Pantheism

Pantheism is a family of philosophical and religious views that identify God with the universe, or with nature taken as a whole, so that there is no creator standing apart from the world that brought it into being from outside.

The term comes from the Greek pan, 'all', and theos, 'God'. The first known combination of these roots appears in Latin in 1697, in a work by the English mathematician Joseph Raphson, who applied it to Spinoza and others. It was soon rendered in English as "pantheism". Before it had a name, pantheist intuitions appeared in animist beliefs and tribal religions around the world, in the Orphic tradition of ancient Greece, and in the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, where Brahman is the only ultimate reality and the sensible world is an appearance.

In the West, pantheism was formalized as a doctrine through Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics argued that there is only one substance, which he called God or Nature, from which all things proceed. Earlier, Giordano Bruno had held a similar view of an infinite universe animated by one divine force, a stance that led the Roman Inquisition to condemn him to death at the stake in 1600. For centuries the Catholic Church regarded such ideas as heresy.

A simple example helps show the idea: for a pantheist, the tree, the river and the stars are not works made by God but expressions of the same divine reality that manifests itself in them.

Today pantheism is distinguished from panentheism, which holds that God encompasses the universe while also exceeding it, and from traditional theism, which affirms a personal God separate from the world. Current debate centers on whether such a view can keep a religious dimension or should be understood as a non-theistic philosophical position, and on how closely modern science and the idea of nature as a self-organizing order come to it.