged unity two points must be made. First, the contingent aspect of nature is entirely omitted. Even a total description of the universe in which every part of the description was logically related to some other part or parts (assuming for the moment such a description to be conceivable) would still leave us with the question whether the universe was as it was described; and if it was as it was described, this truth would be a contingent truth that could not be included in the description itself and that could stand in no internal conceptual relationship to the description. The fact of existence would remain irreducibly contingent. Second, the actual development of the sciences does not accord with Spinoza's ideal. The forms of explanation are not all the same; the logical structure of Darwinian evolutionary theory must be distinguished from the logical structure of quantum mechanics. Thus, the kind of unity ascribed by Spinoza to the universe seems to be lacking.

In Fichte and Hegel the unity ascribed to the universe is one of an overall purpose manifest in the pattern of events, as that pattern is discovered by the agent in his social and moral life. In order for this assertion to be meaningful it must be construed, at least in part, in empirical terms; in Fichte's case as a hypothesis about moral development, in Hegel's case as a hypothesis about historical development. Neither hypothesis appears to be vindicated by the facts.

Suppose, however, that a unity of some kind, inclusive of all that is, could be discovered. In virtue of what might the pantheist claim that it was divine? The infinity and the eternity of the universe have often been the predicates that seemed to entail its divinity, but the sense in which the universe is infinite and eternal is surely not that in which the traditional religions have ascribed these predicates to a god. What is clear is that pantheism as a theology has a source, independent of its metaphysics, in a widespread capacity for awe and wonder in the face both of natural phenomena and of the apparent totality of things. It is at least in part because pantheist metaphysics provides a vocabulary that appears more adequate than any other for the expression of these emotions that pantheism has shown such historical capacity for survival. But this does not, of course, give any warrant for believing pantheism to be true.

See also Aristotle; Averroes; Boehme, Jakob; Bradley, Francis Herbert; Brahman; Bruno, Giordano; Darwinism; Eckhart, Meister; Erigena, John Scotus; Eternity; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; God, Concepts of; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Heidegger, Martin; Indian Philosophy; Infinity in Theology and Metaphysics; Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; Neoplatonism; Pantheismusstreit; Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von; Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) de; Tauler, Johannes; Toland, John; Xenophanes of Colophon.

Boehme, Jakob. Works. Edited by C. J. Barber. London, 1909.

Bruno, Giordano. "Concerning the Cause, Principle, and One." Translated by Sidney Greenberg in The Infinite in Giordano Bruno. New York: King's Crown Press, 1950.

Bruno, Giordano. "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds." Translated by Dorothea W. Singer in Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought. New York: Schuman, 1950.

Eckhart. Meister Eckhart. Edited, with introduction, by O. Karrer. Munich, 1926.

Erigena, John Scotus. Opera. In Patrologia Latina, edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 18441864. Vol. 122.

Fichte, J. G. Die Schrifte zu J. G. Fichte's Atheismusstreit. Edited by H. Lindau. Munich, 1912.

Fichte, J. G. The Science of Knowledge. Translated by A. E. Kroeger. Philadelphia, 1868.

Flint, Robert. Antitheistic Theories. London, 1878. Baird lectures.

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Translated by E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson, 3 vols. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1895.

Schelling, Friedrich. Werke. Edited by M. Schrter. 8 vols. Munich: Beck, 19271956.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Translated by J. W. Oman. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893.

Spinoza, Benedict de. The Chief Works. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1951.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1967)

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Pantheism | Encyclopedia.com

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The word pantheism comes from two Greek words: pn, which means all and thos, which means god. Hence it is used to classify doctrines according to which all that is, is God, or which identify God and the world in various ways. J. Fay was the first to use the term pantheism, in his work entitled Defensio religionis (1709). In an effort to defend theism, he criticized the theoretical positions of J. Toland, who in the work, Socinianism Truly Stated (1705), defined himself as a pantheist, and who also later entitled his last work, Pantheisticon (1720).

The doctrine of pantheism, however, is much older than its name. Due to this long history, one must distinguish its various expressions throughout the ages. The first meaning of pantheism refers to transcendental pantheism, i.e., the very general idea that the world is a mere manifestation of God. This form of pantheism sees the divine only deep within things, and in particular in the soul. As a result, the creature becomes God only insofar as it liberates itself from the material shell of sensibility. This view dates all the way back to the Vedanta doctrines of India and found its highest expression in western Neo-platonism. The second meaning of pantheism is atheistic or immanent pantheism, or monism (see the article Atheism). It considers the divine as a vital energy animating the world from within, and thus has naturalistic and materialistic consequences. Finally, pantheism also assumes the meaning of a transcendental-immanent pantheism, according to which God not only reveals himself, but also realizes himself in all things. Such is the pantheism of Spinoza, for example, and that which, in diverse forms, is of interest to various idealistic currents of the modern age.

Here, the classical roots of pantheism will be introduced first, followed by a number of illustrative examples from the Renaissance and Modern Age. Next, I will indicate those conceptions of nature, implicitly favored by contemporary scientific thought or at times explicitly conveyed by it, that seem to maintain a certain relation with the pantheistic vision. Finally, the perspectives of Christian Revelation and of the Magisterium of the Church will be briefly outlined.

1. Archaic Eastern Conceptions and the Buddhist Perspective. It is possible to see in many Eastern religions and philosophies the original seed that gave rise to the pantheistic vision of the universe. Indeed, in many of these systems of thought, the idea of a personal God does not exist: God is understood as the sole existing reality and the world as nothing other than an appearance, an image, that in the end must be reabsorbed in some way. This idea is clear in the ancient religion of the Veda, which developed in India between the 15th and 9th centuries B.C., though the entire Vedic period was much more extended. Our knowledge of this religion comes to us from the Rig-Veda (Veda in Sanskrit means knowledge), a collection of ten poetic books. The Hindu religion, which derives from the Rig-Veda, cannot exactly be defined as a polytheistic religion, even less as a religion in the more literal sense of the word. In the Hindu or Vedic form of religiosity, the believer, although fully accepting and firmly believing in the existence of a supreme and unique Deity, chooses to venerate one of the Deitys particular aspects or his energy or perhaps one of his beneficial manifestations (cf. Poli and Rizzi, 1997, p. 85). In fact, in the Vedic religion, God comes to be identified with a natural object such as the sun, the luminous sky, or the rain. These divine beings have the function of protecting their devotees, but never assume anthropomorphic features. As a result of this, the Vedic-Hindu divinities never arrive at the mythical form, plastic and concrete, of the gods of ancient Greece.

From the Hinduism of the Veda, two diverse currents broke away, which could be considered its heresies: Jainism and Buddhism. Buddhism arose in India in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., and then, thanks to its missionaries, was diffused throughout the entire Orient. For Buddha, observation of the world reveals that everything is a perpetual flowing: our consciousness only bears witness to us of the flowing of rapidly changing sensations, emotions, and concepts. Having thus denied the existence of the individual soul, the Buddha (whose name means illuminated) holds that it is not possible to know anything other than this perpetual becoming, beyond which it is impossible to find an immutable deity. For Buddhism, reality is reduced to a harmonic correspondence of objective and subjective elements, thus laying the foundations of an a-cosmic pantheism, which will be developed by some of its specific schools. This type of pantheism affirms that nothing exists in itself, but only inasmuch as it is correlated to others. Being alone is conceptual only: every being exists in relation to another. Individuality and singularity are erroneous assumptions. All things are nothing outside the absolute identity, which is void, the inexpressible, the non-conceptual (cf. Puech, 1970-1972). Does such a concept of Buddhism necessarily lead to a negation of the world? It is difficult to respond to this question. However, from an empirical point of view, the world is just as it appears, and beyond this veil of appearances there is the unknown and the unknowable, the void.

Buddhism, on account of its specific structure, is not a religion that may be codified in precise rules. Consequently, a considerable number of Buddhistic schools have formed, practically one for each country where it implanted itself. Interesting for our purposes here is Zen Buddhism, which originated in China and developed in Japan after the 12th century. In fact, not a small number of contemporary scientists seem to intend to refer to it in the construction of their systems and for some of their ideas about natural phenomena (emblematic is the work of F. Capra, The Tao of Physics. An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, 1975). Zen means meditation and its practice is an exercise that attempts to liberate the fundamental principle present in each of us from the impure ballast of the passions. The liberation of this principle can come about either through a more profound study of the sacred writings of Buddhism or by means of ascetic or esoteric practices. According to Watts (1959), Zen Buddhism became quite popular in American culture in the 1950s thanks to its philosophical ideas, which inserted themselves perfectly into the climate of philosophical relativism and utilitarian pragmatism.

2. Greek Thought and the Distinction of Beings in Being. The context that gave rise to certain forms of pantheism in ancient Greece was quite different. The Greek epic, which experienced its golden age during the early centuries of the first millennium before Christ and which found in Homer its greatest poet, gave the gods a personal character, unlike the primitive mythologies in which the divinity was essentially tied to natural phenomena. Anthropomorphized by the Greek epic, the gods were more accessible to the existential necessities of human beings, thus favoring the development of a cult civico-religious in character. Beside the Homeric epic, Hesiods Theogonies reconstruct the history of the gods before Zeus, going back even to the very origin of the various divine figures. For Hesiod, all the gods take their form, after various separations and successive generations, from an original Chos, a word meaning above all the immensity of space, the immeasurable, the unlimited. In Greek thought, chos acquired such a broad meaning as to be able easily to approach the philosophical meaning of the All, therefore also bringing to mind a certain idea of pantheism. Theogony slowly lays the foundation for a successive cosmogony, furnishing a series of archaic elements for the speculation about the origin of all things, some of which remain found in the natural philosophy of the Ionian thinkers, for example, Empedocles, who will ultimately hold the interaction of two cosmic forces, love and hate, responsible for the formation of all things.

Greek philosophical thought arose in response to a question that is simultaneously physical and religious and that inquires into totality and multiplicity: what is the origin of all things (Gr. pnta)? And, immediately thereafter: from what are all things made? The solution given by the pre-Socratic thinkers in their search for a unifying principle (arch) will not be exempt from pantheistic currents. These thinkers tended to state that there is one sole substance at the origin of everything, whether it was the water of Thales, the unlimited (peiron) of Anaximander, or the fire of Heraclitus. Certainly, a distinction between the particular beings and Being as such is not missing, as in Parmenides and in Heraclitus, but Being is never taken as something different than individual entities, but is rather their very substance. For example, already for Thales, the observation that all bodies were substantially of water ended in the assertion that all things were actually full of gods. For Parmenides, nature (physis) is Being itself, the All: beyond the All not a thing exists, because the All is being, and beyond being there is nothing. Although the possibility of thinking of something else is not excluded by the thinkers prior to Parmenides nor by the great texts of Eastern wisdom even as they speak of the All and the Totality of things, this was no longer possible after Parmenides. In Parmenidean philosophy, through the use of logic one arrives at the being of All by shaking off all particular beings, which become only appearances. Not knowing how to explain their relation to reality as Being, particular beings end up losing their individuality and autonomy.

Plato and Aristotle will pave the way to secure the separation and consistency of particular beings. Affirming the transcendence of the Forms or Ideas with respect to the material world, and the transcendence of the Good with respect to the Ideas themselves, Plato emphasizes that particular beings are becoming and changeable, whereas the Forms are immutable and eternal. At the summit of all the Ideas, the Idea of the Good significantly also called the One acts upon the unlimited and chaotic multiplicity as a limiting and determining principle. While Parmenides and his followers claim that Being is simultaneously both the Divine that dominates the things and the totality of the things governed, Plato holds instead that there exists a certain separation between the Divine and the things. Thanks to the work of the Demiurge, the primal matter is reduced to order (gr. ksmos) and organized in a space (gr. chra) that becomes a kind of depository, notwithstanding the fact that matter was pre-existent to such an ordering action. But even in Plato, the world forged and diversified by the Demiurge does not cease to be a great living organism endowed with its soul (cf. Timeaus, 30b; also cf. Philebus, 30a-c).

A second way to attribute individual consistency and cohesion to things comes from Aristotle. He derived his result, thanks above all to the principle of the analogy of being and to the distinction between the divine way of being (which is a pure act without any trace of potentiality) and the way of being of particular realities (which instead are a composition of act and potency). Each being possesses a proper essence and a proper metaphysical nature, which guarantee its autonomy and independence and are intrinsic principles of the specificity of its being and operation. Since the beings that manifest themselves to our experience are generally beings subject to becoming, Aristotle asks himself the metaphysical question par excellence: whether beyond them there exist immutable and eternal beings. To this question, both the books of the Physics and of the Metaphysics will give a positive response, to the point of concluding that an Immutable Being must exist, whose supreme life is the knowledge of himself. In other words, God and the world are not the same thing, but from the world one can arrive at knowledge of God.

Thus, a dualistic gnoseological vision of reality is sketched out, in which one recognizes a sensible part and an intelligible one. The distinction, emblematically laid out in the second sailing undertaken by Plato when he broke with the preceding philosophical tradition (cf. Phaedo, 99d-101d), is of interest to Aristotle as well. For Aristotle, the intelligibility of reality is reached by lifting oneself above sensible nature, although this intelligibility does not belong, as Plato proposed, to the world of ideas, but is inherent to the essence of things. Despite this differentiation, pantheistic tendencies will persist in Greek thought, either through the reduction of the immateriality of the intellect or the divine life to the nature of matter itself (materialistic pantheism), or through the spiritualization of the world and its re-absorption in the sphere of the divine (panpsychist pantheism).

3. Plotinian Pantheism. Beyond the pantheism of a materialistic bent professed by the stoic philosophers (see the article Materialism), who held that the divinity consisted of very fine matter animating the great organism of the cosmos (considered to be the body of God), it was the emanatistic pantheism of Plotinus (205-270), the greatest proponent of the so-called Neo-platonism, that in an age already Christian would exercise the greatest influence on later thought. The main elements of Plotinian pantheism are the derivation of the world from the One as a necessary emanation and expansion of the substance of the Ones own being, and the role of the Soul, the third hypostasis of the Plotinian Divinity. This cosmic soul of the world vivifies and binds in harmonic sympathy all the things of the universe, preserving them from matters tendency to disperse and dissolve. The tight correspondence between the cosmic soul and the human soul, and the proportional relations between macrocosm and microcosm deriving therefrom, will furnish the elements for many animistic and vitalistic ideas that, passing through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, will reach all the way to the Age of Romanticism.

Plotinus held that, if matter were totally independent from God, and thus coeternal and co-existent with Him, then something would be lacking to God and one would fall into a clear contradiction. God would no longer be pure act as Aristotle understood him to be, but only being in potential and therefore not immutable, but becoming (cf. Enneads, III, 7,5). Since, for motives stemming from an ontological foundation, one cannot deny the existence of an immutable being, it is then necessary that God be the producer of matter in some way. If then the substance of the world was not co-eternal and co-original with the Divine as Plato and Aristotle held, for whom the one could not exist without the other, it was necessary that matter was produced by God, which according to Plotinus would happen by emanation.

At the summit of the Plotinian system, there is the One that wishes and determines itself to be exactly as it is. Perfectly simple and infinite, the One transcends every separation, containing in itself all things and therefore able to bring them into existence. Hence in the Plotinian One, there exist two activities: one that consists in positing its own essence, and one that brings about the emanation of all things from the One. The processes of this emanation lead in the first place to the formation of the Nos or the Intellect, from which, also by emanation, comes the Soul. This third hypostasis after the One and the Intellect is the last reality of the incorporeal world proceeding from the One, and in its turn is the generator of matter, or rather of the first reality of the corporeal world. Matter is a simple receptacle in which the forms and beings of the world transform themselves and deteriorate. In the Plotinian idea, matter is the last stage of the emanative process from the One, the product of the Ones total emptying out and therefore of its maximum privation. But by identifying the One with the Good, matter is seen as privation, as something negative, although without going so far as to identify it with evil, as happens in the radical dualism of the gnostics. In giving origin to the world, however, the One of Plotinus doesnt turn towards what it produces: the world does not arise from a free act (and therefore neither is it loved as such); rather it is produced out of necessity of the superabundance of the same One, just as it belongs to the nature of light to diffuse itself and illuminate all things. Although the world comes about after the generation of Intellect and the Soul, it is in continuity with the sphere of the Divine and it is part of its substance.

4. Creation Out of Nothing: God Participates Being to Creatures. Although the pantheism of the ancient world is also representative of a philosophical journey, in the first place it expresses a religious idea, the core of which, especially in the Eastern matrix, is that the sacredness of nature is seen as divinity. Opposed to such a perspective is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo by the One God, present in the sacred texts of the Hebrew tradition and which the Christian religion enriched in the following centuries with a specific philosophical-theological depth. One of the first systematic approaches appeared in the first centuries of the Christian era due to the critique of gnosticism. In a dialogue with Platonic philosophy, Theophilus of Antioch (ca. 120-185) traces out a quick sketch: All things God has made out of things that were not [...]. But Plato and those of his school acknowledge indeed that God is uncreated, and the Father and Maker of all things; but then they maintain that matter as well as God is uncreated, and aver that it is coeval with God. But if God is uncreated and matter is uncreated, God is no longer, according to the Platonists, the Creator of all things, nor, so far as their opinions hold, is the monarchy of God established. And further, as God, because He is uncreated, is also unalterable; so if matter, too, were uncreated, it also would be unalterable, and equal to God; for that which is created is mutable and alterable, but that which is uncreated is immutable and unalterable. And what great thing is it if God made the world out of existent materials? For even a human artist, when he gets material from some one, makes of it what he pleases. But the power of God is manifested in this, that out of things that are not He makes whatever He pleases. (Ad Autolicum, I, 4, and II, 4). The doctrine of creation out of nothing and therefore of the clear separation between God and the world also appears in other Christian authors: Origen, Athanasius, Hippolytus of Rome, and, in explicit tracts, in the Shepherd of Hermas, a work of the 2nd century: You must believe that there is one sole God that created and brought to completion everything and who made from nothing that which exists. (Mandata, I,1).

Thanks above all to Augustine of Hippo (354-430), creation out of nothing and the metaphysical irreducibility between God and the world are formulated upon rigorous philosophical foundations, especially in the context of the problem of the nature of time. Our rational soul bears witness to the perception we have of passing and of remaining (cf. Confessiones, XI, 20). But what holds for our soul must hold also for the whole cosmos, which must therefore be understood in temporal terms. Creation can only be conceived by us a succession of temporal events. The world, affirms St. Augustine, was created with time and not in time (cf. Confessiones, XII, 29,40; De civitate Dei, XI, 6), proof of an ontological separation between God and creation. The Eternal God, Being and the Supreme Good (cf. De natura boni, 19; De Trinitate, VIII, 3,4) is contrasted to the temporal things created by Him, and therefore fully distinct from them. Given his Neo-platonic formation, Augustine presupposes that creatures participate in Being and the Good by means of creation. He keeps a necessary distance from the Neo-platonic doctrine of emanation, however, and does not hold that such participation takes place as a necessary flowing out, as if God could not exist without a created world. His criticism of the pantheistic vision of those who worship nature, holding her to be the soul or the body of God, is explicit; after having upbraided those who worship the Soul or the Intellect, considered by the Neo-platonists to be the first creatures of God or the various elements of creation, above all the celestial bodies, Augustine adds: But those think themselves most religious who worship the whole created universe, that is, the world with all that is in it, and the life which inspires and animates it, which some believe to be corporal, other incorporeal. The whole of this together they think to be one great God, of whom all things are parts. They have not known the author and maker of the universe. So they abandon themselves to idols, and, forsaking the works of God, they are immersed in the works of their own hands, all of them visible things. (St. Augustine, De vera religione, 37, 68).

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) sustained the same anti-dualistic and anti-pantheistic line. In his thought, the Augustinian doctrine and the Aristotelian reflection flow together. For Aquinas, God is the Being simply-speaking, i.e., Being simpliciter, He who exists for Himself, but is also one who communicates and gives himself to the world. Creating everything, God communicates himself and his own Being with sovereign liberty. Created beings are essentially different from their Creator, but they are similar to him in a certain sense, given that they participate each according to its own level of existence in the being they receive by God. Aquinas will explain this thought many times in light of the doctrine of participation of being (cf. Summa theologiae, I, qq. 44-45). The creature participates in the being that God possesses in fullness, taking part in it without being a part of it. If one predicates of God the being of everything, it is not because he is the essential constituent of everything but because he is the root cause of whatever exists. Concerning the well-known idea that God is present in all things by power, presence, and essence, Thomas will specify that God is in all things by His essence, in as much He is present to all as the cause of their being, adding that God is said to be in all things by essence, not indeed by the essence of the things themselves, as if He were of their essence; but by His own essence, because His substance is present to all things as the cause of their being. (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 8, a. 3; cf. In I Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a.2). Thanks to his doctrine of the absolute simplicity of God, Thomas cuts every form of pantheism off at the roots, refuting in particular those forms present in the teachings of other philosophers of the same epoch, as, for example, in the materialism of David of Dinant (cf. Summa theologiae, I, q. 3, aa. 6-7 and a. 8, ad 3um), which will later inspire in part the pantheism of Giordano Bruno.

As a theory about nature, pantheism is principally tied to Neo-platonic thought. In an historic era, such as the Renaissance, that saw the rediscovery of this philosophical current, there was in fact also a rebirth of pantheism. In the naturalistic-scientific context of the Renaissance, the study of natural phenomena did not yet enjoy an autonomous and rigorous method, and pantheistic thought manifested itself in the tendency to conceive God as the universal animation of nature. Two authors stand out from the others in this new current: Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella. The thinkers of the Renaissance saw nature as a living organism, whose parts are reciprocally dependent upon one another, as a succession of phenomena that move toward their proper end, impelled by some interior principle. This idea shapes all the philosophy of nature of the 16th century after Agrippa of Nettesheim (cf. De occulta philosophia, 1510), who held that one can think of the universe only if it is endowed with an independent soul. The revival of this idea of anima mundi, which will prepare the way for the establishment of a new concept of nature, will also be the gateway for new forms of pantheism.

1. Tommaso Campanella and Giordano Bruno. In the line of this progression stands the thought of Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), whose philosophy was inspired by the physics of Bernard Telesio (1509-1588) even if he ultimately distanced himself from it. The suggestion of a singular empathetic relation between human beings and the world emerges already in Campanellas philosophy of knowledge. He holds that the sole way of knowing is a kind direct contact with all things. Our ability to comprehend and understand reality is realized in a sensible way, through sapere (to know, to taste): the subject of this act makes his own the flavor of things, tasting or savoring them. The idea of sensible knowledge here is not that of empiricism, which remains extrinsic in character; it is, rather, a kind of intrinsic operation, a participation in the thing and in that innermost part of the thing, which is the same expressive process of God, the acting of the divine, the Being which conforms with Power and Love. It is not a seeing or a glancing, reproducing images, but a penetrating of the vital process of all, in short, a tasting of the sweetness of universal life. (E. Garin, LUmanesimo italiano, Bari 1965, p. 249). Consistently, Campanella affirms that everything possesses a sensibility and is subject of a certain knowledge, even if confused, of itself and of the external world, which permits it to love other beings and to remain in harmony with them through a universal empathy. Advocate of a characteristic magical animism, Campanella holds that the world is sustained above and beyond this sensibility of individual things by its own proper Soul, an instrument by which God directs all operations (cf. De sensu rerum et magia, II, 32). The task of this Soul of the world is precisely to determine the agreement, the concord, among all things and to dispose them towards a single end. Even if he views the world in a pantheistic perspective, Campanella doesnt wish thus to deny a final cause: he actually assigns it primacy over all others. As paradoxical as it might seem, the system of Campanella was intended to remain theological and to seek in nature a demonstration of the presence and action of God.

The pantheistic position of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is quite complex. His scheme is similar to that of Plotinus, acknowledging a universal Intellect, but understood from a totally immanent standpoint; a Soul of the world, which gives form to everything; and Matter, which acts as a receptacle for these forms. The Aristotelian philosophy of composition from matter and form, and of potency and act having been supplanted according to the sensibility of the late 1500s and the harbingers of what will slowly become the new physics, it is precisely the notion of form that Bruno tries to re-read in a new light. In Brunos thought, the forms more and more resemble vital principles, changeable and changing, while matter is no longer seen as the element that is indeterminate and that limits, but rather as a living potentiality. According to Bruno, the finite being cannot simultaneously be all that it is in its nature and its essence, but since it has within itself the force and the seed of all its future forms, it is in this respect infinite. Ascribing the capacity of infinity to every finite being, Bruno intends to propose a new philosophical conception of matter, which would no longer receive its form from without, but rather from an innate and interior force. It is not the form that embraces and constrains matter, rather it is matter itself that expands and develops itself in ever new forms. Matter therefore is not solely a relation between potency and act, but a living seed that develops itself in all things. The true reality owes nothing, says Bruno, to any of the forms in particular; it owes nothing to anything. It simply is of an essence to unify in itself the unlimited multiplicity of all measures, all figures, and all dimensions. This concept of reality is the overthrowing of the Aristotelian concept of individual substance, bond by limitations of space and time, a substance that cannot encompass within itself the totality of the possible manifestations of being (cf. De immenso et innumerabilibus, Book VIII).

Indeed, the pantheistic vision of Bruno is most evident in his theory regarding the relationship between infinity and finitude. For Bruno, the infinity of the effect, i.e., of the universe, derives from the infinity of the First Cause. The world, indeed an infinity of worlds, all proceed ab aeterno from God. The universe is one, infinite, and immobile; its life is the divine life, because in all its parts, it is an effusion of Gods life. God and the universe are not infinite in the same way, inasmuch as God is all-infinite and totally infinite (i.e., He is totally present in every part of the infinite whole as its cause), while the universe is all-infinite but not totally infinite (because it is not wholly present in each of its infinite parts). However, nothing impedes the finite from being able to incorporate into itself what is proper to the infinite: the attributes of Brunos universe end up coinciding with those of Parmenidean Being to the point that they are confounded with the attributes of God.

In addition, the pantheism of Bruno manifests a gnoseological motivation. While in Galileo, it is the universality of the language of mathematics to which the whole universe is subject without any limitation, in Bruno it is the universality of substance, whose unity and eternity are not apprehended by the senses, but by the Intellect. This process is not synonymous with abstraction or immateriality, however, because intelligibility no longer belongs principally to act or form, since form and matter are simply two aspects of the same substance, nature.

2. The Pantheism of Spinoza. Baruc Spinoza (1632-1677) sought to restore the unity of being that had been shattered by Ren Descartes. By pursuing an extreme synthesis between metaphysical-theological thought and geometric-scientific thought, Spinoza set up a single substance in opposition to the three substances of the French philosopher, the res cogitans, the res extensa, and the res divina (the last being God as the foundation of knowledge). The res cogitans and the res extensa are two of the infinite attributes of the unique substance that, in Spinoza, indicates no other reality than God himself. Although ideas and things present themselves as singular concrete realities, they are instead modes of this substance, such that its universal character grounds their intelligibility. Nothing can exist outside of God except as a mode or attribute of God. God becomes the source and the reality of all reality; He alone is that unity (in the Neo-platonic sense) capable of guaranteeing all multiplicity (cf. Ethica, Book I).

The desire to allow any other form of becoming is the desire to imagine another God (cf. Ethica, I, 33). From this perspective, the philosophy of nature becomes identical to metaphysics. The famous equation of Spinoza of Deus sive natura (God, or nature) finds here its perfect setting. Contingency having been denied, nature assumes the character of divine necessity, a key element to Spinozas entire system. Such necessity in nature does not regard the infinite sum of all singular things, but rather the necessity binding one to another. God is the substance with all its infinite attributes; the world is the sum total of all the modes, finite and infinite, of the being of the substance (that is, ultimately, of God). Thus, in this universe there is no room for contingency: all becomes a necessary consequence of the necessity of God. However, the pantheism of Spinoza will acknowledge a distinction, at least a weak one, between God and the world: if the first has free necessity, the second possesses a determined necessity; if the first is the subject of infinite attributes, the second is the expression of these within the infinite modes of being of the substance; if the first is natura naturans, the second is natura naturata. However, this distinction is not a metaphysical detachment: nature is an effect present in the cause and contained within it, according to the principle that all is in God.

If Spinozas thought is more inclined to divinize matter due to its Cartesian point of reference and a certain dialogue with scientific thought, the pantheism deriving from the German idealism of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling finds itself in a historic and romantic ambience and proceeds instead to divinize form as the mode of being par excellence. Spinoza remains one of the philosophers most often cited by scientists, although he is often known only shallowly by them. Among others, Albert Einstein has left us explicit references to the God of Spinoza (cf. The World as I see it, 1935).

3. The absolute space of Isaac Newton. The concept of the relation between God and nature proposed by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) has been interpreted in various ways, oscillating between a judgment of deism and one of pantheism. When he explicitly deals with the problem of God, especially in his works, Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis and Opticks, the English scientist speaks more often of a God who orders and organizes than of a God who creates. Often calling Him the Lord of all (Gr.Pantocrator), Newton, in an effort to explain the meaning of this attribute, affirms that God-Lord is a relative term that makes reference to a servile subjection. Deity is the dominion of God, not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. Newton continues, The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God []. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity; he governs all things, and knows all thing that are or can be done. He is not Eternity or Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration or Space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes Duration and Space. (I. Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. by A. Motte [London: Dawsons, 1968], pp. 389-390). The God of Newton appears distinct from His creation, which He sustains and justifies without being identified with it.

Setting aside the problem of what type of theism is represented in Newtons thought and what conformity there is between his notion of God and the biblical image of God presented by Revelation, one needs to keep in mind that several authors have sensed a certain kind of pantheism in Newtons idea of absolute space: the space of Newtonian physics is then understood as an attribute or an extension of God (cf. Jammer, 1969). In this interpretation, absolute space and time would ultimately be the sensorium of God (God's omnipresence in space through his Spirit) thus establishing an equivalence between what is absolute and the divine. Nevertheless, as Max Jammer specifies, it seems that Newton was aware how he could easily be misunderstood and placed among the pantheists of his times, who were identified with the atheists by orthodox circles. Besides, Newton used the word sensorium merely to make a comparison, and he did not identify space as an organ of God.

Moreover and to be precise, the absolute space of Newton is not the mere extension proposed by Descartes, who identified it with bodies. Newtons space is something distinct from matter, and its principal function is to explain the attraction of bodies at a distance. In a letter to Richard Bentley (1692), Newton recognizes that gravity must be caused by an agent which acts constantly in accord with determined laws, but at the same time he does not know exactly what it is, preferring to leave to the judgment of my readers to establish if this agent is either material or immaterial. One can also hold that the God of Newton occupies the space of the world to ensure that in it the laws of physics are accomplished in an absolute way; but Gods presence in space the notion of field being yet unknown seems mainly to serve the function of justifying the transmission of an action at a distance, as was the case with gravitation.

In regard to various concepts of nature, philosophy and the sciences have exerted reciprocal influences on each other. Scientific discoveries have many times been stimulated philosophical thought, as in the cases of heliocentrism, the discovery of the quantum nature of radiation, the theories of special and general relativity, and the uncertainty principle. But in its turn, philosophy has furnished scientific discourse with conceptual categories and systematic outlines. In general, this second implication is verified more easily in those fields of science where rapid theoretical developments and less dependence upon observations leave greater space for speculation. Hence, rather than search for the direct influences of philosophical pantheism upon scientific formulations, it appears more appropriate to consider those visions of nature expressed in some scientific speculations that seem to be debtors, in an implicit and indirect way, to certain philosophical ideas about the Absolute and its relation to the world.

The two classical directions taken by philosophical pantheism throughout history the spiritualistic or panpsychist one, in which nature is seen as a great spirit that animates reality (anima mundi), and the materialistic one, in which nature is identified with matter and ends up manifesting the same attributes of the Absolute or divine are also present in certain concepts of nature diffused by contemporary science. I would suggest three major fields in which such pantheistic traits seem to emerge: the cosmic neo-vitalism (to which belong the program of the Gnosis of Princeton and other forms of mysticism of physics), the idea of a cosmic code as an answer to the question of the intelligibility of reality, and, finally, some interpretations of the Anthropic principle. The first can be traced back to a spiritualistic perspective, while the second and third are more in tune with the materialistic perspective. A further example of interaction between philosophical and scientific views is the idea, supported by some scientists, of the world as all in God, with the corresponding involvement of God himself in the world, a vision at times described as panentheism.

1. The Gnosis of Princeton and Cosmic Neo-Vitalism. Today, a number of scientists are searching for new interpretations of reality following two intuitions above all: a) to overcome systems of logic that are considered typical of a western culture, generally based upon the principles of identity and of non-contradiction, upon dialectic opposition and the irreducibility of the contraries; new logical systems are thus invoked, often derived from oriental philosophies and more open to the composition of contraries, to the transformation of identity, and to the possibility of new syntheses; b) to favor relation and interaction as the keys for understanding the properties of the individual, which in reality ultimately cease to be the properties of the individual and become solely the properties of the whole, whose global logic (or even life) determines the behavior and the meaning of the parts. Having been developed in a bizarre and creative way starting from the theory of games and then the theory of paradoxes, these forms of thought called by the end of the 1960s The Gnosis of Princeton or even The New Gnosis by their adversaries at Princeton and Pasadena found a first application in the field of quantum mechanics. With an attitude fluctuating between reserve and secrecy, they rapidly expanded into the fields of biology and cosmology, generating criticism on the part of official science (cf. Ruyer, 1974).

The fundamental thesis of the New Gnosis is similar to that of all gnostic systems: the world is dominated by the Spirit, to which matter is counterposed; but according to the Gnostics of Princeton, the Spirit doesnt find opposition in matter, inasmuch as it is seen instead as the Spirits creature. Material bodies are seen as the by-product of the Spirit, they are the stuff that allows the Spirit, united in all the parts of the cosmos, to be contained. The universe is formed neither of material entities, nor of energies, but rather of domains of consciousness. The universe consists of the forms conscious of themselves and of the interactions that establish themselves between these forms, thanks to their mutual information. The true pieces of information would be those present in the interior consciousness of every being. Scientific observation gathers solely the reverse side of this information, i.e., its bodily and material dimension, but not its right side, represented by the spiritual and relational dimension. The New Gnosis intends to overcome this conceptual barrier, in which conventional science remains ensnared, to gain access to the innermost, relational dimension of the object, but to accomplish this goal, it is necessary to recognize that every object observed has its own life and its own consciousness. Some entities, such as human beings and animals, would be able to communicate this consciousness of theirs, this hidden right side, while other beings would not, although they also possess their own innermost dimension, their proper right side. Except for artificial entities and entities that appear by chance, individual elements and even the individual elementary particles possess a conscious dimension. The real world is generated by all these infinite processes and relations; ignoring them would result in not knowing the world in its profundity, because one would be ignoring the soul.

The vision of a cosmic neo-vitalism, which one may encounter well beyond the confines of the Gnostics of Princeton, thus becomes more and more distinct: self-regulation, coordination, and homoeostasis of complex material systems such as the Earth are now seen as manifestations of a true life (cf. Lovelock, 2000). Not only would the various material elements and the biosphere have their own life, but the whole universe would definitely possess the personality of a living being, capable of constructing its own history (cf. Smolin, 1997). According to some authors, the progressive and irreversible growth of information in the world assumes the role of a Soul or of a cosmic Spirit, to whom is entrusted the task not only of regulating the processes of matter (by transcending it or at least by uncoupling itself from matter), but also of guiding the entire evolution of the universe towards immortality (cf. Tipler, 1994).

It is difficult to formulate a comprehensive and pondered judgment about such visions of nature due to the heterogeneity (and at times the navet) of the different proposals. There is another factor not to be undervalued: these proposals arise from an exigency of a post-modern surmounting of some forms of modern rationality, as reductionism and materialism, understood today to be inadequate. But the search for new philosophical paradigms is not devoid of a certain ambiguity. Some authors indicate that the greater importance given to the creative evolution of complex systems is the necessary overcoming of a theistic vision that will finally free us from the idea of a God who rules the fortunes of the world (cf. Smolin, 1997); yet others hold it to be in accord with the existence of purpose in the universe, and therefore with the idea of a Creator (cf. Davies 1987 and 1992). Rather than judging between these two positions, it is much easier to point out the fact that evident connections exist between many neo-vitalistic concepts and some characteristic elements of the New Age, of which the Gnosis of Princeton almost appears to be a faithful application in the scientific field. There is also an implicit relationship among hermetism, Renaissance vitalism (see above, II.1) and modern ideas of emergence or creativity in nature. These paradigms appear and disappear in various forms in scientific reflections, perhaps to demonstrate that they contain meaningful insights, which modern positivistic rationality had thought to be able to elude in modes perhaps overly-simplistic. Nonetheless, it must be said that the overcoming of reductionism and other analytical methodologies in favor of new visions of nature characterized by a synthetic and holistic approach, one more attentive to the relational properties and to the synthesis and harmony of the whole, ought not to lead to a refutation of a foundational logic or of a first philosophy that ultimately unites both Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. These two traditions should not be seen in an antagonistic way; otherwise philosophy itself would suffer a dangerous loss of identity, as would, in the ultimate analysis, the universal communicability of scientific thought.

2. The Cosmic Code and Immanent Evolution towards the Emergence of Consciousness. Besides those who speak of a cosmic Soul, various contemporary authors refer to a cosmic mind. Here there is a restructuring that unknowingly follows closely the role of the two Plotinian hypostases generated by the One (see above, I.3) and that, also unknowingly, maintains a constant bond with the two classical ways of seeing the divine in the world: as Intellect and as Spirit. The reference to a cosmic mind or even to a cosmic code is usually presented in the context of the question about the intelligibility and rationality of thelaws of nature, the question about the reason for the harmony among the various parts of the universe and, finally, the discussion about the delicate coordination (fine-tuning) among the many parameters and numerical constants that determine the structure and evolution of the cosmos.

If on the scientific level such observation is completely licit and finds its place within a Pythagorean tradition, one associated with every mathematical reading of nature that sees the world as an expression of harmony and order (gr. ksmos), on the philosophical level and from a realistic perspective, it can follow two diverse approaches. (Observe, by the way, that from an idealistic perspective the idea of cosmic order would be described as solely an apparent order, something imposed by the mental categories of the subject.) The first realist philosophical approach is to hold that such rationality is a reflection on the objective level of the world and its phenomena of an ordering Intelligence that, transcending the universe, possesses it and unfolds the entire cosmic project. Even if subjected to diverse developments one can indeed arrive and stop at a kind of God, typical to deism, who is both architect and impersonal, or one can remain open to the Revelation of a God who is the source for the order, but also personal and salvific such a perspective points towards something beyond the universe itself. In other words, the observation of the hallmarks of intelligence in the world leads us to ask for their cause.

The second approach, although it also recognizes the existence of an order and of a delicate fine-tuning in the structure of the world, does not think it necessary to invoke some Intelligence that transcends the universe, but understands these simply as the self-expression of a necessary and immanent law embedded within the very conditions of the existence of the world as such. The universe is nothing more than its laws or its project: if there is any reference to a notion of God or of the divine, this notion ends up being identified with the laws of nature, which in their turn are identified with the universe itself. The mind of God is substantially the mind of the universe. In this case, the cosmic Intellect in nothing but the modern expression for a materialistic pantheism in which there is the theoretical possibility of recognizing a kind of lgos, but which in practical terms belongs to matter itself. Thus, the weak separation between matter and spirit, or between matter and reason, to which the idea of a cosmic code seems to lead, now completely disappears into the rule of a strict materialistic monism.

Something similar takes place in regard to the possible interpretations of the Anthropic principle. The scientific data demonstrating that the delicate conditions for the existence of the cosmos as it is are also the same that allow it to be suitable for life, can be understood philosophically in two different ways. They could be taken as consonant with the idea that there exists an original project for the world, a project that is also distinct from the world, whose final purpose is the creation of the necessary conditions to allow intelligent observers to appear in the universe. On the other hand, the same data could be interpreted to demonstrate that cosmic and biological evolution has within itself a fully immanent code (similar to DNA in its own significance for the development of a living organism), the program of which consists in structuring the universe by leading it to the appearance of intelligent (human) beings, so that the universe might finally arrive at being conscious of itself. In the first case, the universe would have been made for humans, in the second, humans for the universe... In this second case, we stand before a new pantheistic vision of a materialistic nature: consciousness particularly that of human beings would be the necessary and sufficient end result of the evolution of matter, and, from the moment of the appearance of intelligence, matter would come to be totally permeated and encompassed by it.

From a conceptual point of view, I would suggest that the affirmation of a materialistic pantheism bound to the presence of a cosmic mind or code presents an inherent contradiction: it dissolves the question about the cause of the intelligibility of reality, i.e. the very question that gave rise to our reflection on the existence of such a mind or of a code. Intelligibility becomes the simple fruit of evolution and no longer the possibility to rise above it by posing problems and asking questions. In addition, there exist arguments confirming the fact that the intelligibility of nature is difficult to ascribe to the laws of natural selection or of cosmic evolution. The issue shows a certain astonishing analogy with the irreducibility of the relationship between mind and body.

Concerning the second interpretation of the Anthropic principle, which says that the appearance of human beings is the necessary product of a deterministic self-expression of the universe, one needs to keep in mind that the scientific observations that are the foundation for the reflections about the fine-tuning between the universe and life regard necessary but not sufficient conditions: to allow life to flourish, it is necessary that the universe is just as it is, but being just as it is, is not sufficient to bring about in a deterministic way the existence and flourishing of life, the originating causes of which are, at least up until this moment, still unknown.

3. The Proposal of Panentheism. The ontological and dynamic consistency that scientific thought tends to grant to nature in its relationship with its possible Creator leads at times to the hypothesis of a kind of feed-back of nature to God. One thus arrives at the idea of a more active role for the world, and therefore of a certain active polarity between God and the world, postulating a participation of God in the dynamic of nature and its processes. In broad strokes, one may say this leads to seeing the world as a part of God, more precisely as a whole within God, thus giving rise to the term panentheism. This idea, probably already present in the philosophy of Heraclitus (550 ca. - 480 ca.) and later favored by the thought of Spinoza (see above, II.2), by the idealism of G. Hegel (1770-1831), and by the cosmic evolution of H. Spencer (1820-1903), was implicitly revived recently in some forms of thought inspired by A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) and his philosophy of process.

Panentheism sees the world as inserted into the nature of God, into his being and his life. God maintains a certain priority over the world, as the whole does over its parts, but he cant avoid depending upon it to a certain degree. The divine perfections and the other divine attributes grow together with the world; God needs to take into account the properties, the potentialities, and the processes of the world if he wishes to bring to fulfillment not only his creative project, but also that which is lacking to his own fulfillment. The idea of creation from nothing and the sovereignty of God over all things certainly become obscured here, and Gods relationship to the universe resembles more that of a pilot commanding a ship in a storm than that of a transcendent Creator. Gods creativity would then depend on the worlds creativity and emergence, whose future developments and results would be unknown to God himself. Panentheism does not deny the personal nature of God nor human freedom (a freedom participated in some way by the whole universe), but the theological understanding of the perfection of Gods freedom is nonetheless profoundly modified. Favorable to a revision of the philosophical idea of the immutability of God, panentheism does not have the theological tools necessary to address or redirect the implications of this idea for the mystery of the Incarnation (or for some kind of theologia crucis within it) or for the biblical meaning of such notions as divine mercy and fidelity. Instead, it seeks an easy solution on the merely physical level, one attractive for the role of protagonist played by the evolution of the cosmos and by its laws, but damaging to the image of God and ultimately also to the right understanding of the reality itself of the universe. If the legitimate desire to grant nature its own autonomy and allow it to participate in some way in the divine attributes is carried out in disregard of any metaphysics of being (the entire dynamic significance of which the proponents of panentheism often ignore) and without affirming a true creation ex nihilo, this way of thinking leads to the idea of a world that grows together with God, and ends up sooner or later replacing Him.

By affirming a substantial, and therefore metaphysical, separation between God and the world, Judeo-Christian Revelation does not take away the sacredness of nature. That is, there exists much room for a sacred vision of nature, though not a religion of nature. Nature is not the ultimate source of its sacredness, because it is only a reflection of the holiness and beauty of God. In many texts of Genesis, one reads how God blesses his creation (cf. Gen 1:22-28; 8:17; 9:1 etc.), a creation many times recognized as a good thing, seen also as beautiful, a creation which the original sin of human beings has in part disfigured by distorting its primal harmony, but which the salvation worked by Jesus Christ will recapitulate and reconcile in a new salvific economy. The created world is called to participate in this economy, the first fruits of which are now present and at hand in the historic and meta-temporal event of His resurrection from the dead (cf. Rm 8:19-22).

As has already been seen, the separation between the God of Israel and the world, and His complete ontological diversity expressed in the doctrine of creation from nothing (see above, I.4), do not prevent the created world from being similar to God, nor God from being present in His creatures. Here there is a true philosophical novelty thanks to the biblical significance of the notions of immanence and transcendence, which are richer than those used by philosophical thought. Among Christian thinkers, Thomas Aquinas developed a metaphysics capable of taking advantage of the mutual immanence and transcendence of God, especially in the formulation of the doctrine of participation and of the intensity of the act of being (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 44-47). The theological perspective of the relationship between God and the world was summed up by John Paul II in one of his catecheses on creation: As Creator, God is in a certain sense outside of created being and what is created is outside of God. At the same time the creature fully and completely owes to God its own existence (its being what it is), because the creature has its origin fully and completely from the power of God. Through this creative power (omnipotence) God is in the creature and the creature is in him. However, this divine immanence in no way diminishes God's transcendence in regard to everything to which he gives existence. (John Paul II, General Audience, January 15, 1986, n. 6)

The Christian universe is similar to its Creator not because it is a necessary emanation (Plotinus), nor because a Demiurge took its forms from the world of Ideas to later reproduce them in the world of nature (Plato). As opposed to the hypostases of Plotinus and the Demiurge of Plato, the Word and the Holy Spirit are not the hinge between the divine and the earthly, nor are they the first creatures of the One. The logic with which the Christian Trinity gives origin to the world resides totally in the liberty of its immanent life. Here the philosophical opposition between necessity and freedom is overcome in the mystery of a personal communion, of the free gift of three distinct Persons made possible by the necessary identity of the same divine nature. Having willed all things in His Word and through His Word, but also for Love and with Love, Godgives origin to a world in which the logic of the Trinitarian processions acts as the exemplary causality, without any of the Divine Persons entering into composition with creatures. The processions of the divine Persons (generation and spiration) are seen by St. Thomas as the cause and reason (Lat. ratio) of the creation of creatures, or said more precisely: The procession of the Persons in the unity of their essence is the cause of the procession of creatures in the diversity of their essence. (Exitus Personarum in unitate essentiae est causa exitus creaturarum in essentiae diversitate) (In I Sent., d. 2, divisio textus; cf. ibidem, d. 14, q. 2, a. 2).

The fact that the universe is called to be completely renewed in Christ though the recapitulation the Son mysteriously brings about, or the fact that the Spirit continually vivifies creation, sanctifying it, is never expressed in Sacred Scripture in a way that would lead one to think of the world as the body of God or of the Spirit as its soul. The teaching of the Church has many times clarified the content of faith in regard to possible pantheistic misinterpretations. Thus the thesis, attributed to Peter Abelard (1079-1142), that the Holy Spirit was the soul of the world (cf. DH 722), was condemned; and likewise the theses, attributed to Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1327), that God created the world at the same time as the generation of the Son, and that the human soul possessed something uncreated and in common with the divine intellect (cf. DH 953, 977). A more organic and complete clarification regarding pantheism will come with the First Vatican Council (1870). Without making explicit reference to specific authors, the Council censured pantheistic visions of the emanatistic type (Plotinus), the substantial (Spinoza), the essential (Schelling), and the universal or indefinite (Hegel). The philosophical causes (ontological, psychological, and ethical) underlying these erroneous understandings of creation were also pointed out and denounced: to deny the distinction between Creator and creature, to deny the liberty of God, and to ignore the true end of creation itself (cf. DH 3024-3025).

Christianity is honestly concerned with the necessity, particularly urgent in more recent decades, to rediscover a better harmony between humankind and nature, for this belongs to the biblical message and to its tradition of thought. We certainly stand in front of a trend felt in many areas of contemporary culture, urged not only by the new scientific epistemologies, but also by the now inevitable worldwide context of social, economical, and technological politics. At the same time, Christianity stresses that such a concern ought not to turn itself into a cosmo-centered anxiety. Sacred Scripture recalls that humanity does not find its tlos (i.e., its end)in the search for an harmony with nature: the quest for this necessary harmony, whether on the personal or societal level, does not provide responses to the great enigmas of human existence, nor does it furnish the ultimate answer about the role of the human being in the universe. Humanity and nature, even in their autonomy, both depend upon God. From a theological point of view, it must be added that nature alone does not save; and this is, perhaps, the greater difference between Christianity and the perspective of Buddhism or of those philosophies inspired by it. Nature can contribute to our salvation insofar as it leads us to God, that is, in the measure to which it shows us the existence of a Creator through aesthetic or rational appeal (natural revelation) and, therefore, only in the measure to which nature remains capable of referring to something beyond itself. In this sense, one could say that Christianity is not in much agreement with the idea of a Mother Nature, but holds rather to that of a Sister Nature, to whom we are bound because we see in her a common dependence upon the Creator (cf. John Paul II, General Audience, January 26, 2000). These insights have been present within the core of Christian message from the beginning and found in St. Francis of Assisi one of their best witnesses. If the Canticle of Creatures will call only the Earth mother and this in the precise context of the production of fruits necessary for sustenance, all other natural realities are seen with a fraternal eye, which recognizes them as participants in a common filiation from God: May you be praised, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially brother sun [...]. May you be praised, my Lord, for sister moon and the stars [...]. May you be praised, my Lord, for sister water [...]. May you be praised, my Lord, for brother fire... (Laudato sii, miSignore, cum tucte le tue creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole [...]. Laudato sii, miSignore, per sora luna e le stelle [...]. Laudato sii, miSignore, per sora aqua [...]. Laudato sii, miSignore, per frate focu...).

The contemplation of nature and the search for the divine within it have a very important role in inter-religious dialogue. Christian theology is interested in developing a more mature and articulate reflection in this area, just as it is convinced that the true God can be known starting from the observation of nature. Judaism and Christianity, the Koran and Eastern religious traditions, philosophical thought and the natural religions, all encounter one another in the praise of God in creation (cf. John Paul II, General Audience, August 2, 2000). Christianity engages in this dialogue with what is specific to her: nature is the first stage of divine Revelation (cf. Fides et ratio, n. 19), creation is the work of the Trinity, the contemplation of the created world moves the believer to the praise of the One and Triune God without stopping at the idea of an anonymous and impersonal sacredness. It is the Holy Spirit, who is indeed the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, the third Person of the Holy Trinity, who orients such praise and contemplation, and who also guides the dialogue between Christian believers and believers of other religions starting from the common observation of nature. In the light of the Christian faith, creation particularly calls to mind the Holy Spirit in the dynamism that marks the relations between things, within the macrocosm and the microcosm, and is apparent especially wherever life is born and develops. Because of this experience, even in cultures far removed from Christianity, the presence of God is perceived in a way as the spirit which gives life to the world. Virgils words are famous in this regard: spiritus intus alit the spirit nourishes from within (Aeneid, VI, 726). The Christian knows well that this reference to the Spirit would be unacceptable if it meant a sort of anima mundi taken in a pantheistic sense. However, while excluding this error, it remains true that every form of life, activity and love refers in the last analysis to that Spirit who, as Genesis tells us, was moving over the face of the waters (Gn 1:2) at the dawn of creation. (John Paul II, General Audience, August 2, 2000, n. 5).

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Naturalistic pantheism – Wikipedia

Naturalistic pantheism is a kind of pantheism. It has been used in various ways such as to relate God or divinity with concrete things,[1] determinism,[2] or the substance of the Universe.[3] God, from these perspectives, is seen as the aggregate of all unified natural phenomena.[4] The phrase has often been associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza,[5] although academics differ on how it is used.

The term pantheism" is derived from Greek words pan (Greek: ) meaning "all" and theos () meaning God. It was coined by Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697.[6] The term was introduced to English by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist that described pantheism as the "opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe."[7]

The term "naturalistic" derives from the word "naturalism", which has several meanings in philosophy and aesthetics.[8] In philosophy the term frequently denotes the view that everything belongs to the world of nature and can be studied with the methods appropriate for studying that world, i.e. the sciences.[9] It generally implies an absence of belief in supernatural beings.[8]

Joseph Needham, a modern British scholar of Chinese philosophy and science, has identified Taoism as "a naturalistic pantheism which emphasizes the unity and spontaneity of the operations of Nature."[10] This philosophy can be dated to the late 4th century BCE.[11]

The Hellenistic Greek philosophical school of Stoicism (which started in the early 3rd century BCE)[12] rejected the dualist idea of the separate ideal/conscious and material realms, and identified the substance of God with the entire cosmos and heaven.[3] However, not all philosophers who did so can be classified as naturalistic pantheists.[13]

Naturalistic pantheism was expressed by various thinkers,[5] including Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for his views.[14] However, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza became particularly known for it.[5]

Possibly drawing upon the ideas of Descartes,[15]Baruch Spinoza connected God and Nature through the phrase deus sive natura ("God, or Nature"),[16][17][18] making him the father of classical pantheism. He relied upon rationalism rather than the more intuitive approach of some Eastern traditions.[19]

Spinoza's philosophy, sometimes known as Spinozism, has been understood in a number of ways, and caused disagreements such as the Pantheism controversy. However, many scholars have considered it to be a form of naturalistic pantheism. This has included viewing the pantheistic unity as natural.[20] Others focus on the deterministic aspect of naturalism.[21][22]Spinoza inspired a number of other pantheists, with varying degrees of idealism towards nature.[23][24] However, Spinoza's influence in his own time was limited.[25][26]

Scholars have considered Spinoza the founder of a line of naturalistic pantheism, though not necessarily the only one.[27][28][29]

In 1705 the Irish writer John Toland endorsed a form of pantheism in which the God-soul is identical with the material universe.[7][30][31]

German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (18341919[32]) proposed a monistic pantheism in which the idea of God is identical with that of nature or substance.[33]

The World Pantheist Movement, started in 1999, describes Naturalistic Pantheism as including reverence for the universe, realism, strong naturalism, and respect for reason and the scientific method as methods of understanding the world.[34] Paul Harrison considers its position the closest modern equivalent to Toland's.[7]

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Naturalistic pantheism - Wikipedia

Lesson 10: Pantheism and New-Age Mysticism | Free Sunday …

Pantheism

Pantheism teaches that the universe and all it contains is God. Thats why its called pantheism everything is part of God. The word Pantheism derives from the Greek words pan (all) and theos (God). Thus, pantheism means All is God.

In essence, pantheism holds that the universe as a whole should be regarded with religious reverence, and that there is nothing that truly merits the name God other than the universe and nature. The Cosmos is divine, and the earth sacred. Pantheists do not propose belief in a deity; rather, they hold nature itself as a creative presence. Pantheists believe in Divine Immanence, i.e., that God is present in all things. To the Pantheist, divinity does not transcend reality; it surrounds, and is within. All share divinity. This leads the pantheist to personal ethics of tolerance and understanding.1

Natural or Scientific Pantheism has much in common with religious humanism, religious naturalism and religious atheism, as well as with philosophical Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and symbolic paganism. Scientific Pantheists take the real universe and nature as their starting point, not some preconceived idea of God. Scientific Pantheists feel a profound reverence and awe for these, like the reverence and awe that believers in a more conventional God feel towards their deity. Natural/scientific pantheism reveres and cares for nature, accepts this life as our only life, and this earth as our only paradise, if we look after it.

Natural/scientific pantheism does not require faith in miracles, invisible entities or supernatural powers. It does not regard this life as a waiting room or a staging post on the way to a better existence after death. It has a healthy and positive attitude to sex and life in the body. It teaches reverence and love for nature.2

Pantheism is built on the philosophical idea called monism. Monism teaches that all reality is unified, i.e., everything is part of the same big system. All things are ultimately and absolutely united. Reality is indivisible. Differences are simply illusions. There is one solid, eternal indivisible ball of being. Since everything is part of everything else, everything that exists must be God.

Probably the most well known pantheistic religion is Hinduism.

Pantheism asserts the following:

God is non-personal. God is not a person; God is the oneness of all things, the single reality that encompasses all things. God has no self-consciousness. God is an It, not a He.

God is absolutely infinite and unknowable. We can say what God is not but not what God is. Logical reasoning is incapable of comprehending God.

Because God is not a person, one cannot have a personal relationship with God. The disciples goal is to be unified with God, to converge with Gods oneness. One achieves this unity by turning away from the physical world and focusing on the soul. It is only through meditation and mystical intuition that one leaps beyond the physical and is united with the One.

God is the source of all being. Everything is rooted in God and springs from God.

Its obvious even to the casual observer that pantheism is in sharp disagreement with Christianity. Note some weaknesses of pantheism:

If all being is unified, then no individual existence is possible. Its self-defeating to assert that individual existence is not real. If ones individual conscious existence is merely an illusion, then the idea that all is one is an illusion, too.

Pantheism and monism assert an idea that cannot be proven, i.e., that all reality is part of the one. However, different kinds of beings may exist, namely, finite (man) and infinite (God).

Pantheism cannot distinguish good from evil. Both good and evil must necessarily be part of God if everything is one.

An impersonal God is no God at all. The idea of God as a personal, loving father is foreign to pantheistic thought. In fact, pantheism differs little from atheism. They both assert that the universe is all there is.

The pantheistic God is incomplete without creation. If nothing material existed, the pantheistic God would not exist.

Its impossible to say for sure what the pantheistic God is. If all is God, then even two contradictory statements about it would both be true, which is logically absurd. One can say nothing meaningful about the pantheistic God.

To claim that God is unknowable is illogical, for it is claiming to know something about God, i.e., that he is unknowable.

The Bible clearly asserts that God is a Person, not the unity of all things. Its mans depraved mind that worships and serves the creation rather than the creator (Rom 1:17f). God exists separate from His creation. Created beings do not share in the divinity of God. God is knowable and the information we have about God is true, logical and meaningful. The Bible contradicts pantheism on almost every point.

When dealing with pantheists, the best attack is to present the gospel in the most clear and positive terms. Further, believers must show pantheists how illogical their system is.

The New Age Movement is largely based on pantheistic notions. The New Age Movement is not a unified system of thought, but a loosely-knit association of ideas and philosophies, most of which are incompatible with Christianity.

The New Age Movement, unlike most formal religions, has no holy text, central organization, membership rolls, formal clergy, geographic center, dogma, or system of beliefs. The New Age is a free-flowing spiritual movement; a network of believers and practitioners who share somewhat similar beliefs and practices. Seminars, conventions, books and informal groups replace sermons and religious services.

Recent surveys of US adults indicate that many Americans hold at least some New Age beliefs:

8% believe in astrology as a method of foretelling the future.

7% believe that crystals are a source of healing or energizing power.

9% believe that Tarot Cards are a reliable base for life decisions.

about 1 in 4 believe in a non-traditional concept of the nature of God which are often associated with New Age thinking:

11% believe that God is a state of higher consciousness that a person may reach.

8% define God as the total realization of personal, human potential.

3% believe that each person is God.

New Age teachings became popular during the 1970s as a reaction against what some perceived as the failure of traditional sources to provide spiritual and ethical guidance for the future. Its roots are traceable to many sources: Astrology, Channeling, Hinduism, Gnostic traditions, Spiritualism, Taoism, Theosophy, Wicca and other Neo-pagan traditions, etc. The movement started in England in the 1960s where many of these elements were well established. The movement quickly became international. The movement has become established a stable, major force in North American religion during the past generation. New Agers expect their movement to expand, promoted by the social backlash against logic and science.3

Basic New Age ideas:

God is an impersonal energy or force. The New Age idea of God is very pantheisticeverything is part of God. People must come to realize their connection to God. Everyone is divine.

Death initiates another life. New Agers generally believe in reincarnation, the idea that after death they come back and experience another life. One accumulates wisdom from one life to the next, and eventually one may be released from the cycle of life and death.

Release from the reincarnation cycle depends on ones karma, i.e., works. Good works build up good karma; bad works build up bad karma. If at the end of life one has accumulated enough good karma, he may be reincarnated at a higher level of life. But if one has accumulated enough bad karma, he may come back at a lower level and suffer for his sin.

Those who break out of the cycle by accumulating enough good karma experience Nirvana, the state of nothingness, the absorption into the One.

The New Age Movement has a low regard for logic or rational thought. An important part of the system is a mystical, transcendental form of meditation in which one seeks unity with the One. Such an experience is not rational. The emphasis is on experience rather than logical thought. A mystical, trance-like state is required to experience unity with the One. This is achieved through various means, such as hypnotism, drugs, yoga, meditation, dreams, visualization, chants, dancing, and various other rituals. Achieving cosmic consciousness will supposedly unleash hidden powers and assist in the exploration of the universe within.

Some aspects of the New Age Movement are returning to pagan religious rituals like sun and moon worship, ancestor worship, god/goddess worship, magic, the use of crystals, channeling, witchcraft, etc.

Because there is no personal God, there can be no absolute standards of right and wrong. New Agers are relativists, except when it comes to environmental issues, where they want to be more objective. They refuse to make moral judgments because they have no basis to make such judgments. Note: this obviously contradicts the whole idea of karma. But that doesnt matter to a New Agerhe can live with all sorts of contradiction. Generally, such people make up their own standards of karma.

Personal Transformation: A profoundly intense mystical experience will lead to the acceptance and use of New Age beliefs and practices. Guided imagery, hypnosis, meditation, and (sometimes) the use of hallucinogenic drugs are useful to bring about and enhance this transformation. Believers hope to develop new potentials within themselves: the ability to heal oneself and others, psychic powers, a new understanding of the workings of the universe, etc. Later, when sufficient numbers of people have achieved these powers, a major spiritual, physical, psychological and cultural planet-wide transformation is expected.

Ecological Responsibility: A belief in the importance of uniting to preserve the health of the earth, which is often looked upon as Gaia (Mother Earth), a living entity.

Universal Religion: Since all is God, then only one reality exists, and all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality. The universal religion can be visualized as a mountain, with many sadhanas (spiritual paths) to the summit. Some are hard; others easy. There is no one correct path. All paths eventually reach the top. They anticipate that a new universal religion which contains elements of all current faiths will evolve and become generally accepted worldwide.

New World Order: As the Age of Aquarius unfolds, a New Age will develop. This will be a utopia in which there is world government, and end to wars, disease, hunger, pollution, and poverty. Gender, racial, religious and other forms of discrimination will cease. Peoples allegiance to their tribe or nation will be replaced by a concern for the entire world and its people.

Logical problems with the New Age Movement:

If theres no personal God, then its impossible to tell what is good karma and what is bad. If all is part of the same universal One, then there can be no distinction between good and evil.

Its impossible to tell when one has accumulated enough good karma to reach Nirvana. How much is enough?

Most people dont remember their (supposedly) previous lives, so how can they carry any wisdom from one life to the next?

According to the New Age system, those enduring suffering are probably being punished for their accumulation of bad karma from a previous life or lives. Hence there is no reason to try to help them or to decrease their suffering.

Its illogical to think that all religions are equally valid, each one a separate but legitimate path. When two religions contradict each other, they cannot both be right.

A Biblical Response:

The New Age Movement clearly rejects biblical revelation. What does the Bible say about New Age ideas?

God is a person, not a force or the unity of all things.

There is only one physical death, and after that is the judgment. There is no such thing as reincarnation. See Heb 9:27. The second death, not another life, awaits those who reject Jesus Christ.

Nirvana is not synonymous with heaven. Believers will enjoy eternal conscious existence in a place of happiness and fulfillment (John 14:2-3); they will not be absorbed into the one. Unbelievers will be punished with everlasting, conscious torment.

Believers are complete in Christ (Col 1:28, 2:10). We need no special mystical experiences to enjoy a relationship with God. All saved people have access to the same benefits from God. It is not necessary to experience a mystical trance or altered state of consciousness to commune with God.

The New Age Movement is really just another version of salvation by works. The Bible teaches salvation by grace through faith (Eph 2:8-9).

The created universe is not part of God. God exists independently from the universe. He is self-existent and needs nothing.

Faith in Jesus Christ is the one and only means of salvation. All religions that deny this are false.

As with any pagan, the best method of reaching a New Ager is through a simple presentation of the gospel. New Agers tend not to value deep logical or rational arguments, so it may be difficult to engage them in a rational discussion. Just proclaim the gospel and call the person to repentance and faith.

Conclusion: Both pantheism and the New Age Movement are particularly hostile to Christianity. They directly contradict biblical claims and are seemingly impervious to logical argumentation. Their belief systems are so vague and broad that they can encompass all sorts of odd doctrines. Christians must show such people the error of their ways by proclaiming the gospel to them and calling them to faith and repentance.

Discussion:

Define pantheism? The belief that All is God.

How is pantheism similar to naturalism? Both claim that there is nothing beyond nature, nothing outside the box.

What is monism? The idea that all things are part of the absolute One.

Why is it self-defeating to say that God is unknowable? Because youre saying something that you know about God.

Why cant a pantheist or New Ager distinguish good from evil? Because they accept no absolute standard or Law Giver. Also, since everything is part of the same One, good and evil are the same.

Explain reincarnation, karma, and Nirvana.

1 Universal Pantheist Society, http://www.pantheist.net/

2 World Pantheist Movement, http://www.harrison.dircon.co.uk/wpm/index.htm

3 http://www.religioustolerance.org/newage.htm

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Lesson 10: Pantheism and New-Age Mysticism | Free Sunday ...

Pantheism. I believe that the universe created itself …

ANYONE WHO IS UNABLE TO POST DUE TO DOWNVOTES SHOULD PM THE MODS AND WE WILL ADD THEM TO THE APPROVED SUBMITTER LIST

Obviously exceptions may be made

Before posting, consider that this is the definition of Atheism most commonly used in this sub, to avoid confusion and threads being snowballed by "That's not what Atheism means!"

There are many definitions of the word atheist, and no one definition is universally accepted by all. There is no single 'literal' definition of atheist or atheism, but various accepted terms. However, within non-religious groups, it is reasonable to select a definition that fits the majority of the individuals in the group.For r/DebateAnAtheist, the majority of people identify as agnostic or 'weak' atheists, that is, they lack a belief in a god.

They make no claims about whether or not a god actually exists, and thus, this is a passive position philosophically.

The other commonly-used definition for atheist is a 'strong' atheist - one who believes that no gods exists, and makes an assertion about the nature of reality, i.e. that is it godless. However, there are fewer people here who hold this position, so if you are addressing this sort of atheist specifically, please say so in your title.

-Thanks /u/deviantmoomba!

Debate in real time!

There are no real rules. It's more like a meta. The public decides what it likes to see, and so set's the "meta". There are no rules, so you can be pithy, and snarky, or show bad form in debate, etc. But, there's a balance you seek. If you stray too far away from the meta and towards "bug", then that leads to the only real "rule":

Obviously Reddit official rules will not be allowed, and dox'ing (or posting someone's post history) will be removed on a post per post basis. If you believe the meta needs to shift, or a bug fix was issued in error, then message us. We may be tyrants, but we're not unreasonable.

NOTE: If you want more rules, I suggest r/DebateReligion.

Here's another sub you might liker/AtheistDefenseLeagueIt's a link swap thing

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Pantheism. I believe that the universe created itself ...

World Pantheism – The online community for scientific pantheists

This community is the bestplace to find and network with fellow scientific pantheists locally, nationally and globally. Here you can express, inspire and take action for Nature and the planet, human and animal rights, and respect for science. You can explore aspects of practical living from a pantheist point of view and plan activities and gatherings. This community is life and Earth-focused, notsuitable for religious or abstract debate.

This community differs from Facebook in worthwhile ways. Our insights and shares don't vanish down the timeline: they stay for us to learn from. You can join a local group here easily. More groups are created as needed - suggest one HERE. You can search for and friend members near you. You can join many groups for various life stages,health & fitness, healthy eating,nature, interestsandcauses. If a group you are interested in is inactive - post something interestingand start it rolling!

Pleaseadd a photo it makes a huge difference! Introduce yourself in theCommon Room.We suggest you turn off notificationsexcept the ones you want to see.Scroll down to see the latest activity!For more details about scientific pantheism, visitwww.pantheism.net.

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World Pantheism - The online community for scientific pantheists

World Pantheist Movement – Official Site

Do you feel a deep sense of peace, belonging, and wonder in Nature or under a clear night sky? You may be a scientific pantheist.Scientific pantheism respects the rights not just of humans, but of all living beings.It focuses on saving the planet rather than saving souls.It encourages you to make the most and best of your one life here.It values reason and the scientific method over adherence to ancient scriptures.Take our popular quiz to find out if it suits you:-Atheist, Agnostic, Pagan, Deist, Pantheist or What?

We relate closely to some of the central challenges of our era. At a time when the balance of our Earth is under unprecedented threat, scientific pantheism is one of the few forms of spirituality in which Nature plays a central part. For us, Nature is a source of peace and beauty, as well as the focus for our care and vigilance. Nature was not created for us to use or abuse. Nature created us, we are an inseparable part of her. We have a duty to live sustainably, to care for Nature and to halt and reverse the harm that humans have done to her.

Sign the Earth Pledge

Scientific pantheism is the only form of spirituality we know of which fully embraces science as part of the human exploration of Earth and Cosmos. We wonder at the picture of a vast, creative and often violent Universerevealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. We regard stargazing as a spiritual practice. We oppose climate change denial and evolution denial, especially in education.

Scientific pantheism has a joyous affirmative approach to life. It has a healthy and positive attitude to sex and life in the body. We wont tell you what you should be smoking or doing in the bedroom. We fully accept diverse gender choices, and we oppose all forms of discrimination.

Scientific pantheism moves beyond God and defines itself by positives.Atheism and Agnosticism both define themselves negatively, in relation to a God that they deny or doubt. These are useful starting points but they dont take us very far. Most people also need positive beliefs and feelings about their place in Nature and the wider Universe. We take Nature and the Universe as our start and finish point, not some preconceived idea of God. We do not believe in a supernatural creator god, let alone one that watches or judges us. Most of us avoid god-language or religious words like church, worship, divinity and so on. We regard them as misleading. Those of us who do use those kinds of words do so metaphorically, in a similar way to how Einstein used the word.

Get the Scientific Pantheism handbook.

Our beliefs and values are summarized in our Pantheist Statement of Principles.The statement was drawn up by fallible humans. It is not required dogma it is simply a notice on our door, to show what we are about so people can decide if it suits them or not. These are the key elements:

Many people feel the need to belong to a religious community. Research shows that such groups provide mutual support and friends and are good for physical and mental health. Theres no good reason why groups of like-minded non-theistic folk should not enjoy similar benefits.

In the WPM we are spiritual but not religious. We dont have churches, priests, or prescribed dogma and rituals. But we do aim to provide a home base for people who love Nature and the Universe and do not believe in supernatural entities.

Two of the major benefits our members and friends say they value are gaining new like-minded friends and finding a place where they can share their enthusiasms without fear of being ostracized or feeling isolated. There have been many local meetings of members across the USA and in other parts of the world, where people have found a rare level of fellowship and stimulation.

The WPMs short term goals are to:

In the longer term, as resources permit, we hope to:

If you would like to help promote these goals, please consider becoming a WPM member. Volunteering is another great way of supporting the WPM.

All who agree with our principles are encouraged to join our Facebook page (with more than 160,000 fans), or join our Facebook discussion groupwith more than 10,000 members.

We use the name pantheism because the term encompasses a long and venerable history dating back to Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius and extending to Einstein, D. H. Lawrence and beyond.

Our beliefs (see the Statement of Principles) are entirely compatible with atheism, humanism, agnosticism, universalism, and symbolic paganism (viewing magic, gods and spirits as symbols rather than objective realities). We offer a home to all forms of naturalistic spirituality however you may choose to label it. Other paths that approximate include philosophical Taoism, modern Stoicism, Western forms of Buddhism that celebrate Nature and daily life without supernatural beliefs, and Unitarian Universalists who do not believe in supernatural beings.

You are free to adopt the terms and practices you prefer and draw on other traditions for inspiration or celebration. Some call this a religion (a positive one), while others call it a philosophy, a way of life, or a form of general spirituality. Its up to you.

Please explore our pages. If you have any questions, please contact us.

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World Pantheist Movement - Official Site

Spinozism – Wikipedia

Spinozism (also spelled Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being attributes of such.

In a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza wrote: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[1] For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, that is, "a dynamic nature in action, growing and changing, not a passive or static thing."

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent "organism". Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God, interconnected with all of existence. Although humans only experience thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will still affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.[citation needed]

Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable. More specifically, he defined this as the ability for the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon its accumulated understanding of the world around them.

Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. From this substance, however, follow an infinite number of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract concept or essence) and modes (things actually existing which follow from attributes and modes). He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism. During his time, this statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.[2]

However, one should keep in mind the neutral monist position. While the natural universe humans experience in both the realm of the mind and the realm of physical reality is part of God, it is only two modes thought and extension that are part of infinite modes emanating from God.

Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism. Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality, Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of free will.[3]

Spinoza defines "substance" as follows:

By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed. (E1D3)[4]

This means, essentially, that substance is just whatever can be thought of without relating it to any other idea or thing. For example, if one thinks of a particular object, one thinks of it as a kind of thing, e.g., x is a cat. Substance, on the other hand, is to be conceived of by itself, without understanding it as a particular kind of thing (because it isn't a particular thing at all).

Spinoza defines "attribute" as follows:

By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence. (E1D4)[4]

From this it can be seen that attributes are related to substance in some way. It is not clear, however, even from Spinoza's direct definition, whether, a) attributes are really the way(s) substance is, or b) attributes are simply ways to understand substance, but not necessarily the ways it really is. Spinoza thinks that there are an infinite number of attributes, but there are two attributes for which Spinoza thinks we can have knowledge. Namely, thought and extension.[5]

The attribute of thought is how substance can be understood to be composed of thoughts, i.e., thinking things. When we understand a particular thing in the universe through the attribute of thought, we are understanding the mode as an idea of something (either another idea, or an object).

The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical, in Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception, God has extension as one of his attributes.

Modes are particular modifications of substance, i.e., particular things in the world. Spinoza gives the following definition:

By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived. (E1D5)[4]

The argument for there only being one substance (or, more colloquially, one kind of stuff) in the universe occurs in the first fourteen propositions of The Ethics. The following proposition expresses Spinoza's commitment to substance monism:

Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. (E1P14)[4]

Spinoza takes this proposition to follow directly from everything he says prior to it. Spinoza's monism is contrasted with Descartes' dualism and Leibniz's pluralism. It allows Spinoza to avoid the problem of interaction between mind and body, which troubled Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

The issue of causality and modality (possibility and necessity) in Spinoza's philosophy is contentious.[6] Spinoza's philosophy is, in one sense, thoroughly deterministic (or necessitarian). This can be seen directly from Axiom 3 of The Ethics:

From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily; and conversely, if there is no determinate cause, it is impossible for an effect to follow. (E1A3)[4]

Yet Spinoza seems to make room for a kind of freedom, especially in the fifth and final section of The Ethics, "On the Power of the Intellect, or on Human Freedom":

I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means or way, leading to Freedom. Here, then, I shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or blessedness, is. (E5, Preface)[4]

So Spinoza certainly has a use for the word 'freedom', but he equates "Freedom of Mind" with "blessedness", a notion which is not traditionally associated with freedom of the will at all.

Though the PSR is most commonly associated with Gottfried Leibniz, it is arguably found in its strongest form in Spinoza's philosophy.[7] Within the context of Spinoza's philosophical system, the PSR can be understood to unify causation and explanation.[8] What this means is that for Spinoza, questions regarding the reason why a given phenomenon is the way it is (or exists) are always answerable, and are always answerable in terms of the relevant cause(s). This constitutes a rejection of teleological, or final causation, except possibly in a more restricted sense for human beings.[4][8] Given this, Spinoza's views regarding causality and modality begin to make much more sense.

Spinoza's philosophy contains as a key proposition the notion that mental and physical (thought and extension) phenomena occur in parallel, but without causal interaction between them. He expresses this proposition as follows:

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. (E2P7)[4]

His proof of this proposition is that:

The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause. (E1A4)[4]

The reason Spinoza thinks the parallelism follows from this axiom is that since the idea we have of each thing requires knowledge of its cause, and this cause must be understood under the same attribute. Further, there is only one substance, so whenever we understand some chain of ideas of things, we understand that the way the ideas are causally related must be the same as the way the things themselves are related, since the ideas and the things are the same modes understood under different attributes.

In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called a heretic. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[9] and called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[10][11] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[10]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional JudeoChristian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[12] Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [13] differs from the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.[14] Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[15] Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore, the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.[14]

French philosopher Martial Guroult suggested the term "panentheism", rather than "pantheism" to describe Spinoza's view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God. Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.[15] In other words, the world is a subset of God. American philosopher Charles Hartshorne, on the other hand, suggested the term "Classical Pantheism" to describe Spinoza's philosophy.[16]

Similarities between Spinoza's philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions have been discussed by many authorities. The 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker was one of the early figures to notice the similarities between Spinoza's religious conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing 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, did his biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher... comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy."[17][18]

It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Though within the various existing Indian traditions there exist many traditions which astonishingly had such similar doctrines from ages, out of which most similar and well known are the Kashmiri Shaivism and Nath tradition, apart from already existing Samkhya and Yoga.[19]

Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying "the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'."[20]Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society also compared Spinoza's religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay "As to Spinoza's Deity natura naturans conceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deity as natura naturata or as conceived in the endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple."[21]

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Spinozism - Wikipedia

Dennis Andrew from Poole says ‘I am Druid’ – Somerset Live

Dennis Andrew doesnt participate in human or animal sacrifices - in fact the retired engineer is really normal.

To put the lie to myths perpetuated by some TV series and films, the retired engineer, cheesemaker and author has written a book entitled I am Druid.

We have fire festivals but not sacrifices, he said.

Knowlton Church and earthworks - a ruined Norman church between Wimborne and Cranborne which stands inside a late Neolithic Henge constructed in 2,500 BC - was the ideal place to meet so that he could explain his beliefs.

Knowlton is one of my favourite places; I sense things here. You can feel ancestry calling, its a spiritual place, said Dennis, who said he has been a Druid for most of his life.

My mother was a Christian and my father a pagan.

So what does it mean to be a Druid?

We dont have a corporate authority - there is no book of Common Prayer. It is a faith not a religion. We worship the divine in nature. Everything in nature is a temple. There is a god in a bird or a tree.

He added that Druids dont tell people what to believe and that they celebrate diversity.

Im as happy in a Christian church as in a Hindu temple, Dennis said. I feel thankful that in this country people are free to explore their faith.

He is a member of Dorset Grove, which numbers between 40 and 60 Druids. They meet at Knowlton Church eight times a year to celebrate - twice at the solstices, twice at the equinox and four times on cross quarter days.

Anyone can come to these rituals, he said. We dont preach or evangelise.

In addition they meet every fortnight in woodland areas.

We are modern druids, which means that our culture goes back no more than 250 years. In fact up to 50 years ago, there were Christian Druids such as Sir Winston Churchill.

Druidic membership extends to a cross section of society.

We have bankers, nurses, ex police officers and shop workers, he said.

If you want to know the definition of the five isms of Druidry - Animism, Pantheism, Polytheism, Monotheism and Dualism, just read Denniss book, I am Druid, which is available from Gullivers Bookshop in Wimborne as well as from http://www.iamdruid.tk.

Report and photos by Marilyn Barber

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Dennis Andrew from Poole says 'I am Druid' - Somerset Live

Pantheism – History – AllAboutHistory.org

QUESTION: What is Pantheism?

ANSWER:

The word "pantheism," like many theological words, comes from the Greek language. Pan means "all" or "everything" and Theos means "god." So, pantheism is the belief that everything somehow is a part of god. Our galaxy, the stars, our solar system, all living things, all thoughts, all people, everything is part of who or what god is. Much of the pantheistic view can be summed up in the statement, "All is god, and god is all." Although a form of the word "Pantheism" was first used in English in 1705, its roots go far back into antiquity. Many current religious and philosophical systems that have their basis in Pantheism include Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Freemasonry, Hinduism, Occultism, Taoism, and the New Age movement. These are based on three broad types of Pantheism.

Materialistic Pantheism holds that the material universe is all that exists - there is nothing else. Our thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, and aspirations are nothing more than biochemical reactions occurring in the cells of the brain, glands, and organs. We are nothing but organic machines. In addition, since nothing but matter exists there was no one or nothing to create this matter. Thus matter must be eternal. "God" is just another name for the material universe. This form of Pantheism has more in common with atheism than with other forms of theism.

Idealistic Pantheism teaches that just as the human soul or mind resides in the human body, the universal soul or mind (i.e. god) resides in the physical universe. God infuses, works through, and expresses the divine essence through the material world. Ultimate reality is found, therefore, not in the material world, but in the spiritual world. Some go so far as to say that the physical world is merely an illusion - either god's or mine - in which I play my part. The sum of all thoughts and feelings is therefore "god."

Neutral Pantheism is like a hybrid of the other two. Both the material and immaterial emanate from a single neutral substance or energy. God is this energy that generates all mind and all matter. God creates physical reality out of this divine substance and then extends spiritual attributes to it from this divine substance. Then, in the end, all things return to god. Therefore, the totality of all thought and all matter is what we call "god."

There are at least two significant problems with Pantheism. First, it cannot account for the existence of the universe. Most scientists today accept that matter, energy, space, and even time (our universe) had a point of beginning. But, if god is just part of the universe or another name for the universe, who or what began god? God could not create himself! Second, since our universe includes beings with personality (you and me for example), the Creator of the universe must have personality also. An effect cannot be greater than its cause.

In contrast to Pantheism, the Bible teaches that God is a Person (Exodus 3:7; Hebrews 6:17), that He created the physical universe (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3), and that He wants to have a relationship with you and me (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10).

Learn More about God!

What is your response?

Yes, today I am deciding to follow Jesus

Yes, I am already a follower of Jesus

I still have questions

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Pantheism - History - AllAboutHistory.org

Pantheism – Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are equivalent (the same thing). A pantheist believes that everything that exists is a part of God or that God is a part of everything that exists. The name pantheism comes from the Greek words theism (belief in God) and pan (all).

Any doctrine or philosophy that believes that the universe and everything in it is God is said to be pantheistic. Most pantheists believe the universe is sacred and the earth and nature are divine. Most of the early Greek philosophers from Thales on to Aristotle believed in some sort of pantheism.

Pantheism is an important part of many eastern religions such as Hinduism, Druidism and Taoism.

Some western philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and some scientists are pantheists.

Some Christians, Jews and Sufis are Pantheists. However, their majority believes that while God is in everything, there is more to God than just the universe.

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Pantheism - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unitarian Universalism and Pantheism World Pantheism

Pantheism and Unitarian Universalism: A harmonious match

Unitarian Universalism is based on the shared values of the Seven Principles, such as peace, democracy, tolerance and justice. However, it does not promote any particular answers to the ultimate questions about human existence is there a God or gods? Are our souls separate from our bodies? Do we have personal afterlives? Is the Universe a projection of a collective consciousness?

Most people need answers to ultimate questions, and most UUs add in these answers from some other source, such as Humanism, Buddhism, Paganism, Christianity and so on.

Scientific Pantheism is extremely compatible with the Seven Principles of UUism. If you love nature and are science-minded in your outlook, you may find that it provides a nice complement to UUism.

Many World Pantheist Movement members belong to Unitarian Universalist congregations and some are UU ministers. They tell us that perhaps a third or a half of Unitarian Universalists are probably strongly sympathetic to Pantheism.

The essence of Pantheism is a profound reverence for Nature and the wider Universe and awed recognition of their power, beauty and mystery. Some Pantheists use the word God to describe these feelings, but the majority prefer not to, so as to avoid ambiguity.

From this feeling flows the desire to make the most of our present life in our bodies on this earth, to care for nature, and to respect the rights of humans and animals in general. We choose to focus on the vibrant and urgent here and now, rather than on invisible realms, spirits, deities or afterlives.

We feel that Nature and the wider Universe are the most appropriate focus for our deepest reverence, rather than supernatural beings or afterlives. We believe that everything that exists is a part of Nature and tend to be skeptical of supernatural phenomena.

We believe that mind and body are an inseparable unity, and so we do not expect personal survival after death. Instead we look forward to a natural persistence of our time on earth, in the actions and creations we leave behind, memories people hold of us, and recycling of our elements in Nature.

Many people who have these feelings dont call it Pantheism they may call it atheism plus wonder and awe, they may call it religious humanism, spiritual humanism, religious naturalism or some other variant, or they may not have a name for it.

A related tendency often found in Unitarian Universalist congregations is Panentheism. Panentheists hold that God is present in and throughout nature and humans, but also transcends them and is much greater than them. By contrast Pantheists consider that God is identical with Nature and the wider Universe, and use the term (if at all) primarily to express their own feelings towards Nature.

Basically Panentheism is a form of belief in a creator God, while Pantheism is not. Panentheism is fully compatible with traditional Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but Pantheism is not.

The two organizations complement each other neatly. World Pantheism shares the values of the UU Seven Principles. We are strongly committed to religious freedom, separation of church and state, religious tolerance and the teaching of science free from religious interference. We filed afriend-of-court brief in the US Supreme Court case, opposing the under God wording in the Pledge.

We have collected more signatures for UNESCOs Manifesto for Peace and Non-Violence than any other US voluntary organization.

We are signatories of the Earth Charter. We endorse and greatly expand on the Unitarian Universalist seventh principle Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Active care for the environment is a central part of our ethic, along with human and animal rights. We aresaving rainforest via EcologyFund faster than any other religious or environmental group.

Many Unitarian Universalists, including ministers, are members and friends of the World Pantheist Movement. WPM members who belong to UU churches in some cases run courses on pantheism or pantheist services or regular small group meetings of pantheists. The WPM offers manyresources for Unitarian Universalists interested in pantheist services or groups.

Unitarian Universalism is a context where you meet sensible sociable tolerant people with varying religious philosophies for shared spiritual exploration and social action. But Unitarian Universalist congregations are focused more on broad spiritual exploration and social justice, and UUism in itself does not offer answers to lifes ultimate questions. Many people need both a social context AND a belief context in order to feel comfortable with their place in the universe.

With its special focus on Nature and Naturalism, World Pantheism can be considered as one of the main flavors of Unitarian Universalism, such as UU Buddhism, Religious Humanism, Unitarian Universalist Paganism and so on. If you consider yourself an atheist or humanist with spiritual feelings and a deep love of nature or if you are a pagan who enjoys nature-oriented celebration but does not believe in the literal reality of gods, spirits and magick then World Pantheism may be the spiritual context you are looking for.

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Unitarian Universalism and Pantheism World Pantheism

Gratitude So Burdensome? – First Things

Anthony Kronman thinks that Christianity contains the seeds of its own undoing. A born-again pagan and former dean of Yale Law, Kronman argues that the Incarnation, which seems to link God with the world in unimaginable intimacy, ends up separating us from God.

Kronmans critique, presented in the opening chapters of his mammoth Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, turns on the Christian understanding of gift and gratitude. God saves by giving the infinite gift of his Son, and that infinite gift demands a return of perfect thanks, as limitless as the gifts of love he bestows upon us.

At the same time, Christianity insists that we are wholly incapable of offering a fitting return gift. In fact, the very thought that we might be able to make an adequate return is an act of pride, humanitys original sin. To imagine that we can smooth over the asymmetry between divine Giver and human recipient only adds to our misery. Christianity evokes the desire forand demandsinfinite gratitude, only to frustrate that desire.

In this respect, Christian gratitude functions differently than does gratitude in social life. I cant make a gift of equal magnitude to repay my parents for what they have given me, since they have given me life itself. But I can make a return of equal value with a gift of comparable value to those who follow me. I can pay it forward, partly by having children of my own, and so balance the books with Mom and Pop.

Christian gratitude also differs from gratitude in the other Abrahamic religions. Ancient Israelites knew they were infinitely less powerful than Yahweh, yet he had bound himself by covenant, which put the Israelites in the position of being able to complainas they often didthat their partner had forgotten them or was neglecting his duties. The Incarnation raises the stakes, rousing intense feelings of dependence on Gods undeserved love while eliminating the possibility of a satisfying response.

Unrequited gratitude stirs us to rage, envy, and rebellion. To preserve the primacy of Gods gift, theologians make God vanish into a faceless Kantian transcendental. As God retreats from the world, we take over his earlier role as creator and savior. Christianity gives birth to humanism, then to nihilism, a contempt for this world that arises from wistfulness for an other world that, we eventually learn, never existed. Beyond Christianity and nihilism lies paganism, Kronmans Spinozist pantheism.

Theres an internal contradiction in Kronmans account of gratitude. He distinguishes sharply between entitlement and gift, linking the former with rights and the latter with undeserved love that reveals our abysmal dependence. Armed with rights, I can argue for fair treatment. Love, however, has no arguments at all. I have no claim on anyones love and no right to complain that Ive been deprived of what is mine if I dont get it. Its a peculiar idea of love: Does my wife have no grounds for complaint if I have an affair? And it contradicts what he says about gratitude: If a gift is an expression of love, how can it impose any obligation of gratitude? Where does the giver get his arguments?

Beyond that, the Christianity Kronman describes isnt the Christianity taught by generations and practiced by millions. According to Kronman, God cannot have a body or a face. Orthodox Christians confess that God has shown himself in the human face of Jesus. In Kronmans Christianity, the idea of analogy between God and creation is a brief Augustinian aberration; in fact, however, analogy is a central theme of theology from the patristic age to the present. Kronman writes of the psychologically unbearable demand that we acknowledge our complete dependence on God, but for Christians its so easy a yoke that its not a burden at all.

Kronman stresses again and again that the central meaning of the cross is that I can never measure up to [the gifts] he has given me. He cites no theologians to support this characterization, and no wonder. Its flat wrong. Jesus bears burdens. The cross is, in David Bentley Harts lovely phrase, a gift exceeding every debt. Its the Sons perfect human return of thanks.

To assume that we have to respond to God with an equal gift is already to resent that God is the source of being. Kronman claims to show that the unbearable burden of Christian gratitude produces envy toward God. In reality, Kronmans account begins from envy, from the Nietzschean dictum, There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He. And, as a born-again pantheist, Kronman can say what Nietzsche couldnt: I am He.

Peter J. Leithart is President ofTheopolis Institute.

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Gratitude So Burdensome? - First Things

Staying power: a poet’s place in God’s agenda – National Catholic Reporter

Milosz's poems suggest that he leaned towards Lithuania's mix of magic, pantheism and Christian mysticism. He was especially close to his maternal grandmother,Jozefa, who spent hours in prayer. Milosz later learned that her piety was blended with superstition.

Writing his first poem at 13, he published approximately 25 books, ending withAbout Journeys Through Time, a book of essays. Three other books were issued posthumously, includingNew and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, which was reprinted in April 2017.

Milosz was highly regarded for his many prose works, such as his autobiographical novel,TheIssaValley, his spiritual biography,The Land ofUlro, his reflections on literature,The Witness of Poetry, and his collection of essays refuting totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, which, he said, originated in a prayer.

Milosz wrote prose and poems about the devastation he experienced during invasions by Czarist and Soviet Russia as well as by Poland and Germany. He lived through both world wars, and afterward, his homeland was carved up and given over to the Soviets. Then, in the1990s, he witnessed the rise of the Solidarity Movement and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Through it all, he was sustained by his wife, brother, friends and faith. AsFranaszekquotes from one of Milosz's essays: "Had it not been for the Catholic faith and [being] able to pray in adulthood, I would have perished. I believed that I have a place in God's agenda, and I asked for the ability to fulfill the tasks awaiting me."

Milosz was friends with luminaries like Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II, the latter of whom corresponded with him. Another friend, Lech Walesa, said that Milosz's poems inspired the Solidarity Movement. Ultimately, Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 for clearly expressing "man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

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Staying power: a poet's place in God's agenda - National Catholic Reporter

This World as Philosophically Necessary – Patheos (blog)

In this post, I am going to consider the necessary property of God. God is often claimed to be philosophically necessary, with all other created things deemed to be contingent. I am going to challenge this prevailing idea.

First, let us consider what both terms (necessary and contingent) mean.

As mentioned, God is deemed to be necessary the fundamental foundation to reality. What might we understand by a logically necessary entity? As wiki explains:

The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in certain arguments for the existence of God, especially theontological argument, but metaphysical necessity is also one of the central concepts in late 20th centuryanalytic philosophy. Metaphysical necessity has proved a controversial concept, and criticized byDavid Hume,Immanuel Kant,J. L. Mackie, andRichard Swinburne, among others.

Metaphysical necessity is contrasted with other types of necessity. For example, the philosophers of religionJohn Hick[2]andWilliam L. Rowe[3]distinguished the following three:

While many theologians (e.g.Anselm of Canterbury,Ren Descartes, andGottfried Leibniz) considered God as logically or metaphysically necessary being, Richard Swinburne argued for factual necessity, andAlvin Plantingaargues that God is a causally necessary being. Because a factually or causally necessary being does not exist by logical necessity, it does not exist in all logically possible worlds.[4]Therefore, Swinburne used the term ultimate brute fact for the existence of God.[5]

To me, there is a distinct potential, here, of confusingthe map with the terrain. We love to use logic and words as means to describe reality, but this does not mean they necessarily (no pun intended)arereality. After all, Christian philosophers have tried to use this technique to logic God into reality and existence, to much controversy.

Lets grant God as necessary, for the sake of argument. He is a necessary entity, existent in all possible worlds (itself a controversial idea).

Okay, so we have a necessary God with necessary properties. One must really assume that his properties are also necessary otherwise the term God as being necessary is really meaningless. We then get to some form of classical theism (the properties of which I roundly criticise in my ebookThe Problem with God: Classical Theism under the Spotlight) whereby God has the necessary ideals of perfect, or maximal, power, knowledge and love.

If God, then, as a necessary being, has necessary properties, and these properties necessarily cause a decision to create in a particular way the most perfect (since all of Gods decisions must be perfect) way then Gods decision to produce this world must also be necessary. It was the perfect choice (I cant, given the constraints on God in this way, see him being able to produce all or multiple versions of creation unless these be seen as perfect in some way) to create this world.

God, in his necessary perfection, chose to create this world. And remember, without time (before the creation of spacetime) any decision to create would not be temporal or deliberative (since deliberation takes time) and would thus be instantaneous (for want of a non-temporal term). Therefore, it really does look like creation springs necessarily from a necessary god.

Ergo, this universe is also necessary.

I cannot think of a way that the universe is contingent upon God since it would exist simultaneously with God. There would be no spacetime, so God would exist in not even a temporal sense, and the universe would coexist as a necessary extension of Gods properties.

This universeisevery possible world. Or, if there are multiple worlds within the perfect creation scenario, thentheyexist in every possible world.

In a sense, arguably, if you have a necessary God, you have some form of pantheism or panentheism where the created is merely a sort of necessary extension of God.

I will formalise this into a syllogism in my next post.

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This World as Philosophically Necessary - Patheos (blog)

Star Wars’ religious imagery is more than just coincidence – Catholic Herald Online (blog)

Darth Vader and Stormtroopers at a Star Wars display during the Disney D23 EXPO 2015 held at the Anaheim Convention Center (Getty Images)

The franchise is a tale of love, sacrifice and fatherhood against hate, domination and tyranny

In our look at prominent anniversaries in 2017, the 40th anniversary of Star Wars bears noting as a significant cultural moment. The series is the most commercially successful movie franchise ever. Later this year, four decades after the first film was released in May 1977, the ninth major motion picture will be released. Its called Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. In any case, it wont be the last film, not by a long shot.

Why has it lasted so long, this series which for generations of children has provided the fantastical architecture of their imaginary play? Despite mediocre writing, it has hosted enduring stars James Earl Jones, Sir Alec Guinness and launched others, such as Harrison Ford.

From the beginning, many fans noted the religious imagery in Star Wars, far too abundant to be accidental. Sir Alec Guinness wore the garb of a monk in his turn as the elderly Obi-Wan Kenobi; Luke Skywalker, when he finally makes it as a Jedi, dresses like a young priest. Darth Vaders helmet is a stylised mitre, all the better to evoke the corrupt bishop he has become. The wicked emperor carries a staff and is attended by a court that includes attendants decked head-to-toe in cardinalatial red. The Jedi temple is a mosque-and-minaret construction. The Force itself is pantheism made palatable for a secular generation that likes to pretend that it is spiritual but not religious. Now, as the saga nears its (supposed) end, the physical setting is actually Skellig Michael, the redoubt of the Irish monks who saved civilisation.

Star Wars endures because it is an ancient story about the deepest human dramas a tale of love, sacrifice and fatherhood on the one hand, and the tragedy of hate, domination and tyranny on the other. It tests which account is a more authentic description of the path to human flourishing.

The central character is Anakin Skywalker, a young boy of preternatural abilities who has no father. The mystery of fatherhood, natural and spiritual, therefore marks the entire saga. The Jedi present the boy with the ideals of honour and duty and sacrifice in which those who have been given much are required to serve the good of all.

As a young man, Anakin rejects his Jedi masters, and the evil Emperor Palpatine offers a different vision to Anakin: those who have been given much have the power to seize more even the ultimate power to create life and cheat death. It is the way of domination, not sacrifice.

Star Wars thus poses a Hegelian question: is the primordial reality the one of the master and the slave? Does man have to choose between being dominant or dominated, in which case the purpose of life and the engine of history is the struggle between those who would be masters and those who would be slaves?

That is the way of the Dark Side, in which the desire to avenge ones own pain fuels the lust for power. Power is the only remedy for pain to hurt others before they can hurt you. In Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, the Emperor attempts to seduce Luke Skywalker, Anakins secret son, to the Dark Side. Luke is invited to kill Vader and take his place at the side of the all-powerful Emperor. It is the Hegelian dynamic of master and slave again. The slave either remains a slave to be destroyed at the masters command, or he kills the master and takes his place. It is the way of the gun or, if you will, the lightsaber.

Show no mercy is the first lesson the Emperor teaches Anakin-cum-Vader in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. There is no room for mercy in the Hegelian master-slave telling of the human story. Kill or be killed it is: the new Lord Vader massacres the innocent younglings in a slaughter that echoes the biblical figures of the Pharaoh and King Herod. Eventually the Emperor makes the same offer to Luke: kill Vader and take his place or be killed. But Vader is Lukes father, so the master-slave dynamic meets the father-son relationship.

It is striking that for a saga saturated with violence, Luke Skywalker survives into this third trilogy because of mercy and the witness of suffering. It is the suffering of the son that inspires the conversion of the father, and Vader turns against the Emperor and destroys him, at the cost of his own life. The show no mercy domination of the tyrant is finally defeated only by the medicine of mercy and the power of filial suffering to move the paternal heart.

St John Paul II observed in Crossing the Threshold of Hope that the only alternative in human relations to the Hegelian master-slave dynamic is the father-son relationship. Either the powerful oppress the weak, as tyrants oppress slaves, or the powerful one sacrifices himself for the weaker, as a father will give his life for his son. This clash of archetypes is at the heart of the Star Wars mythology.

The revelation of the Trinity teaches us that the father-son relationship is more powerful for it lies at the heart of reality. Thus the radiation of fatherhood in St John Pauls words touches all creation, even a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of Convivium.ca

This article first appeared in the August 4 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the world, go here

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Star Wars' religious imagery is more than just coincidence - Catholic Herald Online (blog)

Senryu pries open ‘The Jaws of Life’ to explore death on latest release – Maryville Daily Times

It took six years and approximating death for Wil Wright to make another full-length Senryu record.

The band, which celebrates the release of The Jaws of Life Saturday night at The Pilot Light, has been a part of the East Tennessee music scene for nearly 17 years more than half of Wrights life, ever since he started it in 2000 with percussionist Steven Rodgers, the only remaining original member of the bands lineup. In that period, Wright and Rodgers have grown up, fallen in and out and back in love, entered into marriage (Rodgers earlier this year, Wright later this month) and cobbled together a band thats been solid for nearly seven years now: brothers Andres (a multi-instrumentalist) and guitarist Dan McCormack, and bassist Zac Fallon.

I dont remember a time before Senryu, Wright told The Daily Times recently over brunch at Petes Coffee Shop in downtown Knoxville. I ring at rock n roll records. For me, its just about keeping my brain hungry, about feeding it to help make records I can stand behind and be proud of. And weve made so many Senryu records that doing it a song at a time doesnt really work. The only reason to keep making records is to explore concepts that are interesting to me.

Which brings us to death. Hes spent the past several years thinking about it, ruminations brought on by the natural rate of attrition to the circle of family and friends of a man whos racing toward the apex of life expectancys bell curve. At the outset, Wright said, he felt certain he had it figured out, which in the beginning dictated a different sort of concept. The album was going to be called Perfect Nothing, he added.

I thought I was going to make a real upbeat record about how nothing happens after you die, because thats so much more uplifting, he said. But then I started reading about pantheism and the science behind seeing the tunnel, and what I found was that writing a record about death and finding inspiration is tough. If youre here to talk about it, then you didnt die, so its difficult to do the research. So I started digging into preexisting theories, and I started to imagine a record about the last moments before you die, and the first moments after.

His research eventually led him to a sensory depravation experience in Asheville, N.C., where he was enclosed in a vault containing roughly 1,500 pounds of salt in, at most, 2 feet of water. Completely dark and soundproof, is was the closest to approaching death and the absence of the body as he could find.

Thats as close to nothing as you can get, because once you get settled in, your body vanishes, he said. Your eyes stop working, and everything physical goes. You stop feeling, you stop being aware of your breathing, your eyes stop working, your ears go. Its quiet for a minute, and then it gets really, really loud, because you just become your mind. Reducing it to the ghost in the machine, to the spark to me, thats what I believe death is.

And it left me completely baffled and more clueless than ever. What I figured out is that I dont know s---, but its so much better to admit you dont know and to just be alive.

And so the context of the record began to change. Its meditative and contemplative, which is most certainly the bands wheelhouse; with the McCormacks, Rodgers and Fallon, Wright is given a canvas on which to explore grand ideas through intricate, delicate instrumentation, and if lovely is an acceptable descriptor for Senryu, then it applies to Night of the Twisters, the albums lead-off track. But the band sheds whatever emo tendencies it may occasionally flirt with on songs like Heaven Can Wait, Dream of Nothing and the howling maelstrom that is Summer Death March, a too-painful-to-look-away tale of madness and breakdown. Wright has never flinched away from documenting his emotional turmoil through song, and while his other projects LiL iFFy and Skeleton Coast, to name a few have been personal ones, none have allowed him to document the journey of his own existence like Senryu.

This was a three-year album making process, and when the title changed, the record stopped being about the stopping and became more about the continuation, he said. The body is the wrecked car, and the end pulls whatevers left out and keeps it going. Over the course of this record, I experienced a personality death six or seven times; I was getting my perspective rocked about the death of self and rebirth, and the constant through it all was, Im making this record.

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Senryu pries open 'The Jaws of Life' to explore death on latest release - Maryville Daily Times

Is Your Christian Worldview Cohesive? – Cape May County Herald

Two weeks ago, we introduced the concept of a worldview, our set of assumptions about the way that the world works, explaining that all worldviews answer the following questions:

What is the nature of the world around us?

Why can we know anything?

How do we determine right and wrong?

What is the meaning of human history?

Last week, I analyzed the Naturalist worldview, explaining that how you answer question number one will determine how you answer question number two and so on and so forth.

I encouraged our readers to have a cohesive worldview because what we believe shapes how we live.

This week, I want to answer the above questions from a Christian perspective.

Christianity defines the essence of reality as coming from God. God always has been and always will be.

He is infinite and transcendent, completely separate and uniquely different from everything else (this is what the word holy actually means), yet at the same time, he is personal.

In the Bible, God is pictured as intimately breathing life into humanity. He is all knowing, all powerful, all present (which is different from being in all things as Pantheism embraces) and is in control of all things (sovereign).

Ultimately, He is good. Every time God creates in the first chapter of the Bible, he proclaims that his creation is good. Only a good God could make good things.

The nature of the world around us is one of a created order. God is outside of our box and has spoken, without ingredients, our existence into reality. He created everything from nothing. Additionally, He is orderly. In Genesis 1, He creates canisters and then fills canisters.

He creates the sky before filling it with birds. He creates plants before creating animals so that they have something to eat.

This underscores that he is wise, orderly, powerful, generous and good. Since God created, He is outside of our sandbox yet involved within it.

This means that the supernatural is possible. At any time he can put his finger in the sand and swirl things around.

Humans are created in Gods image. This means that we share in his characteristics which are able to be shared.

Since God is Creator, we can be creative, being called to create art, culture, language and so much more. We are personal, just like our God is personal and intimate.

We share in some transcendence, being separate from other types of the created world. We can learn, we can know right from wrong, we desire community and so much more. These attributes exist in us because they exist in God.

According to the scriptures, underscoring the reality that by chapter three of the first book in the Bible mankind rejects God and willfully enters into rebellion against him, upon death we either eternally enter into perfect relationship with him or are eternally separated from him.

This is a byproduct of our relational status with God, which is only established by faith in the God provided rescuer, Jesus Christ.

We can know anything at all because we are made in the image of an all-knowing God.

Because of Gods goodness and character made manifest through his creation, we can learn through empirical research, discover new concepts, invent new machines, and so on and so forth. Still, we cannot discover all things.

There are secret things, which belong to God, and we can only know in part (Deuteronomy 29:29).

As such, God reveals to us what he wants us to know. Since he is outside of our sandbox, he has to reveal certain things to us, and there are still some things that we will never know.

Ultimately, God has given us a glimpse past our own deductive abilities through his special revealed knowledge, revelation, which is found in Jesus Christ and in the Bible.

As created beings, we are subject to a created order and absolute standards of morality and ethics.

Gods good character is the standard of ethics, not our emotions or what we believe is good for society.

God knows best, yet we routinely reject his revealed path and his revealed ethical standards in exchange for our own ideas and design. This is what led to mankinds rejection and rebellion in Genesis 3, where the first humans did not want to go to God for the definition of good and evil but wanted to craft it for themselves.

All of that said, history is not accidental nor is it aimless. It is a linear, sequential, unfolding story of God. and it is leading towards a specific aim and purpose.

History is meaningful because it is Gods story, ultimately pointing to Jesus Christ, the one who came to rescue humanity from itself, and to the redemption of Gods people.

Do you have a question about life, family, or faith for Pastor Bill? Email RevolveNJ@gmail.com with the subject Ask Pastor Bill and your question.

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Is Your Christian Worldview Cohesive? - Cape May County Herald

‘Heretics!’ Illustrates the Contentiousness Surrounding Philosophy – PopMatters

(Princeton University Press) US: Jun 2017

The period of European modern philosophy covered in this clever and informative new book was unusually fertile. From roughly 1600 to 1700, significant philosophical positions were articulated by the likes of Rene Descartes, Bento (Baruch) Spinoza, Gottfried Liebniz, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and many others. Barring the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, this might be the most intellectually fruitful era in all of philosophy.

In this telling of the story of modern philosophy, esteemed historian of philosophy Steven Nadler, who has previously authored or edited academic books on Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Antoine Arnauld, and Jewish modern philosophy, teams with his son, illustrator Ben Nadler, to turn these complex theories into a visual journey through the history of ideas. The focus here tends to be on the scientific (Bacon, Newton, Galileo) and the epistemological/ metaphysical (Leibnizs monads, Spinozas pantheism, Cartesian knowledge and mind-body dualism) although some of the most significant developments in ethics and political philosophy (including Hobbess theory of government, Spinozas views on democracy, and Lockes influential views on property) get some coverage as well.

This story of modern ideas unfolds in the style of a comic book, with chapters (usually centered around a thinker and his critics) divided into panels on each page. The panels are generally limited to six or fewer per page, with each panel featuring expository passages and/or dialogue between these characters from the period.

Ben Nadlers art is colorful and expressive, and he has taken some pains to make these figures look like their classic depictions from historical art. Leibniz, for example, is drawn with impressively poodle-like hair and a prominent nose, much like the Christoph Bernhard Francke portrait from the early 1700s. However, Nadlers art softens their stern features and makes them more approachable and fun. By adding in plenty of humorous moments to their livesfrom Descartes , a thinking thing by definition, with a giant brain (26) to a Cartesian mind-body picnic (39) echoing the Bart Sells His Soul episode of The Simpsonsthe reader gets to laugh at some of these clever intuition pumps and thought experiments.

The anachronistic Disco Malebranche (109), for example, offers an explanation for the notoriously counter-intuitive theory of occasionalism, the view that God is the only cause and that all other apparently self-directed things (like a leisure-suit bedecked Malebranche in a disco) are moved only by the occasional decision of God to move them. Im not sure how many professors have ever used disco dancing to explain occasionalism, but it is a clever and resourceful way to present an idea that students usually respond to with blank stares and open mouths.

The combination of comic art and complex ideas is particularly helpful with some of the more arcane and confusing theories presented here. Take, for example, Leibnizs metaphysical monadology, always a head-scratcher for intro students (95-99). In the care of Nadler and Nadler, the puzzle of corporal substances and Leibnizs solution, windowless monads, is presented in a clear, visual manner that includes a cat, a volcano, a shark, and Leibniz himself. It sounds puzzling, but it makes sense, with brief and deft explanations paired with eye-catching illustrations. Spinozas solution to the mind-body problem, and the pantheism (or panentheism) that is entailed by it on pages 58-63 is another case where the illustrations serve to illuminate an often puzzling theoretical view, tying Spinozas view to Hamlets pondering of fate and free will. Its skillfully explained and depicted, and in five short pages, the view that led Spinoza to be branded a heretic is laid bare.

One of the more interesting questions this book leaves open is a meta-textual one: who or what is the intended audience? It crosses the borderlines between popular philosophy, general introduction, and academic text. It might, for example, serve as a useful introductory text (supplemented by some of the source works) for a course in modern philosophy, particularly for students with no background in philosophy at all. Its an excellent text for a non-academic audience, although the ideas and concepts discussed probably require at least a little knowledge of religious and political history. It might, with some scaffolding, be useful for younger readers who are trying to wrap their minds around the development of philosophical views in general.

The narrative arc of this story of modern philosophy is bound up in Spinozas abominable heresies and monstrous deeds (as the Herem against him claimed) and the so-called heresies of many of these modern philosophers, who shared both intellectual endeavors and a willingness to challenge the status quo. Conflicts and challenges between these figures, including bad blood between philosophers, schisms between iterations of faith, and political upheavals, dot the terrain of modern philosophy. Almost all of these figures had at least one view that was considered a heresy in the eyes of some other key figure or institution, and this willingness to put forth challenges to the prevailing views is part of the identity of philosophy in the modern era.

Given the heretical arc, it is very fitting that the book ends with an epilogue focused on Voltaires Candide. Voltaires brilliant satire took the intellectual gymnastics of modern philosophy, particularly that of Gottfried Leibnizs famous Best of All Possible Worlds theodicy, to the woodshed and gave them a beat-down. This is not to say that Nadler is trying to jump into the frayhis portrayal of these philosophical views is tempered and charitable, but also critical and questioning. Voltaire took philosophers to task, but Nadler gives them their due.

They might be heretics, but we owe them (and ourselves) the intellectual honesty to take their ideas seriously before moving on to those ideas that are less threatening and more comfortable. Its a lesson sorely lacking in our current intellectual culture, and this lovely introduction helps to present it in a historically relevant way.

Rating:

Eric Rovie teaches high school AP English in suburban Atlanta. He has also contributed to The A.V. Club and to several Chunklet publications. In his previous iteration, he was an academic philosopher and he might have edited a book and published a few articles. Originally from the Twin Cities, he worships at the altars of The Replacements, Hsker D, and The Hold Steady, as any good son of the Cities should. He re-reads The Catcher in the Rye at least once a year, but he has never tried to assassinate anyone.

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'Heretics!' Illustrates the Contentiousness Surrounding Philosophy - PopMatters