Pantheism is the belief that reality is identical with divinity, or that all-things compose an all-encompassing, immanent god. Pantheist belief does not recognize a distinct personal god, anthropomorphic
or otherwise, but instead characterizes a broad range of doctrines
differing in forms of relationships between reality and divinity.
Pantheistic concepts date back thousands of years, and pantheistic
elements have been identified in various religious traditions. The term pantheism was coined by mathematician Joseph Raphson in 1697 and has since been used to describe the beliefs of a variety of people and organizations.
Pantheism derives from the Greek πᾶν pan (meaning "all, of everything") and θεός theos (meaning "god, divine"). The first known combination of these roots appears in Latin, in Joseph Raphson's 1697 book De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito, where he refers to the "pantheismus" of Spinoza and others.
It was subsequently translated into English as "pantheism" in 1702.
Definitions
There are numerous definitions of pantheism. Some consider it a theological and philosophical position concerning God.
Pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God. All forms of reality may then be considered either modes of that Being, or identical with it.
Some hold that pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position. To
them, pantheism is the view that the Universe (in the sense of the
totality of all existence) and God are identical (implying a denial of
the personality and transcendence of God).
History
Pre-modern times
Early traces of pantheist thought can be found within the theology of the ancient Greek religion of Orphism, where pan (the all) is made cognate with the creator God Phanes (symbolizing the universe), and with Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes.
The Catholic Church has long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy. Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar who evangelized about a transcendent and infinite God, was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Roman Inquisition. He has since become known as a celebrated pantheist and martyr of science, and an influence on many later thinkers.
Baruch Spinoza
The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is often regarded as pantheism.
In the West, pantheism was formalized as a separate theology and
philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch
Spinoza. Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese descent raised in the Sephardi Jewish community in Amsterdam.
He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of
the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine, and was effectively
excluded from Jewish society at age 23, when the local synagogue issued a herem against him. A number of his books were published posthumously, and shortly thereafter included in the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books. The breadth and importance of Spinoza's work would not be realized for many years – as the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe.
In the posthumous Ethics,
"Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in
which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned
against themselves and destroyed entirely." In particular, he opposed René Descartes' famous mind–body dualism, the theory that the body and spirit are separate. Spinoza held the monist
view that the two are the same, and monism is a fundamental part of his
philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man," and used the
word God to describe the unity of all substance. This view influenced philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who said, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Spinoza earned praise as one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy and one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers.
Although the term "pantheism" was not coined until after his death, he
is regarded as the most celebrated advocate of the concept. Ethics was the major source from which Western pantheism spread.
Heinrich Heine, in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833–36), remarked that "I don't remember now where I read that Herder once exploded peevishly at the constant preoccupation with Spinoza, "If Goethe
would only for once pick up some other Latin book than Spinoza!" But
this applies not only to Goethe; quite a number of his friends, who
later became more or less well-known as poets, paid homage to pantheism
in their youth, and this doctrine flourished actively in German art
before it attained supremacy among us as a philosophic theory."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rejected Jacobi’s personal belief in
God as the “hollow sentiment of a child’s brain” (Goethe 15/1: 446) and,
in the "Studie nach Spinoza" (1785/86), proclaimed the identity of
existence and wholeness. When Jacobi speaks of Spinoza’s “fundamentally
stupid universe” (Jacobi [31819] 2000: 312), Goethe praises nature as
his “idol” (Goethe 14: 535).
In their The Holy Family (1844) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels note, "Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century both in its later French variety, which made matter into substance, and in deism,
which conferred on matter a more spiritual name.... Spinoza's French
school and the supporters of deism were but two sects disputing over the
true meaning of his system...."
In George Henry Lewes's words (1846), "Pantheism is as old as philosophy. It was taught in the old Greek schools — by Plato, by St. Augustine, and by the Jews.
Indeed, one may say that Pantheism, under one of its various shapes, is
the necessary consequence of all metaphysical inquiry, when pushed to
its logical limits; and from this reason do we find it in every age and
nation. The dreamy contemplative Indian, the quick versatile Greek, the
practical Roman, the quibbling Scholastic, the ardent Italian, the
lively Frenchman, and the bold Englishman, have all pronounced it as the
final truth of philosophy. Wherein consists Spinoza's originality? —
what is his merit? — are natural questions, when we see him only lead to
the same result as others had before proclaimed. His merit and
originality consist in the systematic exposition and development of that
doctrine — in his hands, for the first time, it assumes the aspect of a
science. The Greek and Indian Pantheism is a vague fanciful doctrine,
carrying with it no scientific conviction; it may be true — it looks
true — but the proof is wanting. But with Spinoza there is no choice: if
you understand his terms, admit the possibility of his science, and
seize his meaning; you can no more doubt his conclusions than you can
doubt Euclid; no mere opinion is possible, conviction only is possible."
S. M. Melamed (1933) noted, "It may be observed, however, that Spinoza was not the first prominent monist
and pantheist in modern Europe. A generation before him Bruno conveyed a
similar message to humanity. Yet Bruno is merely a beautiful episode in
the history of the human mind, while Spinoza is one of its most potent
forces. Bruno was a rhapsodist
and a poet, who was overwhelmed with artistic emotions; Spinoza,
however, was spiritus purus and in his method the prototype of the
philosopher."
18th century
The first known use of the term "pantheism" was in Latin ("pantheismus") by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito, published in 1697. Raphson begins with a distinction between atheistic "panhylists" (from the Greek roots pan, "all", and hyle,
"matter"), who believe everything is matter, and Spinozan "pantheists"
who believe in "a certain universal substance, material as well as
intelligence, that fashions all things that exist out of its own
essence."
Raphson thought that the universe was immeasurable in respect to a
human's capacity of understanding, and believed that humans would never
be able to comprehend it.
He referred to the pantheism of the Ancient Egyptians, Persians,
Syrians, Assyrians, Greek, Indians, and Jewish Kabbalists, specifically
referring to Spinoza.
The term was first used in English by a translation of Raphson's work in 1702. It was later used and popularized by Irish writer John Toland in his work of 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno, and had read Joseph Raphson's De Spatio Reali, referring to it as "the ingenious Mr. Ralphson's (sic) Book of Real Space". Like Raphson, he used the terms "pantheist" and "Spinozist" interchangeably. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society
in Latin, envisioning a pantheist society that believed, "All things in
the world are one, and one is all in all things ... what is all in all
things is God, eternal and immense, neither born nor ever to perish." He clarified his idea of pantheism in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz in 1710 when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".
In the mid-eighteenth century, the English theologian Daniel Waterland
defined pantheism this way: "It supposes God and nature, or God and the
whole universe, to be one and the same substance—one universal being;
insomuch that men's souls are only modifications of the divine
substance." In the early nineteenth century, the German theologian Julius Wegscheider defined pantheism as the belief that God and the world established by God are one and the same.
Pantheism controversy
Between 1785–89, a major controversy about Spinoza's philosophy arose between the German philosophers Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (a critic) and Moses Mendelssohn (a defender). Known in German as the Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy), it helped spread pantheism to many German thinkers.
A 1780 conversation with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing led Jacobi to a protracted study of Spinoza's works. Lessing stated that he knew no other philosophy than Spinozism.
Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinozas (1st ed. 1785, 2nd ed. 1789)
expressed his strenuous objection to a dogmatic system in philosophy,
and drew upon him the enmity of the Berlin group, led by Mendelssohn.
Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism
and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Mendelssohn disagreed
with Jacobi, saying that pantheism shares more characteristics of theism than of atheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time.
Willi Goetschel argues that Jacobi's publication significantly
shaped Spinoza's wide reception for centuries following its publication,
obscuring the nuance of Spinoza's philosophic work.
A letter written by William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner in 1886, was sold at auction for US$30,000 in 2011. In it, Herndon writes of the U.S. President's evolving religious views, which included pantheism.
"Mr. Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow of even a
shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist and a Rationalist, denying all
extraordinary – supernatural inspiration or revelation. At one time in
his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the
immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He
believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force.
Subsequent to this he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the
change he ever underwent."
The subject is understandably controversial, but the content of the
letter is consistent with Lincoln's fairly lukewarm approach to
organized religion.
Comparison with non-Christian religions
Some
19th-century theologians thought that various pre-Christian religions
and philosophies were pantheistic. They thought Pantheism was similar to
the ancient Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism) to the extent that the 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstücker
remarked that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy
which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations
and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the
Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the
fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus."
19th-century European theologians also considered Ancient
Egyptian religion to contain pantheistic elements and pointed to
Egyptian philosophy as a source of Greek Pantheism. The latter included some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander. The Stoics were pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism. The early Taoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic, although it could be more similar to Panentheism.
Cheondoism, which arose in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and Won Buddhism are also considered pantheistic. The Realist Society of Canada believes that the consciousness of the self-aware universe is reality, which is an alternative view of Pantheism.
20th century
In a letter written to Eduard Büsching (25 October 1929), after Büsching sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book Es gibt keinen Gott
("There is no God"), Einstein wrote, "We followers of Spinoza see our
God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its
soul [Beseeltheit] as it reveals itself in man and animal." According to Einstein, the book only dealt with the concept of a personal god and not the impersonal God of pantheism.
In a letter written in 1954 to philosopher Eric Gutkind, Einstein wrote
"the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of
human weaknesses."
In another letter written in 1954 he wrote "I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it
clearly." In Ideas And Opinions, published a year before his death, Einstein stated his precise conception of the word God:
Scientific research can reduce superstition by
encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and
effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of
the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all
scientific work of a higher order. [...] This firm belief, a belief
bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in
the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common
parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza).
In the late 20th century, some declared that pantheism was an underlying theology of Neopaganism, and pantheists began forming organizations devoted specifically to pantheism and treating it as a separate religion.
Albert Einstein is considered a pantheist by some commentators.
Dorion Sagan, son of famous scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan, published the 2007 book Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, co-written with his mother Lynn Margulis.
In the chapter "Truth of My Father", Sagan writes that his "father
believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature, but
as nature, equivalent to it."
In 2009, pantheism was mentioned in a Papal encyclical and in a statement on New Year's Day, 2010, criticizing pantheism for denying the superiority of humans over nature and seeing the source of man's salvation in nature.
In a 2009 review of the film Avatar, Ross Douthat described pantheism as "Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now".
There are multiple varieties of pantheism and various systems of classifying them relying upon one or more spectra or in discrete categories.
Degree of determinism
The philosopher Charles Hartshorne used the term Classical Pantheism to describe the deterministic philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, the Stoics, and other like-minded figures. Pantheism (All-is-God) is often associated with monism (All-is-One) and some have suggested that it logically implies determinism (All-is-Now). Albert Einstein explained theological determinism by stating,
"the past, present, and future are an 'illusion'". This form of
pantheism has been referred to as "extreme monism", in which – in the
words of one commentator – "God decides or determines everything,
including our supposed decisions." Other examples of determinism-inclined pantheisms include those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Hegel.
However, some have argued against treating every meaning of "unity" as an aspect of pantheism,
and there exist versions of pantheism that regard determinism as an
inaccurate or incomplete view of nature. Examples include the beliefs of
John Scotus Eriugena, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and William James.
Degree of belief
It
may also be possible to distinguish two types of pantheism, one being
more religious and the other being more philosophical. The Columbia
Encyclopedia writes of the distinction:
"If the pantheist starts with the belief that the one great
reality, eternal and infinite, is God, he sees everything finite and
temporal as but some part of God. There is nothing separate or distinct
from God, for God is the universe. If, on the other hand, the conception
taken as the foundation of the system is that the great inclusive unity
is the world itself, or the universe, God is swallowed up in that
unity, which may be designated nature."
Form of monism
A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.
Philosophers and theologians have often suggested that pantheism implies monism. Different types of monism include:
Substance monism, "the view that the apparent plurality of substances is due to different states or appearances of a single substance"
Attributive monism, "the view that whatever the number of substances, they are of a single ultimate kind"
Partial monism, "within a given realm of being (however many there may be) there is only one substance"
Existence monism, the view that there is only one concrete object token (The One, "Τὸ Ἕν" or the Monad).
Priority monism, "the whole is prior to its parts" or "the world has
parts, but the parts are dependent fragments of an integrated whole."
Property monism: the view that all properties are of a single type (e.g. only physical properties exist)
Genus monism: "the doctrine that there is a highest category; e.g., being"
Views contrasting with monism are:
Metaphysical dualism, which asserts that there are two ultimately irreconcilable substances or realities such as Good and Evil, for example, Manichaeism,
Metaphysical pluralism, which asserts three or more fundamental substances or realities.
Nihilism, negates any of the above categories (substances, properties, concrete objects, etc.).
Monism in modern philosophy of mind can be divided into three broad categories:
Idealism, phenomenalism, or mentalistic monism, which holds that only mind or spirit is real
Neutral monism, which holds that one sort of thing fundamentally exists, to which both the mental and the physical can be reduced
Material monism (also called Physicalism and materialism), which holds that only the physical is real, and that the mental or spiritual can be reduced to the physical
a. Eliminative Materialism, according to which everything is physical and mental things do not exist
b. Reductive physicalism, according to which mental things do exist and are a kind of physical thing
Certain positions do not fit easily into the above categories, such as functionalism, anomalous monism, and reflexive monism. Moreover, they do not define the meaning of "real".
Other
In 1896, J.
H. Worman, a theologian, identified seven categories of pantheism:
Mechanical or materialistic (God the mechanical unity of existence);
Ontological (fundamental unity, Spinoza); Dynamic; Psychical (God is the
soul of the world); Ethical (God is the universal moral order, Fichte);
Logical (Hegel); and Pure (absorption of God into nature, which Worman
equates with atheism).
In 1984, Paul D. Feinberg,
professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School, also identified seven: Hylozoistic; Immanentistic;
Absolutistic monistic; Relativistic monistic; Acosmic; Identity of
opposites; and Neoplatonic or emanationistic.
Demographics
Prevalence
Canadian pantheist population by percentage (2011 National Household Survey)
As of 2011, about 1000 Canadians identified their religion as "Pantheist", representing 0.003% of the population. In Ireland, Pantheism rose from 202 in 1991, to 1106 in 2002, to 1691 in 2006, 1940 in 2011. In New Zealand, there was exactly one pantheist man in 1901. By 1906, the number of pantheists in New Zealand had septupled to 7 (6 male, 1 female). This number had further risen to 366 by 2006.
In
Canada (2011), The age group with the most pantheists was age 55 to 64.
The age group with the least pantheists was children and adolescents
aged under 15, who were 0.0005% pantheist - 9 times less likely to be
pantheist than people aged 55 to 64. In Canada, there was no significant sex difference between men and women.
However, in Ireland (2011), Pantheists were more likely to be female
(1074 pantheists, 0.046% of women) than male (866 pantheists, 0.038% of
men).
Canadian pantheists by age and gender (2011)
Under 15
15 to 24
25 to 34
35 to 44
45 to 54
55 to 64
65 or older
30
(0.0005%)
165
(0.004%)
185
(0.004%)
140
(0.003%)
140
(0.003%)
205
(0.005%)
130
(0.003%)
Male
Female
500
(0.003%)
500
(0.003%)
Total
1000
(0.003%)
Related concepts
Nature worship
or nature mysticism is often conflated and confused with pantheism. It
is pointed out by at least one expert, Harold Wood, founder of the Universal Pantheist Society,
that in pantheist philosophy Spinoza's identification of God with
nature is very different from a recent idea of a self identifying
pantheist with environmental ethical concerns. His use of the word nature
to describe his worldview may be vastly different from the "nature" of
modern sciences. He and other nature mystics who also identify as
pantheists use "nature" to refer to the limited natural environment (as opposed to man-made built environment).
This use of "nature" is different from the broader use from Spinoza and
other pantheists describing natural laws and the overall phenomena of
the physical world. Nature mysticism may be compatible with pantheism
but it may also be compatible with theism and other views.
Nontheism
is an umbrella term which has been used to refer to a variety of
religions not fitting traditional theism, and under which pantheism has
been included.
Panentheism
(from Greek πᾶν (pân) "all"; ἐν (en) "in"; and θεός (theós) "God";
"all-in-God") was formally coined in Germany in the 19th century in an
attempt to offer a philosophical synthesis between traditional theism
and pantheism, stating that God is substantially omnipresent in the physical universe but also exists "apart from" or "beyond" it as its Creator and Sustainer.
Thus panentheism separates itself from pantheism, positing the extra
claim that God exists above and beyond the world as we know it.
The line between pantheism and panentheism can be blurred depending on
varying definitions of God, so there have been disagreements when
assigning particular notable figures to pantheism or panentheism.
Pandeism is another word derived from pantheism, and is characterized as a combination of reconcilable elements of pantheism and deism.
It assumes a Creator-deity that is at some point distinct from the
universe and then transforms into it, resulting in a universe similar to
the pantheistic one in present essence, but differing in origin.
Panpsychism is the philosophical view held by many pantheists that consciousness, mind, or soul is a universal feature of all things. Some pantheists also subscribe to the distinct philosophical views hylozoism (or panvitalism), the view that everything is alive, and its close neighbor animism, the view that everything has a soul or spirit.
Ideas resembling pantheism existed in East/South Asian religions before the 18th century (notably Sikhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism).
Although there is no evidence that these influenced Spinoza's work,
there is such evidence regarding other contemporary philosophers, such
as Leibniz, and later Voltaire. In the case of Hinduism, pantheistic views exist alongside panentheistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, and atheistic ones. In the case of Sikhism, stories attributed to Guru Nanak
suggest that he believed God was everywhere in the physical world, and
the Sikh tradition typically describes God as the preservative force
within the physical world, present in all material forms, each created
as a manifestation of God. However, Sikhs view God as the transcendent
creator, "immanent in the phenomenal reality of the world in the same way in which an artist can be said to be present in his art". This implies a more panentheistic position.
Spirituality and new religious movements
Pantheism is popular in modern spirituality and new religious movements, such as Neopaganism and Theosophy.
Two organizations that specify the word pantheism in their title formed
in the last quarter of the 20th century. The Universal Pantheist
Society, open to all varieties of pantheists and supportive of
environmental causes, was founded in 1975. The World Pantheist Movement is headed by Paul Harrison,
an environmentalist, writer and a former vice president of the
Universal Pantheist Society, from which he resigned in 1996. The World
Pantheist Movement was incorporated in 1999 to focus exclusively on
promoting naturalistic pantheism – a strict metaphysical naturalistic version of pantheism, considered by some a form of religious naturalism. It has been described as an example of "dark green religion" with a focus on environmental ethics.
Pantheism is the belief that reality is identical with divinity, or that all-things compose an all-encompassing, immanent god. Pantheist belief does not recognize a distinct personal god, anthropomorphic
or otherwise, but instead characterizes a broad range of doctrines
differing in forms of relationships between reality and divinity.
Pantheistic concepts date back thousands of years, and pantheistic
elements have been identified in various religious traditions. The term pantheism was coined by mathematician Joseph Raphson in 1697 and has since been used to describe the beliefs of a variety of people and organizations.
Pantheism derives from the Greek πᾶν pan (meaning "all, of everything") and θεός theos (meaning "god, divine"). The first known combination of these roots appears in Latin, in Joseph Raphson's 1697 book De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito, where he refers to the "pantheismus" of Spinoza and others.
It was subsequently translated into English as "pantheism" in 1702.
Definitions
There are numerous definitions of pantheism. Some consider it a theological and philosophical position concerning God.
Pantheism is the view that everything is part of an all-encompassing, immanent God. All forms of reality may then be considered either modes of that Being, or identical with it.
Some hold that pantheism is a non-religious philosophical position. To
them, pantheism is the view that the Universe (in the sense of the
totality of all existence) and God are identical (implying a denial of
the personality and transcendence of God).
History
Pre-modern times
Early traces of pantheist thought can be found within the theology of the ancient Greek religion of Orphism, where pan (the all) is made cognate with the creator God Phanes (symbolizing the universe), and with Zeus, after the swallowing of Phanes.
The Catholic Church has long regarded pantheistic ideas as heresy. Giordano Bruno, an Italian friar who evangelized about a transcendent and infinite God, was burned at the stake in 1600 by the Roman Inquisition. He has since become known as a celebrated pantheist and martyr of science,and an influence on many later thinkers.
Baruch Spinoza
The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is often regarded as pantheism.
In the West, pantheism was formalized as a separate theology and
philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch
Spinoza. Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese descent raised in the Sephardi Jewish community in Amsterdam.
He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of
the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine, and was effectively
excluded from Jewish society at age 23, when the local synagogue issued a herem against him. A number of his books were published posthumously, and shortly thereafter included in the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books. The breadth and importance of Spinoza's work would not be realized for many years – as the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe.
In the posthumous Ethics,
"Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in
which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned
against themselves and destroyed entirely." In particular, he opposed René Descartes' famous mind–body dualism, the theory that the body and spirit are separate. Spinoza held the monist
view that the two are the same, and monism is a fundamental part of his
philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated man," and used the
word God to describe the unity of all substance. This view influenced philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who said, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Spinoza earned praise as one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy and one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers.
Although the term "pantheism" was not coined until after his death, he
is regarded as the most celebrated advocate of the concept. Ethics was the major source from which Western pantheism spread.
Heinrich Heine, in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833–36), remarked that "I don't remember now where I read that Herder once exploded peevishly at the constant preoccupation with Spinoza, "If Goethe
would only for once pick up some other Latin book than Spinoza!" But
this applies not only to Goethe; quite a number of his friends, who
later became more or less well-known as poets, paid homage to pantheism
in their youth, and this doctrine flourished actively in German art
before it attained supremacy among us as a philosophic theory."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rejected Jacobi’s personal belief in
God as the “hollow sentiment of a child’s brain” (Goethe 15/1: 446) and,
in the "Studie nach Spinoza" (1785/86), proclaimed the identity of
existence and wholeness. When Jacobi speaks of Spinoza’s “fundamentally
stupid universe” (Jacobi [31819] 2000: 312), Goethe praises nature as
his “idol” (Goethe 14: 535).
In their The Holy Family (1844) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels note, "Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century both in its later French variety, which made matter into substance, and in deism,
which conferred on matter a more spiritual name.... Spinoza's French
school and the supporters of deism were but two sects disputing over the
true meaning of his system...."
In George Henry Lewes's words (1846), "Pantheism is as old as philosophy. It was taught in the old Greek schools — by Plato, by St. Augustine, and by the Jews.
Indeed, one may say that Pantheism, under one of its various shapes, is
the necessary consequence of all metaphysical inquiry, when pushed to
its logical limits; and from this reason do we find it in every age and
nation. The dreamy contemplative Indian, the quick versatile Greek, the
practical Roman, the quibbling Scholastic, the ardent Italian, the
lively Frenchman, and the bold Englishman, have all pronounced it as the
final truth of philosophy. Wherein consists Spinoza's originality? —
what is his merit? — are natural questions, when we see him only lead to
the same result as others had before proclaimed. His merit and
originality consist in the systematic exposition and development of that
doctrine — in his hands, for the first time, it assumes the aspect of a
science. The Greek and Indian Pantheism is a vague fanciful doctrine,
carrying with it no scientific conviction; it may be true — it looks
true — but the proof is wanting. But with Spinoza there is no choice: if
you understand his terms, admit the possibility of his science, and
seize his meaning; you can no more doubt his conclusions than you can
doubt Euclid; no mere opinion is possible, conviction only is possible."
S. M. Melamed (1933) noted, "It may be observed, however, that Spinoza was not the first prominent monist
and pantheist in modern Europe. A generation before him Bruno conveyed a
similar message to humanity. Yet Bruno is merely a beautiful episode in
the history of the human mind, while Spinoza is one of its most potent
forces. Bruno was a rhapsodist
and a poet, who was overwhelmed with artistic emotions; Spinoza,
however, was spiritus purus and in his method the prototype of the
philosopher."
18th century
The first known use of the term "pantheism" was in Latin ("pantheismus") by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson in his work De Spatio Reali seu Ente Infinito, published in 1697. Raphson begins with a distinction between atheistic "panhylists" (from the Greek roots pan, "all", and hyle,
"matter"), who believe everything is matter, and Spinozan "pantheists"
who believe in "a certain universal substance, material as well as
intelligence, that fashions all things that exist out of its own
essence."
Raphson thought that the universe was immeasurable in respect to a
human's capacity of understanding, and believed that humans would never
be able to comprehend it.
He referred to the pantheism of the Ancient Egyptians, Persians,
Syrians, Assyrians, Greek, Indians, and Jewish Kabbalists, specifically
referring to Spinoza.
The term was first used in English by a translation of Raphson's work in 1702. It was later used and popularized by Irish writer John Toland in his work of 1705 Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist. Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno, and had read Joseph Raphson's De Spatio Reali, referring to it as "the ingenious Mr. Ralphson's (sic) Book of Real Space". Like Raphson, he used the terms "pantheist" and "Spinozist" interchangeably. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society
in Latin, envisioning a pantheist society that believed, "All things in
the world are one, and one is all in all things ... what is all in all
things is God, eternal and immense, neither born nor ever to perish." He clarified his idea of pantheism in a letter to Gottfried Leibniz in 1710 when he referred to "the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe".
In the mid-eighteenth century, the English theologian Daniel Waterland
defined pantheism this way: "It supposes God and nature, or God and the
whole universe, to be one and the same substance—one universal being;
insomuch that men's souls are only modifications of the divine
substance." In the early nineteenth century, the German theologian Julius Wegscheider defined pantheism as the belief that God and the world established by God are one and the same.
Pantheism controversy
Between 1785–89, a major controversy about Spinoza's philosophy arose between the German philosophers Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (a critic) and Moses Mendelssohn (a defender). Known in German as the Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy), it helped spread pantheism to many German thinkers.
A 1780 conversation with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing led Jacobi to a protracted study of Spinoza's works. Lessing stated that he knew no other philosophy than Spinozism.
Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinozas (1st ed. 1785, 2nd ed. 1789)
expressed his strenuous objection to a dogmatic system in philosophy,
and drew upon him the enmity of the Berlin group, led by Mendelssohn.
Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism
and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Mendelssohn disagreed
with Jacobi, saying that pantheism shares more characteristics of theism than of atheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time.
Willi Goetschel argues that Jacobi's publication significantly
shaped Spinoza's wide reception for centuries following its publication,
obscuring the nuance of Spinoza's philosophic work.
A letter written by William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner in 1886, was sold at auction for US$30,000 in 2011. In it, Herndon writes of the U.S. President's evolving religious views, which included pantheism.
"Mr. Lincoln's religion is too well known to me to allow of even a
shadow of a doubt; he is or was a Theist and a Rationalist, denying all
extraordinary – supernatural inspiration or revelation. At one time in
his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the
immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He
believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force.
Subsequent to this he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the
change he ever underwent."
The subject is understandably controversial, but the content of the
letter is consistent with Lincoln's fairly lukewarm approach to
organized religion.
Comparison with non-Christian religions
Some
19th-century theologians thought that various pre-Christian religions
and philosophies were pantheistic. They thought Pantheism was similar to
the ancient Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism) to the extent that the 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstücker
remarked that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy
which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations
and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the
Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the
fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus."
19th-century European theologians also considered Ancient
Egyptian religion to contain pantheistic elements and pointed to
Egyptian philosophy as a source of Greek Pantheism. The latter included some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander. The Stoics were pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism. The early Taoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi is also sometimes considered pantheistic, although it could be more similar to Panentheism.
Cheondoism, which arose in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and Won Buddhism are also considered pantheistic. The Realist Society of Canada believes that the consciousness of the self-aware universe is reality, which is an alternative view of Pantheism.
20th century
In a letter written to Eduard Büsching (25 October 1929), after Büsching sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book Es gibt keinen Gott
("There is no God"), Einstein wrote, "We followers of Spinoza see our
God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its
soul [Beseeltheit] as it reveals itself in man and animal." According to Einstein, the book only dealt with the concept of a personal god and not the impersonal God of pantheism.
In a letter written in 1954 to philosopher Eric Gutkind, Einstein wrote
"the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of
human weaknesses."
In another letter written in 1954 he wrote "I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it
clearly." In Ideas And Opinions, published a year before his death, Einstein stated his precise conception of the word God:
Scientific research can reduce superstition by
encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and
effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of
the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all
scientific work of a higher order. [...] This firm belief, a belief
bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in
the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common
parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza).
In the late 20th century, some declared that pantheism was an underlying theology of Neopaganism, and pantheists began forming organizations devoted specifically to pantheism and treating it as a separate religion.
Albert Einstein is considered a pantheist by some commentators.
Dorion Sagan, son of famous scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan, published the 2007 book Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature, co-written with his mother Lynn Margulis.
In the chapter "Truth of My Father", Sagan writes that his "father
believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature, but
as nature, equivalent to it."
In 2009, pantheism was mentioned in a Papal encyclical and in a statement on New Year's Day, 2010, criticizing pantheism for denying the superiority of humans over nature and seeing the source of man's salvation in nature.
In a 2009 review of the film Avatar, Ross Douthat described pantheism as "Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now".
There are multiple varieties of pantheism and various systems of classifying them relying upon one or more spectra or in discrete categories.
Degree of determinism
The philosopher Charles Hartshorne used the term Classical Pantheism to describe the deterministic philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, the Stoics, and other like-minded figures. Pantheism (All-is-God) is often associated with monism (All-is-One) and some have suggested that it logically implies determinism (All-is-Now). Albert Einstein explained theological determinism by stating,
"the past, present, and future are an 'illusion'". This form of
pantheism has been referred to as "extreme monism", in which – in the
words of one commentator – "God decides or determines everything,
including our supposed decisions." Other examples of determinism-inclined pantheisms include those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Hegel.
However, some have argued against treating every meaning of "unity" as an aspect of pantheism,
and there exist versions of pantheism that regard determinism as an
inaccurate or incomplete view of nature. Examples include the beliefs of
John Scotus Eriugena, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and William James.
Degree of belief
It
may also be possible to distinguish two types of pantheism, one being
more religious and the other being more philosophical. The Columbia
Encyclopedia writes of the distinction:
"If the pantheist starts with the belief that the one great
reality, eternal and infinite, is God, he sees everything finite and
temporal as but some part of God. There is nothing separate or distinct
from God, for God is the universe. If, on the other hand, the conception
taken as the foundation of the system is that the great inclusive unity
is the world itself, or the universe, God is swallowed up in that
unity, which may be designated nature."
Form of monism
A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.
Philosophers and theologians have often suggested that pantheism implies monism. Different types of monism include:
Substance monism, "the view that the apparent plurality of substances is due to different states or appearances of a single substance"
Attributive monism, "the view that whatever the number of substances, they are of a single ultimate kind"
Partial monism, "within a given realm of being (however many there may be) there is only one substance"
Existence monism, the view that there is only one concrete object token (The One, "Τὸ Ἕν" or the Monad).
Priority monism, "the whole is prior to its parts" or "the world has
parts, but the parts are dependent fragments of an integrated whole."
Property monism: the view that all properties are of a single type (e.g. only physical properties exist)
Genus monism: "the doctrine that there is a highest category; e.g., being"
Views contrasting with monism are:
Metaphysical dualism, which asserts that there are two ultimately irreconcilable substances or realities such as Good and Evil, for example, Manichaeism,
Metaphysical pluralism, which asserts three or more fundamental substances or realities.
Nihilism, negates any of the above categories (substances, properties, concrete objects, etc.).
Monism in modern philosophy of mind can be divided into three broad categories:
Idealism, phenomenalism, or mentalistic monism, which holds that only mind or spirit is real
Neutral monism, which holds that one sort of thing fundamentally exists, to which both the mental and the physical can be reduced
Material monism (also called Physicalism and materialism), which holds that only the physical is real, and that the mental or spiritual can be reduced to the physical
a. Eliminative Materialism, according to which everything is physical and mental things do not exist
b. Reductive physicalism, according to which mental things do exist and are a kind of physical thing
Certain positions do not fit easily into the above categories, such as functionalism, anomalous monism, and reflexive monism. Moreover, they do not define the meaning of "real".
Other
In 1896, J.
H. Worman, a theologian, identified seven categories of pantheism:
Mechanical or materialistic (God the mechanical unity of existence);
Ontological (fundamental unity, Spinoza); Dynamic; Psychical (God is the
soul of the world); Ethical (God is the universal moral order, Fichte);
Logical (Hegel); and Pure (absorption of God into nature, which Worman
equates with atheism).
In 1984, Paul D. Feinberg,
professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School, also identified seven: Hylozoistic; Immanentistic;
Absolutistic monistic; Relativistic monistic; Acosmic; Identity of
opposites; and Neoplatonic or emanationistic.
Demographics
Prevalence
Canadian pantheist population by percentage (2011 National Household Survey)
As of 2011, about 1000 Canadians identified their religion as "Pantheist", representing 0.003% of the population. In Ireland, Pantheism rose from 202 in 1991, to 1106 in 2002, to 1691 in 2006, 1940 in 2011. In New Zealand, there was exactly one pantheist man in 1901. By 1906, the number of pantheists in New Zealand had septupled to 7 (6 male, 1 female). This number had further risen to 366 by 2006.
Age and gender
In
Canada (2011), The age group with the most pantheists was age 55 to 64.
The age group with the least pantheists was children and adolescents
aged under 15, who were 0.0005% pantheist - 9 times less likely to be
pantheist than people aged 55 to 64. In Canada, there was no significant sex difference between men and women.
However, in Ireland (2011), Pantheists were more likely to be female
(1074 pantheists, 0.046% of women) than male (866 pantheists, 0.038% of
men).
Canadian pantheists by age and gender (2011)
Under 15
15 to 24
25 to 34
35 to 44
45 to 54
55 to 64
65 or older
30
(0.0005%)
165
(0.004%)
185
(0.004%)
140
(0.003%)
140
(0.003%)
205
(0.005%)
130
(0.003%)
Male
Female
500
(0.003%)
500
(0.003%)
Total
1000
(0.003%)
Related concepts
Nature worship
or nature mysticism is often conflated and confused with pantheism. It
is pointed out by at least one expert, Harold Wood, founder of the Universal Pantheist Society,
that in pantheist philosophy Spinoza's identification of God with
nature is very different from a recent idea of a self identifying
pantheist with environmental ethical concerns. His use of the word nature
to describe his worldview may be vastly different from the "nature" of
modern sciences. He and other nature mystics who also identify as
pantheists use "nature" to refer to the limited natural environment (as opposed to man-made built environment).
This use of "nature" is different from the broader use from Spinoza and
other pantheists describing natural laws and the overall phenomena of
the physical world. Nature mysticism may be compatible with pantheism
but it may also be compatible with theism and other views.
Nontheism
is an umbrella term which has been used to refer to a variety of
religions not fitting traditional theism, and under which pantheism has
been included.
Panentheism
(from Greek πᾶν (pân) "all"; ἐν (en) "in"; and θεός (theós) "God";
"all-in-God") was formally coined in Germany in the 19th century in an
attempt to offer a philosophical synthesis between traditional theism
and pantheism, stating that God is substantially omnipresent in the physical universe but also exists "apart from" or "beyond" it as its Creator and Sustainer.
Thus panentheism separates itself from pantheism, positing the extra
claim that God exists above and beyond the world as we know it.
The line between pantheism and panentheism can be blurred depending on
varying definitions of God, so there have been disagreements when
assigning particular notable figures to pantheism or panentheism.
Pandeism is another word derived from pantheism, and is characterized as a combination of reconcilable elements of pantheism and deism.
It assumes a Creator-deity that is at some point distinct from the
universe and then transforms into it, resulting in a universe similar to
the pantheistic one in present essence, but differing in origin.
Panpsychism is the philosophical view held by many pantheists that consciousness, mind, or soul is a universal feature of all things. Some pantheists also subscribe to the distinct philosophical views hylozoism (or panvitalism), the view that everything is alive, and its close neighbor animism, the view that everything has a soul or spirit.
Ideas resembling pantheism existed in East/South Asian religions before the 18th century (notably Sikhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism).
Although there is no evidence that these influenced Spinoza's work,
there is such evidence regarding other contemporary philosophers, such
as Leibniz, and later Voltaire. In the case of Hinduism, pantheistic views exist alongside panentheistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, and atheistic ones. In the case of Sikhism, stories attributed to Guru Nanak
suggest that he believed God was everywhere in the physical world, and
the Sikh tradition typically describes God as the preservative force
within the physical world, present in all material forms, each created
as a manifestation of God. However, Sikhs view God as the transcendent
creator, "immanent in the phenomenal reality of the world in the same way in which an artist can be said to be present in his art". This implies a more panentheistic position.
Spirituality and new religious movements
Pantheism is popular in modern spirituality and new religious movements, such as Neopaganism and Theosophy.
Two organizations that specify the word pantheism in their title formed
in the last quarter of the 20th century. The Universal Pantheist
Society, open to all varieties of pantheists and supportive of
environmental causes, was founded in 1975. The World Pantheist Movement is headed by Paul Harrison,
an environmentalist, writer and a former vice president of the
Universal Pantheist Society, from which he resigned in 1996. The World
Pantheist Movement was incorporated in 1999 to focus exclusively on
promoting naturalistic pantheism – a strict metaphysical naturalistic version of pantheism, considered by some a form of religious naturalism. It has been described as an example of "dark green religion" with a focus on environmental ethics.
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.
Development
In mythology
Many ancient mythologies suggested that the world was created from the physical substance of a dead deity or a being of similar power. In Babylonian mythology, the young god Marduk slew Tiamat and created the known world from her body. Similarly, Norse mythology posited that Odin and his brothers, Vili and Vé defeated a frost giant, Ymir and then created the world from his skull. Chinese mythology of the Three Kingdoms
era recounts the creation of elements of the physical world (mountains,
rivers, the sun and moon, etc.) from the body of a creator called Pángǔ (盤古). Such stories did not go so far as to identify the designer of the world as being one as having used his or her own body to provide the material.
But, one such example exists in Polynesian myth, for in the islands of the Pacific, the idea of Supreme Deity manifests in a divinity that New Zealanders call Tangaroa, the HawaiiansKanaroa, the Tongans and SamoansTangaloa, the Georgian and Society islanders Taaroa.
A native poetic definition of the Creator relates: " He was; Taaroa was
his name; he abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls,
but nought answers; and alone existing, he became the universe. The
props are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa; it is thus
he himself is named."
Ancient philosophy
Religious studies professor, Francis Edward Peters traced this idea to the philosophy of the Milesians, who had also pioneered knowledge of pantheism, in his 1967 Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, noting that "[w]hat appeared... at the center of the Pythagorean tradition in philosophy, is another view of psyche that seems to owe little or nothing to the pan-vitalism or pan-deism that is the legacy of the Milesians.
Milesian philosopher Anaximander in particular favored the use of rational principles to contend that everything in the world was formed of variations of a single substance (apeiron), which had been temporarily liberated from the primal state of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,
stated that Anaximander viewed "...all coming-to-be as though it were
an illegitimate emancipation from eternal being, a wrong for which
destruction is the only penance." Anaximander was among the material monists, along with Thales, who believed that everything was composed of water, Anaximenes, who believed it was air, and Heraclitus, who believed it to be fire.
In the 9th century, Johannes Scotus Eriugena proposed in his great work, De divisione naturae (also called Periphyseon, probably completed around 867 AD), that the nature of the universe is divisible into four distinct classes:
Johannes
Scotus Eriugena was among the first to propose that God became the
universe, and did so to learn something about itself.
that which creates and is not created;
that which is created and creates;
that which is created and does not create;
that which neither is created nor creates.
The first is God as the ground or origin of all things, the last is
God as the final end or goal of all things, that into which the world of
created things ultimately returns. One particularly controversial point
made by Eriugena was that God was "nothing", in that God could not fall
into any earthly classification. Eriugena followed the argument of Pseudo-Dionysius and from neo-Platonists such as Gaius Marius Victorinus
that because God was above being, God was not a being: "So supremely
perfect is the essence of the Divinity that God is incomprehensible not
only to us but also to Himself. For if He knew Himself in any adequate
sense He should place Himself in some category of thought, which would
be to limit Himself."
Eriugena depicts God as an evolving being, developing through the
four stages that he outlines. The second and third classes together
compose the created universe, which is the manifestation of God, God in
process, Theophania; the second being the world of Platonic ideas or forms. The third is the physical manifestation of God, having evolved through the realm of ideas and made those ideas seem to be matter, and may be pantheistic or pandeistic, depending on the interference attributed to God in the universe:
[God] enters... the realm of space
and time, where the ideas become subject to multiplicity, change,
imperfection, and decay. In this last stage they are no longer pure
ideas but only the appearances of reality, that is phenomena. ... In the
realm of space and time the ideas take on the burden of matter, which
is the source of suffering, sickness, and sin. The material world,
therefore, of our experience is composed of ideas clothed in matter —
here Eriugena attempts a reconciliation of Platonism with Aristotelean
notions. Man, too, is composed of idea and matter, soul and body. He is
the culmination of the process of things from God, and with him, as we
shall see, begins the process of return of all things to God.
The divine system is thus distinguished by beginning, middle and end;
but these are in essence one; the difference is only the consequence of
man's temporal limitations. This eternal process is viewed with finite
comprehension through the form of time, forcing the application of
temporal distinctions to that which is extra- or supra-temporal.
Eriugena concludes this work with another controversial argument, and
one that had already been scathingly rejected by Augustine of Hippo, that "[n]ot only man, however, but everything else in nature is destined to return to God." Eriugena's work was condemned by a council at Sens by Honorius III (1225), who described it as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity," and by PopeGregory XIII in 1585. Such theories were thus suppressed for hundreds of years thence.
16th century on
The ideas of Spinoza lay the foundations for pandeism.
Giordano Bruno
conceived of a God who was immanent in nature, and for this very
purpose was uninterested in human affairs (all such events being equally
part of God). However, it was Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century who
appears to have been the earliest to use deistic reason to arrive at the
conception of a pantheistic God. Spinoza's God was deistic in the sense
that it could only be proved by appeal to reason, but it was also one
with the universe.
Spinoza's pantheistic focus on the universe as it already
existed, was unlike Eriugena's. It did not address the possible creation
of the universe from the substance of God, as Spinoza rejected the very
possibility of changes in the form of matter required as a premise for
such a belief.
18th-century British philosopher Thomas Paine also approached this territory in his great philosophical treatise, The Age of Reason, although Paine was concentrated on the deistic aspects of his inquiry. According to the Encyclopedia of American Philosophy "Later Unitarian Christians (such as William Ellery Channing), transcendentalists (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau), writers (such as Walt Whitman) and some pragmatists (such as William James) took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world." It was Dutchnaturalist
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn who first specifically detailed a religious
philosophy incorporating deism and pantheism, in his four volume
treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854. Junghuhn's book was banned for a time in Austria and parts of Germany as an attack on Christianity. In 1884, theologian Sabine Baring-Gould would contend that Christianity itself demanded that the seemingly irreconcilable elements of pantheism and deism must be combined:
This world is either the idea or it
is the workmanship of God. If we say that it is the idea,--then we are
Pantheists, if we say that it is the work, then we are Deists... But
how, it may be asked, can two such opposite theories as Pantheism and
Deism be reconciled,--they mutually exclude one another? I may not be
able to explain how they are conciliable, but I boldly affirm that each
is simultaneously true, and that each must be true, for each is an
inexorably logical conclusion, and each is a positive conclusion, and
all positive conclusions must be true if Christ be the Ideal and the
focus of all truths.
Within a decade after that, Andrew Martin Fairbairn
similarly wrote that "both Deism and Pantheism err because they are
partial; they are right in what they affirm, wrong in what they deny. It
is as antitheses that they are false; but by synthesis they may be
combined or dissolved into truth."
Ironically, Fairbairn's criticism concluded that it was the presence of
an active God that was missing from both concepts, rather than the
rational explanation of God's motives and appearance of absence.
In 1838, Italian phrenologistLuigi Ferrarese in Memorie Riguardanti la Dottrina Frenologica ("Thoughts Regarding the Doctrine of Phrenology") attacked the philosophy of Victor Cousin
as a doctrine which "locates reason outside the human person, declaring
man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual Pandeism, absurd
for us, and injurious to the Supreme Being."
Cousin had often been identified as a pantheist, but it was said that
he repudiated that label on the basis that unlike Spinoza, Cousin
asserted that "he does not hold with Spinoza and the Eleatics that God
is a pure substance, and not a cause."
In the Mandukya Upanishad
it is written, "As a spider throws out and retracts its web, as herbs
spring up in the ground . . . so is the Universe derived from the
undecaying one," Brahma,
for the "Germ of unknown Darkness", is the material from which all
evolves and develops, "as the web from the spider, as foam from the
water," etc. This is only graphic and true, if the term Brahma, the
"Creator", is derived from the root brih, to increase or expand. Brahma
"expands", and becomes the Universe woven out of his own substance.
Developments from the 20th century to today
In the 1940s, process theologianCharles Hartshorne
identified pandeism as one of his many models of the possible nature of
God, acknowledging that a God capable of change (as Hartshorne insisted
God must be) is consistent with pandeism. Hartshorne preferred pandeism
to pantheism, explaining that "it is not really the theos that is described."
However, he specifically rejected pandeism early on in favor of a God
whose characteristics included "absolute perfection in some respects,
relative perfection in all others" or "AR", writing that this theory "is
able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or
pandeism."
Hartshorne accepted the label of panentheism for his beliefs, declaring
that "panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except
their arbitrary negations."
In 2001, Scott Adams published God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, in which a fictional character puts forth a radical form of kenosis, surmising that an omnipotent God annihilated himself in the Big Bang,
because God would already know everything possible except his own lack
of existence, and would have to end that existence in order to complete
his knowledge. Adams' protagonist asks about God, "would his omnipotence
include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would
his knowledge of the future end at that point?" He proceeds from this question to the following analysis:
A God who knew the answer to that
question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that
reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There
would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one
nagging question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to
find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. ... The fact that
we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since
only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God,
it stands to reason that we... are God's debris.
Adams' God exists now as a combination of the smallest units of energy of which the universe is made (many levels smaller than quarks), which Adams called "God Dust", and the law of probability,
or "God's debris", hence the title. The protagonist further proposes
that God is in the process of being restored not through some process
such as the Big Crunch, but because humankind itself is becoming God.
The 1976 Simon Raven novel, The Survivors
includes an exchange between characters where one observes, "God became
the universe. Therefore the universe is God." while the other counters:
In becoming the universe God
abdicated. He destroyed himself as God. He turned what he had been, his
true self, into nullity and thereby forfeited the Godlike qualities
which pertained to him. The universe which he has become is also his
grave. He has no control in it or over it. God, as God, is dead.
Criticisms
Some theologians have criticised the notion of a Creator wholly becoming the universe. An example is William Walker Atkinson, in his Mastery of Being:
It will be seen that this fact of
the Immutability of REALITY, when clearly conceived, must serve to
confute and refute the erroneous theories of certain schools of
Pantheism which hold that "God becomes the Universe by changing into the
Universe." Thus it is sought to identify Nature with God, whereby, as
Schopenhauer said, "you show God to the door." If God changes Himself
into The Phenomenal Universe, then God is non-existent and we need not
concern ourselves any more about Him, for he has committed suicide by
Change. In such case there is no God, no Infinite, no Immutable, no
Eternal; everything has become finite, temporal, separate, a mere union
of diverse finite parts. In that case are we indeed adrift in the Ocean
of Diversity. We have lost our Foundation of REALITY, and are but
ever-changing "parts" of physical things governed by physical laws.
Then, indeed, would be true the idea of some of the old philosophies
that "there is No Being; merely a Becoming." Then would there, in truth,
be nothing constant, the universe never the same for two consecutive
moments, with no permanent ground of REALITY to support it. But the
reason of man, the very essence of his mental being, refuses to so think
of That-which-IS. In his heart of hearts he recognizes the existence of
THAT-WHICH-CHANGES-NOT, THAT-WHICH-IS-ETERNAL, THAT-WHICH-IS-REALITY. .... Moreover,
the idea of the immutability of REALITY must, serve to confute the
erroneous idea of certain schools of metaphysics which assert the
existence of "an Evolving God"; that is, a God which increases in intelligence, nature, and being
by reason of the change of the universe, which is an expression of
Himself. This conception is that of a Supreme Being who is growing,
developing, and increasing in efficiency, wisdom, power, and character.
This is an attempt to combine the anthropomorphic deity and the
pantheistic Nature-God. The conception is clearly anthropomorphic, as it
seeks to attribute to God the qualities and characteristics of man. It
defies every fact of Ultimate Principle of REALITY. It is extremely
unphilosophical and will not stand the test of logical examination.
He claims that if God were evolving or improving, being an infinite
being, it would have to be traceable back to some point of having "an
infinitely undeveloped state and condition."
But, this claim was made prior to the rise of scientific knowledge
pinpointing the beginning of the universe in time, and connecting time
with space, so that time would not exist as we know it prior to the
universe existing. In Islam, a criticism is raised, wherein it is argued
that "from the juristic standpoint, obliterating the distinctions
between God and the universe necessarily entails that in effect there
can be no Sharia,
since the deontic nature of the Law presupposes the existence of
someone who commands (amir) and others who are the recipients of the
command (ma'mur), namely God and his subjects."
In 1996, Pastor Bob Burridge of the Genevan Institute for Reformed Studies wrote in his Survey Studies in Reformed Theology an essay on "The Decrees of God," also identifying the notion of God becoming the universe as incompatible with Christianity:
All the actions of created
intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a
universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the
proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil
things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the
proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in
motion." That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism.
Burridge disagrees that such is the case, decrying that "The Creator
is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what
separates Christian theism from pandeism."
Burridge concludes by challenging his reader to determine why "calling
God the author of sin demand[s] a pandeistic understanding of the
universe effectively removing the reality of sin and moral law."
Compatibility with scientific and philosophical proofs
Stephen Hawking's determination that the universe (and others) needed no Creator to come about inspired the response from Deepak Chopra, interviewed by Larry King, that:
He says in the book that at least
10 to the power of 500 universes could possibly exist in super position
of possibility at this level, which to me suggests an omniscient being.
The only difference I have was God did not create the universe, God
became the universe.
Chopra insists that Hawking's discoveries speak only to the nature of God, not to its existence.
The God Theory
Physicist Bernard Haisch has published two books expressing such a model of the universe. The first was the 2006 book entitled The God Theory, in which he writes:
I offer a genuine insight into how
you can, and should, be a rational, science-believing human being and at
the same time know that you are also an immortal spiritual being, a
spark of God. I propose a worldview that offers a way out of the hate
and fear-driven violence engulfing the planet.
Haisch published a followup in 2010, The Purpose-Guided Universe.
Both books reject both atheism and traditional theistic viewpoints,
favoring instead a model wherein the deity has become the universe, to
share in the actualized experiences therein manifested. Haisch provides
as proof of his views a combination of fine tuning and mystical experiences arguments. Haisch additionally points to the peculiar capabilities of persons with autism and like defects of the brain experiencing savant syndrome,
and especially having the ability to perform complex mathematical
calculations. Haisch contends that this is consistent with humans being
fragments of a supreme power, with their minds acting as filters to
reduce that power to a comprehensible experience, and with the savantic
mind having a broken filter which allows access to the use of greater
capacities.
Alan Dawe's 2011 book The God Franchise, likewise proposes the human experience as being a temporarily segregated sliver of the experience of God.
Science of Mind was established in 1927 by Ernest Holmes (1887–1960) and is a spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical religious movement within the New Thought
movement. In general, the term "Science of Mind" applies to the
teachings, while the term "Religious Science" applies to the
organizations. However, adherents often use the terms interchangeably.
In his book, The Science of Mind,
Ernest Holmes stated "Religious Science is a correlation of laws of
science, opinions of philosophy, and revelations of religion applied to
human needs and the aspirations of man." He also stated that Religious
Science/Science of Mind (RS/SOM) is not based on any "authority" of
established beliefs, but rather on "what it can accomplish" for the
people who practice it. Today the International Centers for Spiritual Living, the United Centers for Spiritual Living (which combined into the Centers for Spiritual Living in 2011) and Global Religious Science Ministries are the main denominations promoting Religious Science.
History
Ernest
Holmes did not originally intend for RS/SOM to be a "church", but rather
a teaching institution. In that spirit, many member "churches" have
traditionally referred to themselves as "centers". The mental healing
work of Phineas Quimby
was a source of inspiration to much of the New Thought movement,
including RS/SOM. Ernest Holmes was especially strongly influenced by Emma Curtis Hopkins, a former student of Christian Science, especially her "Scientific Christian Mental Practice", a direct precursor to Holmes' "Spiritual Mind Treatment", and by the writings of Judge Thomas Troward and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as he developed his own synthesis, which became known as Religious Science or Science of Mind.
In 1926 Holmes published The Science of Mind, which references the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Bible and Buddha.
Holmes established the Institute for Religious Science and School of
Philosophy in Los Angeles. This organization would later become the
Church of Religious Science. Holmes had previously studied another New
Thought teaching, Divine Science, and he was an ordained Divine Science Minister. He saw humans as being "open at the top"—that is, open to evolutionary improvement of consciousness in all areas of life.
The concepts of "Open at the Top" and "New Thought" have inspired
RS/SOM organizations and their teachings to evolve over the years. As
stated in the book New Thought: A Practical American Spirituality,
"New Thought still is evolving; it may yet be the point at which
religion, philosophy, and science come together as the most effective
combination to move the world to greater peace, plenty, health, and
harmony. Many believe it might be the quintessential spirituality for
the next millennium." His teachings attracted famous celebrities of his time including Cecil B. DeMille, Peggy Lee, and Cary Grant.
The RS/SOM teaching generally incorporates idealistic and panentheistic philosophies. RS/SOM teaches that all beings are expressions of and part of Infinite Intelligence, also known as Spirit, Christ Consciousness, or God.
It teaches that, because God is all there is in the universe (not just
present in Heaven, or in assigned deities, as believed by traditional
teachings), its power can be used by all humans to the extent that they
recognize and align themselves with Its presence. Ernest Holmes said "God is not ... a person, but a Universal Presence ... already in our own soul, already operating through our own consciousness."
The introduction to The Science of Mind text describes "The Thing Itself" (God or Infinite Intelligence), "The Way It Works", "What It Does" and "How to Use It".
Although Holmes was criticized for not focusing much on love, he did
say that "Love rules through Law." (i.e., the Law of Mind or Cause and
Effect) and "Love points the way and Law makes the way possible."
The "Law of Cause and Effect" simply states that every action has a
consequence — creative, destructive, or neutral. It can be described as
Jesus Christ stated "You reap what you sow" and "The bread you cast
upon the water, comes back to you". The Law of Attraction is one aspect of that Law. It differs from the Hindu definition of karma in that it is not related to reincarnation and that it happens in this life. Personal responsibility is a major tenet of RS/SOM.
RS/SOM teaches that people can achieve more fulfilling lives
through the practice called Spiritual Mind Treatment (Treatment), or Affirmative Prayer. Spiritual Mind Treatment
is a step-by-step process, in which one states the desired outcome as
if it has already happened. In that way, it differs from traditional prayer,
since it does not ask an entity separate from itself to act. It
declares human partnership with Infinite Intelligence to achieve
success. Treatment is to be stated as personal (first person), positive,
powerful (with feeling), and present (is happening right now). The goal
is to gain clarity in thinking that guides action to be consistent with
the desired outcome. The Treatment is believed to set off a new chain
of causation in Mind that leads one to act according to the good for
which one is treating.
Spiritual Mind Treatment, as currently taught in RS/SOM centers,
contains five steps: Recognition, Unification, Declaration,
Thanksgiving, and Release. Some adherents of RS/SOM also use supplemental meditation techniques, including "Visioning".
Beliefs
Religious Science credo, adapted from Ernest Holmes "What I Believe":
We believe God, the living Spirit Almighty; one, indestructible,
absolute, and self-existent Cause. This One manifests Itself in and
through all creation, but is not absorbed by Its creation. The manifest
universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of
the infinite self-knowingness of God.
We believe in the individualization of the Spirit in Us, and that all people are individualizations of the One Spirit.
We believe in the eternality, the immortality, and the continuity of the individual soul, forever and ever expanding.
We believe that heaven is within us, and that we experience it to the degree that we become conscious of it.
We believe the ultimate goal of life to be a complete freedom from
all discord of every nature, and that this goal is sure to be attained
by all.
We believe in the unity of all life, and that the highest God and
the innermost God is one God. We believe that God is personal to all who
feel this indwelling presence.
We believe in the direct revelation of truth through our intuitive
and spiritual nature, and that anyone may become a revealer of truth who
lives in close contact with the indwelling God.
We believe that the Universal Spirit, which is God, operates through
a Universal Mind, which is the Law of God; and that we are surrounded
by this Creative Mind which receives the direct impress of our thought
and acts upon it.
We believe in the healing of the sick through the power of this Mind.
We believe in the control of conditions through the power of this Mind.
We believe in the eternal Goodness, the eternal Loving-kindness, and the eternal Givingness of Life to all.
We believe in our own soul, our own spirit, and our own destiny; for we understand that the life of all is God.
Core concepts
According to The Science of Mind, the ten core concepts of RS/SOM (as taught in the "Foundations of Science of Mind" class) are:
There is One Cosmic Reality Principle and Presence in the
Universe — commonly called "God". All creation originates in this One
Source. EXPLANATION: God is not one thing, but rather is an Energy
Source or Infinite Intelligence present in everything in the Cosmos
(i.e. everything seen and unseen in this and all other parallel
dimensions of the Universe).
God is threefold (triune) in nature, having three aspects or modes
of being within the One: Spirit, Soul and Body. This is God seen as the
Universal Macrocosm. EXPLANATION: The term "Universal Macrocosm" is another term for all dimensions of the Universe.
Spirit is the great Causative Power of the Universe. The Word, or
thought, of God eternally initiates the Divine Creative Process. In this
process, Law is continuously set in motion to create, from the Unformed
Substance, innumerable forms which follow the thought-patterns of
Spirit. EXPLANATION: God consciously initiates creation with
thought and thereby forms all things from unformed substance by using
Its "Soul" (i.e. the impersonal Law of Cause and Effect — that is "What
you sow is what you reap." See further explanation in the second
paragraph of this "Teachings and Practices" Section. Since God is in
everything (see #1), humans include God; and humans can use that
God-energy to create, on the human level.
In the Infinite Nature of God, all conceivable Good is eternally
available, ready to flow into human experience. Through some cosmic
Process, this flow of Good is activated and/or increased by human
belief, faith, and acceptance. The expression of this essential belief,
faith, and acceptance is prayer. EXPLANATION: "Prayer" is
"Spiritual Mind Treatment" (see third paragraph of this section, above).
This is the main Religious Science technique to tap into God (defined
in #1 as "present in everything" — i.e. Its "Infinite Nature") to create
all the good we desire on the human level, analogous to God creating on
the Universe level (see #3). This requires faith in the knowledge that
the technique is working right now.
This is a Universe of Wholeness, Allness, Oneness. Spirit is a
transcendent, perfect Wholeness that, in Its infinite inclusivity,
harmoniously embraces all seeming opposites. EXPLANATION: Since God is present throughout the Universe these are some of the attributes of God.
This is a Universe of infinite abundance, spiritual, mental, and
physical. This Bounty of Spirit, this Allness of Good, is limitless and
can never be depleted. EXPLANATION: These are some more of the attributes of God.
This is a reciprocal Universe. For every visible form, there is an
invisible counterpart. Everything in nature tends to equalize itself, to
keep its balance true. EXPLANATION: This is the Law of Cause and
Effect (See further explanation in the second paragraph of this
"Teachings and Practices" Section).
The Universe exists in the Eternal Now, each moment complete and
perfect within itself. In this Universal Harmony, justice without
judgment is always automatic, an infallible Universal Principle. There
can be no place for Divine anger, unforgiveness, or punishment. EXPLANATION:
God's and human's thoughts, actions, and manifestations can only occur
in the present. The Law of Cause and Effect is always working. We
make our "Heaven and Hell" experiences every moment in the present, with
the choices we make. To the extent that mankind achieves the Divine
attributes, it evolves into God's attributes.
Immortality is a Universal Principle, not a "belief' or a bargain
made with the Universe for good behavior. God knows only Life, its
eternal continuity, evolution, and expansion. EXPLANATION:
Religious Scientists know (rather than believe) that life evolves in
this as well as all other dimensions, even after our souls make their
transition into those dimensions. In this case, the term "Universal"
means "no exceptions."
The mystic concept of the Cosmic Christ is not that of a person, but
of a Principle, a Universal Presence ... the Universal Image of God
present in all creation ... the "pattern that connects." EXPLANATION:
The term "Cosmic Christ" here is a metaphor for that God-like
consciousness that was and is present in all the Prophets and other
enlightened people who have and are using this Principle to assist in
the positive evolution of mankind, society, and/or their own personal
lives. "Christ"
was not Jesus' last name, but rather a title for an enlightened person,
or "anointed one" that was created and given to him before the 12th
century A.D. Early Hebrew kings were given the title "Christ."
Organizations
Founder's Church, Los Angeles
There are three major organizations for Religious Science: Centers for Spiritual Living, the Affiliated New Thought Network, and the Global Religious Science Ministries.
Centers for Spiritual Living is the largest organization teaching
Religious Science (Science of Mind) and has over 200 communities around
the world. Its organization also continues to publish the works of
Ernest Holmes as well as the monthly magazine, Science of Mind.
Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious
thought and behavior from the perspective of cognitive science, and
often engages with evolutionary science, which it assumes is its
foundation. The field employs methods and theories from a wide range of
disciplines, including cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, and archaeology.
Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire,
generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by
means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
History
Although
religion has been the subject of serious scientific study since at
least the late nineteenth century, the study of religion as a cognitive
phenomenon is relatively recent. While it often relies upon earlier
research within anthropology of religion and sociology of religion,
cognitive science of religion considers the results of that work within
the context of evolutionary and cognitive theories. As such, cognitive
science of religion was only made possible by the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and the development, starting in the 1970s, of sociobiology and other approaches explaining human behaviour in evolutionary terms, especially evolutionary psychology.
While Dan Sperber foreshadowed cognitive science of religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism, the earliest research to fall within the scope of the discipline was published during the 1980s. Among this work, Stewart E. Guthrie's "A cognitive theory of religion"
was significant for examining the significance of anthropomorphism
within religion, work that ultimately led to the development of the
concept of the hyperactive agency detection device – a key concept within cognitive science of religion.
The real beginning of cognitive science of religion can be dated
to the 1990s. During that decade a large number of highly influential
books and articles were published which helped to lay the foundations of
cognitive science of religion. These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer, Inside the Cult and Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse, and Guthrie's book-length development of his earlier theories in Faces in the Clouds.
In the 1990s, these and other researchers, who had been working
independently in a variety of different disciplines, discovered each
other's work and found valuable parallels between their approaches, with
the result that something of a self-aware research tradition began to
coalesce. By 2000, the field was well-enough defined for Justin L. Barrett to coin the term 'cognitive science of religion' in his article "Exploring the natural foundations of religion".
Since 2000, cognitive science of religion has grown,
similarly to other approaches that apply evolutionary thinking to
sociological phenomena. Each year more researchers become involved in
the field,
with theoretical and empirical developments proceeding at a very rapid
pace. The field remains somewhat loosely defined, bringing together as
it does researchers who come from a variety of different traditions.
Much of the cohesion in the field comes not from shared detailed
theoretical commitments but from a general willingness to view religion
in cognitive and evolutionary terms as well as from the willingness to
engage with the work of the others developing this field. A vital role
in bringing together researchers is played by the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion, formed in 2006.
Theoretical basis
Despite a lack of agreement concerning the theoretical basis for work
in cognitive science of religion, it is possible to outline some
tendencies. Most significant of these is reliance upon the theories
developed within evolutionary psychology.
That particular approach to evolutionary explanations of human
behaviour is particularly suitable to the cognitive byproduct
explanation of religion that is most popular among cognitive scientists
of religion.
This is because of the focus on byproduct and ancestral trait
explanations within evolutionary psychology. A particularly significant
concept associated with this approach is modularity of mind,
used as it is to underpin accounts of the mental mechanisms seen to be
responsible for religious beliefs. Important examples of work that falls
under this rubric are provided by research carried out by Pascal Boyer and Justin L. Barrett.
These theoretical commitments are not shared by all cognitive
scientists of religion, however. Ongoing debates regarding the
comparative advantages of different evolutionary explanations for human
behaviour find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with dual inheritance theory recently gaining adherents among researchers in the field, including Armin Geertz and Ara Norenzayan.
The perceived advantage of this theoretical framework is its ability to
deal with more complex interactions between cognitive and cultural
phenomena, but it comes at the cost of experimental design having to
take into consideration a richer range of possibilities.
Main concepts
Cognitive byproduct
The
view that religious beliefs and practices should be understood as
nonfunctional but as produced by human cognitive mechanisms that are
functional outside of the context of religion. Examples of this are the
hyperactive agent detection device and the minimally counterintuitive concepts or the process of initiation explaining buddhism and taoism. The cognitive byproduct explanation of religion is an application of the concept of spandrel (biology) and of the concept of exaptation explored by Stephen Jay Gould among others.
Minimally counterintuitive concepts
Concepts
that mostly fit human preconceptions but break with them in one or two
striking ways. These concepts are both easy to remember (thanks to the
counterintuitive elements) and easy to use (thanks to largely agreeing
with what people expect). Examples include talking trees and
noncorporeal agents. Pascal Boyer argues that many religious entities fit into this category. Upal
labelled the fact that minimally counterintuitive ideas are better
remembered than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive ideas as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.
Hyperactive agency detection device
Cognitive scientistJustin L. Barrett
postulates that this mental mechanism, whose function is to identify
the activity of agents, may contribute to belief in the presence of the
supernatural. Given the relative costs of failing to spot an agent, the
mechanism is said to be hyperactive, producing a large number of false positive errors. Stewart E. Guthrie and others have claimed these errors can explain the appearance of supernatural concepts.
Pro-social adaptation
According
to the prosocial adaptation account of religion, religious beliefs and
practices should be understood as having the function of eliciting
adaptive prosocial behaviour and avoiding the free rider problem. Within the cognitive science of religion this approach is primarily pursued by Richard Sosis. David Sloan Wilson
is another major proponent of this approach and interprets religion as a
group-level adaptation, but his work is generally seen as falling
outside the cognitive science of religion.
Costly signaling
Practices that, due to their inherent cost, can be relied upon to provide an honest signal regarding the intentions of the agent. Richard Sosis
has suggested that religious practices can be explained as costly
signals of the willingness to cooperate. A similar line of argument has
been pursued by Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer. Alternatively, D. Jason Slone has argued that religiosity may be a costly signal used as a mating strategy in so far as religiosity serves as a proxy for "family values."
Dual inheritance
In
the context of cognitive science of religion, dual inheritance theory
can be understood as attempting to combine the cognitive byproduct and
prosocial adaptation accounts using the theoretical approach developed
by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson,
among others. The basic view is that while belief in supernatural
entities is a cognitive byproduct, cultural traditions have recruited
such beliefs to motivate prosocial behaviour. A sophisticated statement
of this approach can be found in Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich (2010).
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution.
Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes,
religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive
functions they might serve.
Mechanisms of evolution
Scientists generally agree with the idea that a propensity to engage
in religious behavior evolved early in human history. However, there is
disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the
religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion
itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation,
in which case religion conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage.
The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors, such as the concept
of a protogod,
may have emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits without initially being selected for because of their own benefits.
Religious behavior often involves significant costs—including economic costs, celibacy, dangerous rituals,
or the expending of time that could be used otherwise. This would
suggest that natural selection should act against religious behavior
unless it or something else causes religious behavior to have
significant advantages.
Religion as an adaptation
Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta have reviewed several of the prominent theories for the adaptive value of religion.
Many are "social solidarity theories", which view religion as having
evolved to enhance cooperation and cohesion within groups. Group
membership in turn provides benefits which can enhance an individual's
chances for survival and reproduction. These benefits range from
coordination advantages to the facilitation of costly behavior rules.
Sosis also researched 200 utopian communes in the 19th-century United States, both religious and secular (mostly socialist).
39 percent of the religious communes were still functioning 20 years
after their founding while only 6 percent of the secular communes were.
The number of costly sacrifices that a religious commune demanded from
its members had a linear effect on its longevity, while in secular
communes demands for costly sacrifices did not correlate with longevity
and the majority of the secular communes failed within 8 years. Sosis
cites anthropologist Roy Rappaport in arguing that rituals and laws are more effective when sacralized. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship. Evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse and theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard have argued instead that because humans with altruistic tendencies are preferred as social partners they receive fitness advantages by social selection,
with Nesse arguing further that social selection enabled humans as a
species to become extraordinarily cooperative and capable of creating culture.
Edward O. Wilson's theory of "eusociality" strongly suggests
group cohesion as the impetus for the development of religion. Wilson
posits that the individuals of a small percentage of species (including
homo sapiens, ants, termites, bees and a few other species) replicated
their genes by adhering to one of a number of competing groups. He
further postulates that, in homo sapiens, thanks to their enormous
forebrains, there evolved a complex interplay between group evolution
and individual evolution within a group.
These social solidarity theories may help to explain the painful or dangerous nature of many religious rituals. Costly-signaling theory
suggests that such rituals might serve as public and hard-to-fake
signals that an individual's commitment to the group is sincere. Since
there would be a considerable benefit in trying to cheat the
system—taking advantage of group-living benefits without taking on any
possible costs—the ritual would not be something simple that can be
taken lightly.
Warfare is a good example of a cost of group living, and Richard Sosis,
Howard C. Kress, and James S. Boster carried out a cross-cultural
survey which demonstrated that men in societies which engage in war do
submit to the costliest rituals.
Studies that show more direct positive associations between
religious practice and health and longevity are more controversial.
Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results
of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the
relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79%
showed a positive influence. Such studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR
program which covered University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's
findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality
correlated with a lower viral load and improved immune-cell levels in
HIV patients. Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health."
Debate continues over the validity of these findings, which do not
necessarily prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between
religion and health. Mark Stibich claims there is a clear correlation
but that the reason for it remains unclear. A criticism of such placebo
effects, as well as the advantage of religion giving a sense of
meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than
religious behavior could achieve such goals.
Religion as a by-product
Stephen Jay Gould cites religion as an example of an exaptation or spandrel,
but he does not himself select a definite trait which he thinks natural
selection has actually acted on. He does, however, bring up Freud's
suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led
to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal
with the concept of personal mortality. Religion may have been one
solution to this problem.
Other researchers have proposed specific psychological processes
which natural selection may have fostered alongside religion. Such
mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms
that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind).
These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine
purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be
explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets,
complexity of life.
Pascal Boyer suggests in his book Religion Explained (2001) that there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. He builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology.
He argues that one such factor is that it has, in most cases, been
advantageous for humans to remember "minimally counter-intuitive"
concepts which are somewhat different from the daily routine and
somewhat violate innate expectations about how the world is constructed.
A god that is in many aspects like humans but much more powerful is
such a concept, while the often much more abstract god discussed at
length by theologians is often too counter-intuitive. Experiments support that religious people think about their god in anthropomorphic terms even if this contradicts the more complex theological doctrines of their religion.
Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyer suggest that humans evolved a
"hazard-precaution system" which allowed them to detect potential
threats in the environment and to attempt to respond appropriately.
Several features of ritual behaviors, often a major feature of
religion, are held to trigger this system. These include the occasion
for the ritual (often the prevention or elimination of danger or evil),
the harm believed to result from nonperformance of the ritual, and the
detailed prescriptions for proper performance of the ritual. Lienard and
Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system
itself may have provided fitness benefits, and that religion then
"associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action
with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".
Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(2004) suggests that belief in God is natural because it depends on
mental tools possessed by all human beings. He suggests that the
structure and development of human minds make belief in the existence of
a supreme god (with properties such as being superknowing,
superpowerful and immortal) highly attractive. He also compares belief
in God to belief in other minds, and devotes a chapter to looking at the
evolutionary psychology of atheism.
He suggests that one of the fundamental mental modules in the brain is
the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), another potential system
for identifying danger. This HADD may confer a survival benefit even if
it is over-sensitive: it is better to avoid an imaginary predator than
be killed by a real one. This would tend to encourage belief in ghosts
and in spirits.
Though hominids probably began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition and mates, Terror Management Theory
argues that this happened before they had reached the point where
significant self- (and thus end-of-self-) awareness arose. Awareness of death
became a highly disruptive byproduct of prior adaptive functions. The
resulting anxiety threatened to undermine these very functions and thus
needed amelioration. Any social formation or practice that was to be
widely accepted by the masses needed to provide a means of managing such
terror. The main strategy to do so was to "become an individual of
value in a world of meaning … acquiring self-esteem [via] the creation
and maintenance of culture", as this would counter the sense of insignificance represented by death and provide: 1) symbolic immortality
through the legacy of a culture that lives on beyond the physical self
("earthly significance") 2) literal immortality, the promise of an afterlife or continued existence featured in religions ("cosmic significance").
Religion as a meme
Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene (1976) that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion (2006) Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned,
their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses".
In such a conception, it is necessary that the individuals who are
unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than
individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could
be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions
created a behavioral pattern that elevated biological fitness for
believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such
beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer
and rarer in the population.
This model holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive
modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal
with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of
supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect"
the presence of other humans or predators (for example: momentarily
mistaking a vine for a snake). For instance, a man might report that he
felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked
around.
Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold,
passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard
ontological categories (person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object)
with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses
that remember what happened in them, etc.). These stories become even
more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated
expectations for the ontological category (houses that "remember"
activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically
attribute thought processes to them).
One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that
humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result
in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably
cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral
guidelines). In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an
uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules
(person identification and behavior prediction) continue to run
decoupled from reality, producing incompatible intuitions that the dead
are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human
predisposition to see misfortune as a social event (as someone's responsibility
rather than the outcome of mechanical processes) it may activate the
intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" module of the human theory of
minds, compelling the bereaved to try to interact and bargain with
supernatural agents (ritual).
In a large enough group, some individuals will seem better
skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As
societies grow and encounter other societies, competition will ensue and
a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to
modify their concepts to provide a more abstract, more widely acceptable
version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group
or guild with its attendant political goals (religion).
