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WillowOne's Positions

Pantheism

My Positions

  1. "God is the universe" is a relabelling, not a claim. I already believe in the universe.
  2. Where pantheism adds something to naturalism (that the universe is conscious, has purposes, or is owed worship) it is false or unsupported. Where it adds nothing, it is a choice of vocabulary, and a bad one.
  3. Richard Dawkins called pantheism "sexed-up atheism". I agree, and would add that the sexing-up is exactly where the trouble starts.

Notes

  1. Spinoza. Benedict de Spinoza was excommunicated in 1656 for a God who is identical with Nature, has no will, no plans, no preferences, and no afterlife to offer. Deus sive Natura: God, or Nature, take your pick. His contemporaries saw at once that this was atheism with better manners, and they were right. Albert Einstein, asked whether he believed in God, said he believed in Spinoza's God, "who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind". That is my position too, minus the noun.
  2. The noun is the problem. "God" carries two thousand years of connotation: a person, an authority, a listener, a judge. To apply the word to the universe is to invite all of that back in through the vocabulary, and to hand the apologist a concession ("so you do believe in God") that was never made. This is the "God is love" move I describe under God: the emotional weight of the classical definition borrowed by a claim that has abandoned its content (Equivocation).
  3. Where it stops being empty, it becomes false. Some pantheists mean more: that the universe is a mind, that it intends things, that it responds to us, that it should be prayed to. There is no evidence that the universe as a whole has any mental properties, and the universe we observe behaves with precisely the indifference one would expect of something that is not thinking about us. The related claim that consciousness is fundamental to matter (panpsychism) or that matter is a product of mind (the analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup) are different claims again, with their own problems, and are set aside here. See Consciousness.
  4. The feeling is legitimate; the worship is not. The awe the pantheist feels before the night sky is real, available to everyone, and discussed under Spirituality. Worship adds a relationship, and there is nobody on the other end of it. One can be grateful for existence without someone to thank; the gratitude is a response, not a transaction.
  5. A test. Ask the pantheist what would be different if the universe were not God. If the answer is "nothing", the belief is a name. If the answer involves purposes, afterlives or answered prayers, it has become a theism and inherits every problem of one.

Sources

  • Spinoza, B., Ethics (1677), Part I, and the writ of cherem of 27 July 1656
  • Einstein, A., telegram to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, 24 April 1929
  • Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), chapter 1, "A deeply religious non-believer"

Also see