Naturalistic pantheism, also known as scientific pantheism, is a form of pantheism. It has been used in various ways such as to relate God or divinity with concrete things, [1] determinism, [2] or the substance of the universe. [3] God, from these perspectives, is seen as the aggregate of all unified natural phenomena. [4] The phrase has often been associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, [5] although academics differ on how it is used. Natural pantheists believe that God is the entirety of the universe and that God speaks through the scientific process.
The term “pantheism" is derived from Greek words pan (Greek: πᾶν) meaning "all" and theos (θεός) meaning God. It was coined by Joseph Raphson in his work De spatio reali, published in 1697. [6] The term was introduced to English by Irish writer John Toland in his 1705 work Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist that described pantheism as the "opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." [7]
The term "naturalistic" derives from the word "naturalism", which has several meanings in philosophy and aesthetics. [8] In philosophy the term frequently denotes the view that everything belongs to the world of nature and can be studied with the methods appropriate for studying that world, i.e. the sciences. [9] It generally implies an absence of belief in supernatural beings. [8]
Joseph Needham, a modern British scholar of Chinese philosophy and science, has identified Taoism and the technology of the Wuxing as "a naturalistic pantheism which emphasizes the unity and spontaneity of the operations of Nature." [10] This philosophy can be dated to the late 4th century BCE. [11]
The Hellenistic Greek philosophical school of Stoicism (which started in the early 3rd century BCE) [12] rejected the dualist idea of the separate ideal/conscious and material realms, and identified the substance of God with the entire cosmos and heaven. [3] However, not all philosophers who did so can be classified as naturalistic pantheists. [13]
Naturalistic pantheism was expressed by various thinkers, [5] including Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for his views. [14] However, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza became particularly known for it. [5]
Possibly drawing upon the ideas of Descartes, [15] Baruch Spinoza connected God and Nature through the phrase deus sive natura ("God, or Nature"), [16] [17] [18] making him the father of classical pantheism. He relied upon rationalism rather than the more intuitive, contemplative approach to understanding and integration of the traditional technologies of Yin and Yang (deductive thinking) and the application of five phase protoscientific theory of Chinese Taoist traditions. [19]
Spinoza's philosophy, sometimes known as Spinozism, has been understood in a number of ways, and caused disagreements such as the Pantheism controversy. However, many scholars have considered it to be a form of naturalistic pantheism. This has included viewing the pantheistic unity as natural. [20] [ self-published source ] Others focus on the deterministic aspect of naturalism. [21] [22] Spinoza inspired a number of other pantheists, with varying degrees of idealism towards nature. [23] [24] However, Spinoza's influence in his own time was limited. [25] [26]
Scholars have considered Spinoza the founder of a line of naturalistic pantheism, though not necessarily the only one. [27] [28] [29]
In 1705 the Irish writer John Toland endorsed a form of pantheism in which the God-soul is identical with the material universe. [7] [30] [31]
German naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919 [32] ) proposed a monistic pantheism in which the idea of God is identical with that of nature or substance. [33]
The World Pantheist Movement, started in 1999, describes Naturalistic Pantheism as including reverence for the universe, realism, strong naturalism, and respect for reason and the scientific method as methods of understanding the world. [34] Paul Harrison considers its position the closest modern equivalent to Toland's. [7]
Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin. As a forerunner of the Age of Reason, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century Rationalism, and contemporary conceptions of the self and the universe, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. He was influenced by Stoicism, Maimonides, Niccolò Machiavelli, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and a variety of heterodox Christian thinkers of his day.
Monism attributes oneness or singleness to a concept, such as to existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:
Pantheism is the philosophical religious belief that reality, the universe, and nature are identical to divinity or a supreme entity. The physical universe is thus understood as an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time. The term pantheist designates one who holds both that everything constitutes a unity and that this unity is divine, consisting of an all-encompassing, manifested god or goddess. All astronomical objects are thence viewed as parts of a sole deity.
Panentheism /pænenˈθiːɪzəm/ is the belief that the divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828 to distinguish the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) about the relation of God and the universe from the supposed pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.
Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity. In common parlance, or when contrasted with deism, the term often describes the philosophical conception of God that is found in classical theism—or conception found in monotheism—or gods found in polytheistic religions—or a belief in God or gods without the rejection of revelation as is characteristic of deism.
Classical Pantheism, as defined by Charles Hartshorne in 1953, is the theological deterministic philosophies of pantheists such as Baruch Spinoza and the Stoics. Hartshorne sought to distinguish panentheism, which rejects determinism, from deterministic pantheism.
Religious naturalism is a framework for religious orientation in which a naturalist worldview is used to respond to types of questions and aspirations that are parts of many religions. It has been described as "a perspective that finds religious meaning in the natural world."
Natural religion most frequently means the "religion of nature", in which God, the soul, spirits, and all objects of the supernatural are considered as part of nature and not separate from it. Conversely, it is also used in philosophy to describe some aspects of religion that are said to be knowable apart from divine revelation through logic and reason alone, for example, the existence of the unmoved Mover, the first cause of the universe.
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written in Latin by Baruch Spinoza. It was written between 1661 and 1675 and was first published posthumously in 1677.
Theopanism was first used as a technical term by the Jesuits in elucidating Hinduism.
[O]ne may distinguish pantheism, which imagines the world as an absolute being, from theopanism, which conceives of God as the true spiritual reality from which everything emanates: "God becomes everything", necessarily, incessantly, without beginning and without end. Theopanism is the most common way in which Hindu philosophy conceives God and the world.
In the history of religion and philosophy, deus otiosus is the belief in a creator God who has entirely withdrawn from governing the universe after creating it or is no longer involved in its daily operation. In Western philosophy the concept of deus otiosus has been associated with Deism since the 17th century, although not a core tenet as often thought.
Robert S. Corrington is an American philosopher and author of many books exploring human interpretation of the universe as well as biographies on C.S. Peirce and Wilhelm Reich. He is currently the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Before that he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is a Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
The pantheism controversy, also known as Spinozismusstreit or Spinozastreit, refers to the 1780s debates in German intellectual life that discussed the merits of Spinoza's "pantheistic" conception of God. What became a wider cultural debate in German society started as a personal disagreement between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn over their understanding of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Spinozist beliefs. The difference of opinion became a wider public controversy when, in 1785, Jacobi published his correspondence with Mendelssohn. This started a series of public discussions on the matter.
Spiritual naturalism, or naturalistic spirituality combines a naturalist philosophy with spirituality. Spiritual naturalism may have first been proposed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1895 in his book En Route.
Coming into prominence as a writer during the 1870s, Huysmans quickly established himself among a rising group of writers, the so-called Naturalist school, of whom Émile Zola was the acknowledged head...With Là-bas (1891), a novel which reflected the aesthetics of the spiritualist revival and the contemporary interest in the occult, Huysmans formulated for the first time an aesthetic theory which sought to synthesize the mundane and the transcendent: "spiritual Naturalism".
Deism, the religious attitude typical of the Enlightenment, especially in France and England, holds that the only way the existence of God can be proven is to combine the application of reason with observation of the world. A Deist is defined as "One who believes in the existence of a God or Supreme Being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason." Deism was often synonymous with so-called natural religion because its principles are drawn from nature and human reasoning. In contrast to Deism there are many cultural religions or revealed religions, such as Judaism, Trinitarian Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others, which believe in supernatural intervention of God in the world; while Deism denies any supernatural intervention and emphasizes that the world is operated by natural laws of the Supreme Being.
The belief that God became the Universe is a theological doctrine that has been developed several times historically, and holds that the creator of the universe actually became the universe. Historically, for versions of this theory where God has ceased to exist or to act as a separate and conscious entity, some have used the term pandeism, which combines aspects of pantheism and deism, to refer to such a theology. A similar concept is panentheism, which has the creator become the universe only in part, but remain in some other part transcendent to it, as well. Hindu texts like the Mandukya Upanishad speak of the undivided one which became the universe.
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe. In its primary sense it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. Philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism.
A number of Christian writers have examined the concept of pandeism, and these have generally found it to be inconsistent with core principles of Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, condemned the Periphyseon of John Scotus Eriugena, later identified by physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein as presenting a pandeistic theology, as appearing to obscure the separation of God and creation. The Church similarly condemned elements of the thought of Giordano Bruno which Weinstein and others determined to be pandeistic.
The World Pantheist Movement (WPM) is an international organization which promotes naturalistic pantheism, a philosophy which asserts that spirituality should be centered on nature. Paul Harrison is their founder and president.
Naturalistic pantheism anticipates Bruno, Spinoza, Toland, Einstein (not Schelling, Hegel) defining God in terms of Nature should not be construed as naturalistic pantheism. By "Nature" Eriugena means something like "Reality" rather than the mere physical universe. "But his position is in fact closer to the naturalistic pantheism of ancient Stoicism. The World-Soul is not a higher reality that generates the physical world but the rational causal agent immanent in the world"...
Spinoza = naturalistic pantheism — universe as a "single, interconnected, and solely natural substance."[ self-published source ]
Naturalistic pantheism "denies finite freedom" as in Spinoza (as opposed to idealistic type of pantheism which identifies God with the universal essence of being)...