A Critique of Pantheism

Scrutinizing the Worldview That Sees God in Nature

trees illuminated at dusk, after a storm

Half a century ago, I listened to the sound of water crashing onto rocks while sitting in a forest at night, just barely seeing the glint of a half-frozen waterfall through the trees. That was the first time I sensed the presence of something divine in nature. It wasn’t the last. Yet several decades went by before I took such encounters to heart, declaring that God and nature are one in the same. I did not shed my Judeo-Christian upbringing as easily as one sheds a winter coat in the spring. I wandered through the woods, contemplated metaphysical matters, and read religious and philosophical tracts for many years before calling myself a pantheist. Even now I do so reluctantly.

In a sense I came to pantheism by default, because all other explanations of What-Is seemed inadequate. A growing mountain of scientific facts informs us that the universe has evolved, that it has not always existed the way we perceive it today. So how did it come to be? One answer is that some transcendent Being created the universe but does not participate in it. Another is that everything has come about by chance, and what we call nature is merely a random series of events. The former strikes me as suspiciously anthropomorphic, while the latter is patently absurd. Every other worldview ignores science. Every other…