Pantheism

From Philosopedia.org

PANTHEISM

• Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything.

–Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Pantheism identifies the universe with God or God with the Universe. John Toland in the 18th century used it, although ancient thinkers also had ideas of “God is all, and all is God.”

Xenophan, the ancient Hindus, the Stoics, Erigena, Eckhart, Boehme, Bruno, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, W. P. Montague, Alfred North Whitehead - all were interested in the concept and devised different interpretations of its meaning.

Joseph McCabe defined pantheism as “any theory that admits the existence of a God but denies that he is distinct from nature. The word (literally meaning ‘the All is God’) was introduced in the eighteenth century but covers a great variety of philosophies, from ancient Brahmanism or the theories of the Eleatic School in Greece to those of Spinoza, Goethe, Schelling, etc.” McCabe added that “It was a natural reaction against the old idea of a God or gods creating the world and then working miracles and giving relations to improve the work they had performed; but the nature of the union of God and the world, the spiritual and material, the infinite and the finite, etc., could not be contemplated in exact thought, and the system was more apt to appeal to poets.”

A contemporary who thinks of the totality of all the galaxies and all within that known and unknown space as being the Ultimate, a kind of super-Mother Nature, might label herself or himself as a pantheist. Particularly, adds a Manhattan wag, when viewing a beautiful sunrise or sunset.

"Hymn of the Pantheist” with words by Minot Savage and modified words and music by freethinker Warren Allen Smith, can be printed as well as heard at <http://wasm.us>.

(See entry for Charles Hartshorne, and for Pantheism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Philip L. Quinn points out that Spinoza's doctrine was that there is only one substance and it is divine - he described this substance as Deus sive natura (God or nature). Quinn added, "Pantheism is distinguished from panpsychism by the fact that panpsychists, who maintain that everything is psychic in nature, need not also hold that everything is divine." He cites Oliver L. Reiser's 1951 Nature, Man and God: A Synthesis of Pantheism and Scientific Humanism).

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