Encyclopedic entry on Pantheism. This chapter contains sections titled: What is Pantheism?; Unity and Divinity; Pantheism, Theism, Atheism, and Monism; Evil; Pantheism in Practice: Worship, Prayer, Ecology; Salvation, Purpose, and Immortality; An Alternative View of Pantheism?; Whither Pantheism?

This entry examines the meaning and nature of pantheism considered as the primary religious alternative to theism. Among the issues addressed are the following: What is pantheism and who are some prominent pantheists? Is pantheism disguised atheism? Does evil present a fundamental difficulty for pantheism as it does for theism? What form, if any, do traditional religious practices such as prayer and worship take in pantheism? Can salvation and the notion of immortality have a place in pantheism? Is there a distinctive ethics or set of values associated with pantheism? Why are pantheists often regarded as environmentalists and ecologists? Is urban life, technology and/or the contemporary social and political order inimical to basic tenets of pantheism and to its practice?

Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that (1) “God is everything and everything is God … the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature” (H.P. Owen). Similarly, it is the view that (2) everything that exists constitutes a ‘unity’ and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine (A. MacIntyre). This paper begins with an account of what the pantheist’s ethical position is formally likely to be (e.g. objectivist etc.). What follows is a discussion of the relationship between pantheism and ecology in the context of the search for the metaphysical and ethical foundations for an ecological ethic. It is claimed that it is no accident that pantheism is often looked to for such foundations.

Many authors in the field of Environmental Philosophy have claimed to be inspired by Spinoza’s monism, which has traditionally been considered a form of pantheism because nature and God coincide. This idea has deep normative implications, as some environmental ethicists claim that wounding nature is the same as wounding God, which implies a resacralization of nature. In particular, authors Valera and Vidal focus on Arne Naess’s Ecosophy (or Deep Ecology) to offer a current relevant example of the pantheist (or panentheist) worldview. However, a new demarcation distinguishes pantheism from panentheism; in the latter, nature and God belong together but do not fully coincide, as in pantheism. Nevertheless, whether Spinoza is a panentheist, pantheist, or neither has yet to be fully determined, as well as whether his doctrine serves as a proper foundation for an ecology that attempts the aforementioned resacralization of nature. This article attempts to clarify these issues.

This encyclopedia entry contains an extensive overview and bibliography on pantheism.

Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, the author articulates a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. The author also illustrates how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements.

“The Pantheist World View” was first published in 1979 to provide a concise and succinct four page summary of the basic vision of life shared by most Pantheists. It was one of the first efforts of the Universal Pantheist Society, which formed in 1975, to help people learn about a way of life combining ancient inspirations with modern scientific understanding.

During the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair’s philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexander’s new realist beliefs about the reality of time. Her metaphysics takes idealism and pantheism in new directions and provides fresh insight into 1920s debates between British idealisms and realisms.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein begins: “In his 1695 essay on Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle excoriates the philosopher for having reduced God to ‘matter, the vilest of all creatures.’ Matter, after all, is passive, nonrational, and changeable–and as such, everything that the God of classical theism is not. In conversation with the renewed focus on materiality in feminist, political, queer, and complexity theories, I would therefore like to ask: What becomes of Spinoza’s unbecoming theology if matter turns out to be other than what we thought it was?”

This paper had two aims. One was to describe a number of pantheist or near pantheist religious attitudes, including the influence of many worlds theories. The other was to indicate some of the ways that one might arrive at Pantheism. One final remark: when assessing religious positions the intellectual grounds for accepting or rejecting them should be whether they make sense of things, that is, enable one to understand. The ways to Pantheism, or to near Pantheism, should therefore be interpreted as part of a comparison between ways of understanding.