Pantheism

I am not a pantheist.  But I think pantheism is worth thinking about.  That is to say, it’s an interesting thought-experiment to ask why anyone would want to be a pantheist.

I take pantheism to be the belief that the word “God” means the totality of everything that exists - so that“God” is another word for the universe (or cosmos).  A pantheist might believe that the universe had some kind of directing mind at work in it; but equally, she might not.  And if a pantheist believed in a directing mind, then that mind would be something that existed within the universe, not something beyond the universe.  Moreover, the directing mind wouldn’t be God, but would be a part of God:  it would be God’s soul or brain, if you like, with the physical universe being God’s body.

There’s a critique of pantheism that goes like this.  Does the pantheist believe in something over and above what is shown by the natural sciences (for instance, a directing mind)?  If yes, then she’s indulging in speculation without evidence.  But if no, then what’s the point of being a pantheist?  Why not drop the word God, and just talk about the universe?  In other word, what’s the difference between pantheism and atheism?  If God is another word for “everything”, then it seems that the word “God” is effectively emptied of content, and God turns out to be nothing at all.

I think there’s more at stake than this critique would allow for.  

There’s a cluster of ways that religious people typically respond to God - for instance, involving awe, reverence, wonder.  These are partly a matter of emotion, but partly also a matter of attitude.  I think what the pantheist wants to say is that these responses are entirely right and good and appropriate, but that their proper object is the universe viewed as a whole, rather than something that’s understood as going beyond the universe.    

We often think of the difference between the religious and the non-religious person as being a difference in the facts that they believe in:  the religious person believes in an extra set of facts, and the non-religious person says that these extra beliefs are unwarranted.  What the pantheist seems to do is to believe in the same facts as everyone else, but nevertheless to take a different approach to all of the facts.  It’s like the difference between a competent musician and an excellent musician: it’s not that the latter plays a whole lot of extra notes that the former leaves out, but rather that the latter approaches all of the notes in a different way.

There’s something called “biophilia” (love of what’s alive):  the experience of feeling affinity with all of the different forms of life.  It seems to be both a common human experience, and (for some people) a kind of moral imperative - this is how we ought to feel, and various good consequences can follow if we do.  And I suspect that there is a close link between biophilia and pantheism.  But I would like to go one stage further, and talk also about ontophilia (the love of being).  This kind of love is partly about understanding yourself as embedded in a set of natural processes, not simply in a web of life: for instance, ontophilia takes delight in knowing that much of the stuff that makes up your body was formed billions of years ago, inside stars.  And it’s also about a kind of astonishment at being, the experience that David Bentley Hart describes (in chapter 3 of his book “The Experience of God”) in this way:

‘[W]e find ourselves brought to a pause by a sudden unanticipated sense of the utter uncanniness of the reality we inhabit, the startling fortuity and strangeness of everything familiar: how odd it is, and how unfathomable, that anything at all exists; how disconcerting that the world and one’s consciousness of it are there, joined in a single ineffable event.

For Hart, this kind of experience is a stepping stone towards a belief in the world-transcending God of classical theism.  But what if you didn’t make that move, while at the same time sharing in the experience that Hart describes?  It seems to me that, by that route, you could perfectly well end up embracing a form of pantheism.

As I said at the outset, I’m not a pantheist.  But I certainly don’t think that pantheism is silly, or pointless.  There are various people around (including some Quakers) who say that they are religious but not theistic: how many of them, I wonder, are pantheists?

(A footnote:  since I wrote this post, I’ve come across an article by Rupert Read, a philosopher heavily involved in the Extinction Rebellion movement, discussing pantheism in a way that’s consistent with some of the points made above.  The article is here.)