God or Nature
Unpacking the pantheistic worldview
Nature is phenomenal. From everything we can perceive in us and immediately around us to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, order dances with chaos. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the biosphere — the thin film of inextricably entwined living things that blankets this otherwise inanimate planet.
How did the simplest life form come to be in a universe that was once nothing more than an unimaginably hot plasma of subatomic particles? What is the source of those packets of genetic information that determine the structure of all living things? Why did these incredibly complex biomolecules come into existence in the first place?
The living world is constantly changing shape, constantly evolving. The individual life forms in it are constantly replicating then passing away. What is it all for?
I have asked myself these questions many times while wandering aimlessly through sprawling forests, temporarily removed from all human constructs. Completely immersed in the wild, and acutely aware of my own tenuous existence, I have sensed the divine in nature.
Divine, yes. There is no other word for it
No Other Adequate Solution
Some creative force is hard at work in the universe. It is that from which the so-called laws of nature are derived. What precisely are those laws? We human beings are still trying to figure that out.
There is a Unity, a wholeness to nature that is greater than the sum of its parts. The reductionist denial of this does not explain the apparent order that we find in the universe, particularly in living things.
No doubt there is chance at work in the evolutionary process, but all is not chaos. Natural order is not a figment of our imagination.
This is why I call myself a pantheist, for lack of a better word. I agree with the naturalist John Burroughs who once wrote:
It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called ‘pantheism,’ which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being.
Defining Pantheism
What exactly is pantheism? It is all too easy to get lost in its subtleties, its endless variations. Michael P. Levine, the author of Pantheism: A nontheistic concept of deity, considered the many definitions of pantheism and found them all swamped with redundancy. Then he said:
A simpler non-redundant definition would be that pantheism holds that “everything is divine.”
Pantheism is best understood as the view that there exists an all-inclusive divine Unity, where Unity and divinity are regarded as distinct properties which are nevertheless inextricably connected in various sways.
That comes as close as anything can to defining the term.
For a deeper understanding of pantheism, it’s best to turn to the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. In his magnum opus The Ethics, he wrote:
Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
Spinoza’s God goes way beyond the anthropomorphic God of the various Judeo-Christian religions, or anything like them. Spinoza’s concept of God is fused with nature, which he believed has no end in view. He said outright:
The eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists.
I have run this sentence through my brain many times and it still doesn’t make complete sense to me. But the core message rings out loud and clear: God or Nature. Nature spelled with a capital “N” that is. Spinoza believed, as most pantheists do, that these two words are interchangeable.
Unfortunate Confusion
The outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins found it necessary to dismiss pantheism before attacking religious belief in his book The God Delusion. He calls pantheism an Einsteinian religion, because many world-class physicists embrace this worldview as Albert Einstein did. Dawkins wrote:
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by the failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion.
He set out to discredit supernatural religion, first and foremost, and considered any deliberate confusion on the part of physicists or anyone else regarding God or religious belief to be “intellectual high treason.”
As is the tendency of so many didactic thinkers, Dawkins framed the most profound of all religious/philosophical matters in the starkest terms: black and white, us or them, atheism versus theism. But pantheism doesn’t conform to this way of looking at the world. Perhaps that is why it is despised by theists and atheists alike.
Pantheism asserts: God or Nature. Take your pick. It all comes down to the same thing.
The confusion is all in our heads. What-Is doesn’t care how we mere humans label it, or how difficult we find it to grasp. What-Is simply is.
The One, the Nameless
The 19th century Yankee philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson stated quite simply in his essay “The Oversoul”:
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
The soul in this context is the Oversoul — “the eternal ONE” he said. Emerson’s fiercest critics, his fellow ministers, called him a pantheist. Emerson’s take on nature was all moonshine to them. No doubt they would have accused him of “intellectual high treason,” just as Dawkins did Einstein, if they had thought it through.
So it goes among Western thinkers, but in the East things are significantly different. I suspect that Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism in the sixth century BCE, would not have been confused by pantheism had he ever been exposed to it. In the beginning of his seminal work Tao Te Ching, he said:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
That sounds a lot like pantheism to me, but maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I’m confused.
