Pan, Panic, Pantheism

Is God the same as the Universe?

I've been grappling with Pantheism—the concept that God and the Universe are one—for some time. It generally feels at odds with my personal understanding of reality, yet at times, it resonates deeply. This tension is perplexing. My first attempt to explore it was with Dr. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes, whose insights were invaluable. Now, I'm diving deeper with gratitude to Dr. Mary-Jane Rubenstein and her illuminating book, Pantheologies.

1. How does Pantheism differ from both classical theism and secular materialism?

Classical theism posits a singular, omnipotent, disembodied God who exists outside the material universe. Secular materialism rejects the existence of such a God and affirms the material universe as all there is. Pantheism argues that God is the universe and that this God-universe is the material-intellectual-spiritual reality that makes, sustains, and destroys all things.

2. What kind of evidence is there to support it?

Every natural science—from physics and chemistry to geology and biology to cybernetics and cosmology—attests to the immanent power of creation; that is, the emergence of new life forms (stars, mitochondria, tree roots, funghi, homo sapiens, artificial intelligence) from the relationships among old life forms. From evolution to plate tectonics to supernovae, the processes of creation, sustenance, and destruction are clearly internal to the universe itself. Of course, the immanence of these processes does not disprove the existence of a transcendent creator; most scientifically informed theists will argue that a transcendent creator is fully compatible with the operations of the natural world.

But even as none of these processes rules out an extra-cosmic creator, none of them requires one, either. In the face of such immanent accounts, there seem to be three possibilities: 1) affirm an extra-cosmic God as the source of natural processes (theism); 2) affirm natural processes as “all there is” (atheism); 3) affirm the divinity of those natural processes (pantheism). It’s not clear that any of these possibilities is more demonstrable than any of the rest. For me, then, the question is which of these metaphysical visions is ethically useful. That is, which of them most reliably grounds an appreciation for, and obligation to, the world that humans both compose and decompose?

3. Pantheism posits an underlying unity, yet our experience is of diversity. What is the metaphysical mechanism or rationale by which multiplicity arises from unity?

William James tells us there are two kinds of pantheisms. “Monistic” pantheisms posit an underlying unity and, therefore, conflict with our experience of diversity. “Pluralistic” pantheisms posit that diversity is fundamental. The “universe,” in other words, is not one—not uni at all—but rather a multiverse. James actually coined this term—not to refer to a hypothetical ensemble of universes outside our own, but to refer to our universe itself, which takes shape as a set of intricate mineral-animal-vegetal-elemental assemblages that co-create, unmake, and reassemble themselves throughout billions of years. And if you start with such plurality—in some places unified, in some places dissonant--then there’s no gap to bridge between the one and the many.

4. You quote the Zohar at the beginning of chapter 2, which indicates that it believes that all things are “pervaded by divinity.” Later in the chapter, you suggest that the Book of Genesis “clearly distinguishes between an active creator and a passive creation.” Do you see the Zohar as correcting, complementing, or subverting the plain sense of Genesis?

This reading of Genesis is not mine but that of Paula Gunn Allen, who is contrasting Genesis 1-3 with numerous Indigenous American creation stories. In those stories, the animals all help create the land that co-creates humanity. So yes, in relation to those stories, the book of Genesis installs a stark separation between creator and creature. What I love about that text from the Zohar is the way it reads Genesis as generously as possible to affirm the divinity within all things. (For what it’s worth, especially given the toggling between singular and plural nouns and verbs in Genesis 1, it’s not clear to me that there’s a “plain sense” there to subvert).

5. Pantheologies makes a fascinating connection between the god Pan, the word panic, and a (monstrous) embodied theology of contradictions: e.g., pantheism. Why is Pan a good symbol of this idea?

Pan tends to be known as the Greek god of nature. Physically, Pan is a literal monster (a thing stitched together out of other things): he’s a monstrous combination of a goat and a man, and of course, he’s also a god. Etymologically, the word “panic” refers to the fear that this goat-god instilled in travelers, as well as the frenzy into which he sent his worshippers. Greek authors liked to play with the resonance of Pan with to pan, meaning “the all.” So the word pan-theism, which means “all-god,” tends to bring to mind this playful, monstrous god of nature named Pan.

Within the history of Western theology and philosophy, the reaction to pantheism has typically been one of horrified rejection. Pantheism, in other words, instills a panic in orthodox Western thought. And if you read the anti-pantheist treatises of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, you will see that this panic is consistently a reaction to the “monstrous” combination of opposites we find in pantheist positions—namely, the combination of God and world, spirit and material, and mind and body. Insofar as these old oppositions tend to be tied to gender (God is traditionally viewed as male, the Earth as female, etc.), anti-pantheists also reliably express disgust over the pantheist feminization of God.

6. Many of the ideas in the book seem rooted in contemporary sociological concerns, such as gender, race, and class. It seems to suggest that Pantheism is better suited to address these issues than other theologies. Do you see it that way? If so, does that make it more likely to be true, or just more useful?

All God-talk (theology) is limited to the metaphors of its day. When people refer to God as “Father” or “King” or “the Rock of Ages”—these are all metaphors. They signify qualities like love, sovereignty, and eternity; but for all that, God is not literally a father or a king or a rock. The omnipersonal, intercreative vision of a pluralist pantheist offers more and more mobile metaphors for divinity, and as such, I think it’s helpful from an anti-racist, feminist, and ecological perspective. That usefulness doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s less likely than the old metaphorical system to collapse into literalism. A person’s capacity to see divinity at work in the microbes who consume oil spills, recreating the Gulf of Mexico, will not likely lead that person to say, “God is a bacterium; period, paragraph.”

7. In discussing the notion of Gaia, you quote biologist Lynn Margulis, who said that “the planet will become uninhabitable for even the whitest and wealthiest bipeds…Gaia will be far better off once she is rid of the ‘upright mammalian weeds’ to which homosapiens amount.” Could it be that some of the strong reactions against Pantheism are that it tends to lead down a road like this, to the devaluation of all of humanity in favor of an abstract and amoral “nature?”

I’m not sure that a pluralist pantheism is either abstract or amoral. Rather, it tries to see anything that is from the perspectives of the numerous life-forms that compose it. In this sense, “nature” isn’t amoral; it’s multiply moral. There are decisions that benefit fish but hurt algae; decisions that benefit foxes but hurt rabbits; decisions that benefit some humans but hurt others; and, of course, there are decisions that benefit some humans but hurt the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, land creatures, water-creatures, mountaintops, etc.

From my perspective, a pluralist pantheism should call to mind the—sometimes conflicting, but often consonant—needs of all these various Earth-makers. And yes, it should chasten the greediest humans and insist that no one benefits from the relentless pursuit of human comfort and profit. But the alternative to this relentless pursuit isn’t human extinction. The alternative is learning to live in relationship to and balance with, and reciprocal care for, the rest of the creative-created world.

8. If the Universe began to exist, does that pose an insurmountable problem for Pantheism?

No more of a problem than it poses for theism! (“What was God God of “before” the universe existed?”)

9. Is there no good empirical and philosophical evidence that the Universe began to exist?

Sure there is—it’s called the Big Bang Hypothesis, and so far, it’s the best theory we’ve got. But about half of modern cosmologists are now fairly certain that our universe is not the only universe; rather, they argue, it has emerged from a larger meta-verse of actual or virtual universes—and in that sense, they’re insisting that the Big Bang is not the beginning of all-that-is. In other words, the metaverse or the multiverse might well be eternal. But either way, I don’t think the universe’s eternity or creation-in-time provides evidence for or against an extra-cosmic God.

10. Spinoza uses the problem of the infinite regress to challenge duality (as duality implies contingency). Why would he not apply that same reasoning to the likelihood of an origin of the universe? Not sure I’ve got anything helpful to say here! I wouldn’t affirm Spinoza’s physical cosmology as the best bet for modern physics or theology.