Pantheism: The Worship Of Everything

Oxford defines the term “pantheism” as, “The belief that God is present in all things.” From some of its advocates, we receive these quotes.

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) wrote, “I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.”

Paul Harrison (born 1945) wrote, “When we say that the cosmos is divine, we mean it with just as much conviction and emotion as believers say that their god is God.” He further wrote, “Pantheism revels in the beauty of nature and the night sky, and is full of wonder at their mystery and power.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677 AD) wrote, “Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. God is the indwelling, and not the transient cause of all things.”

Interestingly, Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wrote, “Pantheism is sexed up atheism.”

What then, can be said of Pantheism? It is the belief that God is in all things, or that all things are a part of God. The cosmos is a divine thing; nature itself is a divine thing. Carl Sagan was once quoted as writing, “If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars?” So then, an admission to reverencing the universe as something divine, tantamount to worshiping the personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is a tacit confession of Pantheism.

Is Pantheism logical or tenable? Is it compatible with a personal, living God as Scripture reveals? Is reverencing the universe, or the suns and stars as Carl Sagan suggested, similar to the faith of orthodox Christianity? Moreover, what does the adherent to such beliefs gain from their faith?

Before contending with the questions posed, let us consider Pantheism’s advocates, and how the Bible would answer their arguments for embracing nature and the cosmos as divine. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who reigned from 161 to 180 AD and also a Stoic philosopher, believed in the divinity of the cosmos. He postulates that mankind is linked to the cosmos. Materially yes, humanity is tethered to the universe. We live on earth, dwelling on a planet in the Milky Way, circling the Sun, in a small corner of a very vast expanse called outer space. The Bible referred to it as the heavens, which began with the Earth’s atmosphere and spread to the farthest flung corners of creation. However, Marcus meant something more. The cosmos wasn’t something seen or studied; it was something to be believed in. He placed his faith in the cosmos. Then he explained that because of this he considered nature (which begot the cosmos?) his god. Furthermore, it is sacred, and walking through the woods was like treading on holy ground. Yet the emperor ate from the field and cut down trees aplenty to advance his empire.

Did this mean that man was free to exploit God for the benefit of his race? Temples and cathedrals were destroyed to make buildings, ships, tools, and more. Were these objects then construed as divine? Or was mankind, who could freely and with impunity pillage God’s person, greater than the proffered entity he was meant to reverence? Would that not mean that man, who dwelt within the cosmos, was not linked to it as much as he was master of it? He could manipulate it as no animal on earth could. What benefit does man gain from worshiping a God we burn in a fire or fashion a door from? The cosmos in its great expanse can dwarf the senses. But does this mean that nature birthed it, and that we must reverence the natural order as divine? The motions of planets and the power of enormous, fiery stars obey the laws of nature and act accordingly. But nature is not a sentient thing. Ascribing laws to nature does not assert that nature wrote such laws; it is a given that nature obeys them. In other words, the cosmos and all it contains is obedient to a law giver that constrained it.

Paul Harrison, by his own admission, contrasts Christianity to Pantheism, or cosmos worship. In his own words, such people believe the cosmos is divine with the same conviction and emotion Christians believe that God is. The crux then falls on the word, “divine.” When the saints speak of God’s divinity we are addressing His intrinsic deity. God is the law giver Marcus Aerelius was seeking, and confused nature for. He is a being outside of the changeable, law-bound universe. He created time/space/matter, and may interact with the race of man, but He is not a part of His creation. He is divine, separate from the universe, and the people that inhabit it. Were He part of the cosmos, He would be bound to the laws of nature, including the famous laws of thermodynamics. In short, God would be doomed to lessen and perish, because the universe is heading toward a higher state of entropy and inevitable death. At the very least then, God would be subject to the same fate as man, and rather than being humanity’s Savior and Creator, would find Himself a powerless victim of the laws that governed Him and all creation. If man was, at the least, on equal footing with this God then it would benefit us nothing to acknowledge, much less worship, Him. If the extent of Pantheistic divinity ends with the borders of the material universe, then positing that the universe is God is not conducive to worship; rather I would assert that it is more conducive to overwhelming hopelessness, because like us, He is going down with the ship. Such a God knows nothing of the eternal, holy nature the Bible ascribes to Him. This God would be an agent of anarchy as stars collapsed, planets die, and natural disasters abound. It reveals a careless, capricious and ineffective deity. Moreover, it reveals a deity who does not hear or answer man’s prayers and pleas because it is not conscious. So man, who possesses what God does not, and may articulate in ways God cannot, proves again to be God’s better.

Baruch Spinoza firmly believed that God is in all things, or in his words, that God is the indwelling, or all things are in Him. In other words, the universe and all of its constituent parts represent God as a whole. He rejects the Scriptural explanation that God caused material reality to exist while outside of creation, calling this transient causation. Rather God indwells all things, and therefore is part of all things. This idea implies that mankind, certainly a part of all things, is also a part of God. We are, one and all, in God, and therefore reflect God. The pious church goer and the serial killer are all part of God. The pristine lake and rotting carcass are reflections of some part of God. The cold void of space, a man dying of cancer, et al. In this instance God is not greater than the sum of His parts because, by claiming that He is inexorably part of all of creation, we may only know Him through His various parts. So the natural world of kill or be killed reflects who God is. And the unnatural world of human oppressor/oppressee also reveals God. This truly is Pantheism in its worst incarnation because the subscriber must adhere to this tenet, and therefore believe that all that is done is not God’s will, but an expression of God Himself. Worse, if all that is represents God, this virulent Pantheism destroys individuality, because who I am, or believe myself to be is merely another expression for God, who is the sum of the universe. It would be a convenient platform for the religion of self deification, to be sure. I could even perceive the Antichrist using a form of this when he reveals himself in the Jewish temple as the purest expression of God’s person to have come from humanity.

Finally, Richard Dawkins weighs in with a very interesting comment. Famously Atheistic, Dawkins says of Pantheism, that it is sexed up–or more titillating–Atheism. In other words, Dawkins finds no overtly religious undertones in Pantheism that would threaten the Atheistic mindset. Worshiping the cosmos is tantamount to worship nothing, because the cosmos lacks sentience and consciousness. The cosmos won’t answer prayers or deliver from sin or judgment. In fact, sin and judgment are moot points within Pantheism since God is a part of creation, and so is what Christians term sin. Sin, at best, is a lapse of sound judgment leading to an ethical error. At worst it is not recognized at all, but viewed subjectively because the God of pantheism knows nothing of morality or good and evil: terms that have no objectively meaningful application in such a system. Dawkins is intelligent enough to recognize that Pantheism can do his own worldview no harm since it deals with natural, not supernatural causation. The spiritual state of mankind before a holy God that is both Savior and Creator have no place in a religious belief that posits God as the cosmos, or replaces a living God, separate from His creation with the universe. One’s moral compass comes from within then, perhaps tempered by whatever morality is currently and culturally en vogue; but it never delves into the eternal consequences of recognizing and believing in the incarnate Son of God, who did become a part of the material universe for 30+ years, to set people free from the hopeless pursuits of finding our religious fix without having to acknowledge our wicked and fallen estate.

So, is Pantheism logical or tenable? I think some serious mental gymnastics need to be done to comfortably accept such a religious belief. At best worshiping the cosmos (of which humanity is part) could lead to praying to stars or finding a rock holy. If this were the case should humanity not refrain from any type of killing, be it babies, the elderly, or even mosquitos, since these too are a part of the cosmos adherents claim to reverence? At worst it can easily promote nihilism or self deification. Worshiping nature begets accepting what is natural. That would be a core tenet. What each person does by nature then (no matter how heinous), could be construed as a form of worship. Moreover, looking to the vast, empty, lifeless expanse of outer space as an expression of a higher presence demeans religious worship. Christians worship God because He is, in every way, greater than those that worship Him. He commands worship because He is the rule maker who knows what is right, best, and safe for His creatures. He calls on us to place our faith in Him so He may lead us in peace and safety through this transient life into eternity. The universe offers nothing, quite literally because it has nothing to offer a race of beings quantifiably greater than it since we can express, articulate, emote and abstract, whereas it cannot. We would condescend to shower adoration on something that cannot receive it. It is the same idolatry the Israelites dealt with in ancient times when they fashioned a god out of wood or stone and worshiped it, after burning the remainder in the fire.

 Is it compatible with a personal, living God as Scripture reveals? In short, no; no it is not. The God of the Bible is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient. He is eternal, holy, just, and a God of love. Nature knows nothing of these concepts so it cannot emulate them. Carl Sagan’s strange admonition to worship stars because they are greater than us makes no sense. Spatially they are greater, but they are nuclear reactors, whereas humanity is a thinking, emotional, reasoning being. The cosmos is not compatible with a holy God because God is a Spirit; something utterly alien to the natural order. He is not material, but spiritual, having become material and entering our time/space/matter world in the person of Jesus Christ. The reason God appeals to mankind is that we, one and all without exception, know in our hearts that we are spiritual beings housed in flesh. We long for God’s presence in our life. But if the cosmos is in fact God, then that longing is sated long before we suffer its first pangs. As the apostle once asked, why does one hope for what he already sees?

Is reverencing the universe, or the suns and stars as Carl Sagan suggested, similar to the faith of orthodox Christianity? Moreover, what does the adherent to such beliefs gain from their faith? Again, the short answer is absolutely no. In fact the Bible calls it idolatry, because we are worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. We recognize the majesty of the created order, but rather than ascribing to God the glory due His works, we posit that the universe itself is divine, and self perpetuating. The Psalmist said that the heavens (outer space) declared God’s glory, and the works of His hands were like a universal language every tribe on earth could understand. But not wanting the uncomfortable truth of holiness and sin, accountability and judgment for our choices, we cleansed the universe of God’s presence and made the creation itself divine. Yet even secular science declares that universal death is coming eventually so one must ask: is God dying? The God presented by ancient and modern Pantheists is a far cry from the true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. As far as anything beneficial, it perhaps provides a placebo effect. A placebo effect is defined thus: “A phenomenon where a person experiences a perceived improvement in their condition after receiving a treatment that has no therapeutic effect, simply because they believe it will work.” The adherent receives the comfort of religion, without the discomfort of the condemnation the Bible states mankind labors beneath, being dead in sin and trespasses. These inconvenient truths hinder our ability to derive pleasure from any source that catches our attention, while likewise releasing us from the tethers of objective truth, leaving us comfortably in the swamp of moral relativism. What does such belief provide? It provides what many Atheists have accused Christians of: escapism, divorced from reason or evidence. May the Lord in His infinite mercy deliver those entrenched in this dangerous and futile thinking, so they may be saved by the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.