Immanence and Transcendence vs. Pantheism

First, some definitions:

Immanence: This isn't a misspelling of "imminence," though the two words are related. "Imminent" means close by or about to happen. "Immanent" refers to the idea that God is always nearby. An immanent God is one that inhabits the world, intervenes in history and human life, and is always with us. The theological system that most often includes immanence is "panentheism" (two doors down from pantheism). Most versions of traditional theism, including some flavors of paganism, are panentheistic and talk about an immanent God/gods, deity which is somehow part of the universe.

Transcendence: This idea talks about God being partly or wholly separate from the universe, human life, and history. Most traditional theistic systems also include an aspect of transcendence. Deism* is one of the only common theistic traditions to view God as entirely transcendent: God created the world--wound the clock, so to speak--and then left it to run on its own.

Most versions of traditional theism operate under a combination of immanence and transcendence. God exists outside the universe, but he also moves and acts within it.

And now, the catch:

These terms don't apply the same way--if at all--in pantheism.

Oddly enough, you really can't say that God is immanent in the world, in a pantheistic system. Being present in something implies that the presence is not the same as the thing. I occupy my house, but my being and the house's being aren't the same thing. God also does not intervene in events, for the same reason. God is history, God is the world, God is everything and everyone living. The existence of God and the existence of the universe are one and the same thing.

Nor can you say, in pantheism, that God transcends the universe (or else your system is no longer pantheistic!). But you can't say that God doesn't intervene in the world, either, since the pantheistic God is existence. That would be like saying I have nothing to do with my little toe.

On the surface, these two terms would seem to apply perfectly to pantheism. God is fully immanent, of course!--except that implies that God is substantially different from the universe. And there is that feeling of religious awe that "transcendence" often means, though this is a transcendence (of sorts) of human emotion, rather than of divine Being. Both ideas are originally based around the biblical God of Western belief. Trying to fit them into pantheism is rather like expecting a python to wear a football jersey.

---------------

* This is where I go on a short American history spiel and say that both Jefferson and Franklin were deists, and that although both were theists, neither believed in the divinity of Jesus. They fell under the "deism" umbrella, not just in their belief that Jesus was simply a very good man, but in denying that God intervened in human history (other than by inspiring prophets like Jesus). Jefferson, in fact, rewrote the Gospels in a way, by cutting out all the references to miracles, including the virgin birth and the resurrection. He published it as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, though these days it's often simply called The Jefferson Bible.

Washington may have also been a deist, though he never came out about specific beliefs. (Some of his presidential speeches were written by Alexander Hamilton, a thoroughgoing Christian, which only confuses things more.) The one thing we can say about Washington was that, when pressed about giving props to Christ, he would deftly change the subject; and when the priest of his family church told him he was setting a bad example by coming to church yet not taking communion, he simply quit coming to church.

Eschatology vs. Free Will

There's a problem here, like the old saying in math class about apples and oranges. Eschatology is one of those ridiculously complicated words that mean something fairly simple: the belief in and philosophy around the end of the world, or where history is headed. (Okay, so maybe not so simple.)

Something about the human psyche demands an end-of-the-world story. Most major civilizations around the world had stories about what would happen, how the world would end, and what kind of world would come after. A lot of them held that the world was destroyed and recreated, over and over again, in a timeless cycle, based on how degraded or evil humanity had become; a new Earth would then be created, with a shiny new humanity ready to inhabit it.

Christianity's no different. From the hardest fundamentalist to the loosest liberal, many if not most Christians have a religious expectation of a Second Coming, a New Jerusalem. It might be literal, as in the Left Behind series; or it might be a metaphoric story about the hope that history is tending towards the perfection of humanity. Either way, history is being guided by a divine hand to some distinct future goal.

That means that every choice we make, for good or for ill, must lead to that final heavenly goal. There is no way around it. There is no possibility of escaping the last days, whether they come next week or two million years from now. History will play out in such a way that everything winds up for the best. The end of the story has already been written.

But if we already know (approximately) how history will turn out, where does that leave free will?

Here, have some time travel:

Suppose you want to go back in time and assassinate Hitler. Unfortunately, even time travel must follow physics. Once you've gone back in time, you must have always gone back in time, which means that the situation that caused you to go back in time has just become a done deal. In other words, when you go back in time, you've predetermined the future. (Maybe someone tried to go back in time to assassinate Hitler, which is why no one was ever able to assassinate him...)

This also goes into the "omniscience" of a personal God. If God knows everything that's going to happen, therefore the future is predetermined. There's a little wiggle room here, since this predestination is only from God's point of view; from our puny human point of view, we still have yet to make the choices God knows we're going to make. (So the apples become oranges in another dimension?)

Either way, though, if history has a set ending, then our free will is either an illusion, or a farce. If God influences our choices to lead to history's happy ending, then free will is a lie. If, on the other hand, God influences nature and physics (all those miracles in the Exodus story, for example) to shape history around our choices, then free will is useless.

[There's an entire subtopic about the horror of "miracles," but that can wait.]

All this is tied up, in most traditional versions of theism, with the idea that God will come swooping in to save the day. (And if you know why "swooping is bad," you get a cookie!) Or the millennium. Or all of human history. It's out of our hands. Which is nice, because now we don't have to take responsibility for each other or for the rest of the planet. God will do it for us--probably by inspiring us to do his holy work, but hey--we just have to wait for that inspiration to strike.

Do away with the eschatology. There is no set ending. It's entirely possible that we will be responsible for our own extinction. It's also entirely possible that we will learn to manage our resources and get along with each other and with the natural world around us. Either way, it's our responsibility now, because there is no promised land except the one we make for ourselves.

Problems in Personal Theism

Traditional Western theism rests on a couple distinct principles: First, God is a Person; in other words, God is something like you and me, but infinitely greater. Second, God is external to the universe/the world/creation. This varies, as some strains have God both within and outside of, a sort of one-foot-in-each-existence sort of thing; but all traditional forms of personal theism have a God which transcends the universe.

These two basic ideas create a whole mess of problems. The problem of evil is fairly easy to tackle, especially since it's so popular these days. God as defined as a Person has the qualities of Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnibenevolence--God is viewed as all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. So how can evil exist? All kind of theodicies have been created to solve this unsolvable problem, the most distasteful of which implies that the terrible things which happen to us are for our own good. Another argument is that God, being good, created the best possible universe in which free will could be found. I've never found any adequate explanation for the paradoxes of human nature, within personal theism. (Original sin, or "it's our fault" is not adequate!) Evil exists because of a basic flaw in the universe, which can be traced to human nature, which was created by--oh, wait.

A more palatable explanation for evil is that it's an intrinsic part of the universe--there's no getting around it--but that God is part of the universe, and therefore suffers with us. This comes from process theology, a type of panentheism, which is a close cousin of pantheism. (The major difference between pantheism and panentheism is that the latter still views God as personal, and in some way transcendent.)

Now bring in that "personal" part. A person has moral views, has aesthetic tastes, has emotions like love or anger. Therefore a personal God would have infinitely greater views, tastes, emotions. And we, his creations, had better figure them out.

The argument against a personal God is, very simply, a moral one. Socrates was quoted as questioning whether something was good because God declared it to be so, or if God declared something good because it always had been.

If the former is correct--something is good because God declares it to be so--then absolutism is the ultimate form of relativism. There is nothing truly good or evil, only what God's opinion, God's culture (if you will) declares to be true. God could always change his mind, and then where would we be?

But if the latter is true--God declares something good because it is good, from all eternity--then God is an abomination. Any God worth the name should be willing and able to prevent torture, murder, rape. The fact that he could prevent these things but doesn't--or might save some and leave others to their fates--means that God (if he's not a divine weakling) is both capricious, and complicit in these evil acts. If goodness is absolute, then even God must obey. But he obviously doesn't.

No matter which of these is taken as true, we're left hanging on divine whim.

The second principle--that God is external--is simpler to deal with, from a metaphysical standpoint. Oddly enough (being the basis of the majority of personal theism) a perfect pantheistic ontology is found in Exodus: "I am that I am." Spinoza rephrased this with his arguments concerning God and Substance. The pantheistic view simply says that God is existence. Everything which exists is a part of God. Nothing can exist outside of existence--because then it wouldn't be "existence." The very concept of "existence" denies the possibility of anything external to it. Even if a heaven is postulated, it must still be part of existence. Bring in alternate "planes of existence" or "modes of being," it's still all part of a single, unified Existence.

The philosophy of pantheism is, quite simply, based on the essence and nature of existence. There is and can be nothing but existence. There is and can be nothing but God.

This also avoids the two major problems with personal theism. Because evil is part of existence, it's also part of God. Once we acknowledge God as amoral (not immoral), and once we acknowledge God as impersonal, we are released from the fear and threat of suffering being the commandment or whimsy of a divine father. Because evil and suffering take place naturally, we're free to deal with them ourselves, to the best of our ability.

We must not wait for a second coming or divine rescue from what we've made of the world. This is our responsibility.

I [heart] metaphysics!

Here, have an ontological argument from Spinoza's Ethics:

Proposition 11. God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.

Demonstration. If this be denied, conceive, if it be possible, that God does not exist. Then it follows that His essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists. Q.E.D.

For newbies, an ontological argument is taken to be a statement purporting to "prove" the existence of God. (Think of a geometrical "proof" and you've got the idea.) And on some level, that's exactly what it is. But the other purpose for the ontological argument is that it serves as the foundation for a specific theology. It's the statement of a worldview, usually with God at the center.

The basis of Spinoza's theology is not God's existence; it's that God is existence. The proof of God's existence is that existence, well, exists. At the same time, it's a statement about the divine nature of existence.

***

One of the basic premises of pantheism, especially as constructed by the Stoics, is that one of God's attributes (even the main one, depending on who you ask) is Reason. Justin Martyr, a Stoic of the Christian tradition, decided that since Christ was the embodiment of Logos, anyone who ruled their life through the use of Reason was a good Christian. This even included pre-Christian philosophers like Heraclitus and Socrates. (A popular theory among Jewish and Christian philosophers of the time was that the early Greeks had somehow gotten their hands on the Torah, and that's why Greek philosophy made so much sense!)

Spinoza developed this further by explaining (in his usual convoluted way) that Reason and reality are just two sides of the same coin.

From part 2 of the Ethics:

Proposition 7. the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

... [E]verything which can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance pertains entirely to the one sole substance only, and consequently that substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute and now under that. Thus, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing expressed in two different ways ... .

[Gesundheit.]

Spinoza, of course, lived shortly after Descartes, who (in)famously decided that mind and body were completely separate--thus creating a paradox that philosophy wasted hundreds of years trying to solve (a guy named Malebranche, for instance, turned God into a phone switch operator between mind and body). Spinoza's two-sided coin doesn't say that mind and matter coincide, or are connected, or are best buddies. They're the same sentence, spoken in two different languages.

Unlike in classical theism, Logos doesn't come in to redeem the world; Logos is the world.

Marcus Aurelius says, "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."

***

In the Appendix to the first part of his Ethics, Spinoza has this to say:

...[I]t is commonly supposed that all things in nature, like men, work to some end; and indeed it is thought to be certain that God Himself directs all things to some sure end, for it is said that God has made all things for man, and man that he may worship God. ... This is the reason why each man has devised for himself, out of his own brain, a different mode of worshiping God, so that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice.

Thus has this prejudice been turned into a superstition and has driven deep roots into the mind--a prejudice which was the reason why everyone has so eagerly tried to discover and explain the final causes of things. The attempt, however, to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is to say, nothing which is not profitable to man), seems to end in showing that nature, the gods, and man are alike mad.

[Pause for three cheers!]

To broaden/deepen/support that, a verse from the Tao te Ching:

Nature is not kind;
It treats all things impartially.
The Sage is not kind,
And treats all people impartially.
Nature is like a bellows,
Empty, yet never ceasing its supply.
The more it moves, the more it yields;
So the sage draws upon experience
And cannot be exhausted.

The most important part of pantheist theology: God is not a Person.

As a last, rather funny note, here's what Spinoza thought about the devil, from his Short Treatise on God:

If the devil is a thing which is entirely opposed to God and has nothing from Him, he is absolutely indistinguishable from the Nothing of which we have already spoken. But, if we suppose with some that the devil is a thinking thing, who neither wills nor does anything whatever that is good, he is certainly most miserable, and if prayers could help him we ought to pray for his conversion.

They had time-traveling email!

There's this... thread... line of thinking?... idea that keeps popping up?... that runs through a series of philosophers.

Start with the Greeks, before Socrates. Everyone wanted the complexity of the world around them to be reduced to something simple. Either everything really was simple (and the complexity was an illusion), or everything came out of a simple First Cause.

Supposedly Greek philosophy started with a guy named Thales, who managed to accurately predict a solar eclipse using math rather than magic. Everyone gasped and was amazed and got in on the fun. And then Parmenides came along.

Parmenides said that either something exists, or nothing exists; no in between. But if existence is, y'know, existence, then change is impossible. After all, once things start changing, then the things in existence will eventually no longer exist--but nonexistence is impossible, if existence exists. (Or something like that.) Everyone else either said, "Holy crap, he's right!" or "No way in Hades!" and frantically tried to explain how things could exist while changing (or change could exist without things). Some of 'em decided (along with Parmenides) that the world around us is an illusion; others (like Heraclitus) decided that change is itself the only thing that exists. Meanwhile, the proto-science nerds were busy trying to figure out what the primal element was that gave rise to everything else.

For instant, Empedocles, my favorite early philosopher, invented the dark and light sides of the Force. He developed a complex system of change/existence, in which four elements--earth, air, fire, water--and two forces--Love and Strife--keep the cosmos going in a constantly changing cycle, eerily similar to early Big Bang/Big Crunch theories.

This kept going until Plato jumped in. He took all these simple-to-complex ideas and codified them into one theory: God Did It. God is the simple; from him comes the complex. In a rather complex system of its own. Everything we see around us--people, cats and dogs, trees, tables, etc.--all resemble other members of their species/class of objects because all of them are simply echoes of the Idea of Man, the Idea of Cat, the Idea of Dog, the Idea of Tree, the Idea of Table. (You get the idea.) These ideas--or Forms--exist in the mind of God, and only there are they perfect. All this ridiculous complexity, change, death, disease--everything unpleasant takes place because this world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect existence in the Intellect of God.

[If this sounds awfully Christian, it's because Aquinas jumped on the Neo-Platonic bandwagon and introduced Catholicism to Plato. First they called him a heretic; then when they finally figured out what he was saying, they called him the Doctor of the Church.]

Then comes Plotinus. He liked Plato so much that in the process of passing on, illuminating, and expanding Plato's ideas, he turned the system into something all his own. God, the First Cause, he called the One. Nothing simpler than One-ness, right? He thought that through a series of "emanations," everything came into being. This wasn't a creation event that happened through time, though; it's more like a reality ladder. You've got the One, which organizes itself into Intellect and Spirit. Intellect is the realm of ideas, similar to the Forms of Plato. Intellect contemplates the One, and creates Forms. Spirit is what the Forms do. Spirit contemplates Intellect, and produces the world of the senses. Our job as sensory beings is to turn back through Spirit and Intellect and eventually return to the One.

[Plotinus was used by, and fought against, both Gnostic and Orthodox Christians. He had a helluva time walking a fine line between them, while owing allegiance to neither.]

This philosophy seems to disappear (or else I'm just not reading widely enough) until Maester Eckhart. He was a German mystic theologian who was tried for heresy, but died before the verdict came down. He also believed in a source similar to Plotinus' One, from which all creation proceeded (but this time in a Christian package). All people shared in the divine soul, since everyone was descended from this single source. By turning inward and contemplating one's own soul, a person could meet God. No priests necessary.

[Gee, I wonder why he was tried as a heretic...]

Then enter Benedict Spinoza. He's like Plotinus' little brother. He's a philosophical descendent in the Greek tradition, all the way down from Parmenides. Spinoza, of course, says that the only thing in existence is God--which in accordance with Parmenides is unchanging. He then proceeds to rewrite Plotinus, using attributes and modes instead of Intellect and Spirit. Only one thing exists--because if more than one thing existed, both things would be limited by each other, and would in effect cancel each other out. (Or something like that.) This one thing has attributes of existence, infinity, mind, motion, and extension (it's the eternal adjective club). These attributes in turn embody themselves in modes, which is basically Idea condensed into what we would call reality (a cluster of deterministic nouns).

[Oddly enough, Spinoza was kicked out of his synagogue for talking about this stuff.]

A few more centuries down the line, we run headfirst into Fichte, and then Schelling. Fichte was the reincarnation of Spinoza, in the same way that Kant was the reincarnation of Parmenides. However, Fichte turned Spinoza's determinism on its head by saying that, since you have to start with a first principle, then human freedom (the existential kind) makes a dandy one. Not surprisingly, he ran into all sorts of trouble. No matter how many iterations of his system he published (last count was two million three hundred thousand and one), no one could understand what he was saying. Then they accused him of atheism (not quite a capital offense any more, but you'd lose your job, your paycheck, and your reputation over it), then he almost single-handedly invented German National Socialism by characterizing the German people as the best embodiment of the divine (thereby committing the worst theological error a pantheist can), and everyone conveniently forgot about him.

...Except for his student, Schelling. Schelling was to Fichte what Jung was to Freud. Everything starts out flowers and chocolate, then they start fighting over money, and pretty soon they're sleeping in separate bedrooms and not speaking to each other.

In another desperate attempt to remove Spinoza's uncomfortable determinism from the budding idealism, Schelling wound up reinventing Empedocles. Instead of Love and Strife, though, he made all existence a push-pull between the unconscious and the conscious, the objective and subjective, deterministic nature and existentially free mind. This muddy dualism hid an underlying monism that said that determinism and free will were, yet again, just two sides of the same coin. (So much for trying to get rid of Spinoza.)

All of which is to say, there really are no new ideas. Every new genius philosophy is the reincarnation of somebody else a thousand years or so ago. Schelling was Empedocles. Kant was Parmenides. Avatar was Dances With Wolves.

But for the real mind-bending stuff, read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations right next to the Tao te Ching. Somehow these two guys, inhabiting different eras, cultures, languages, and sides of the planet, wrote down almost the exact same ideas about religion, government, and human nature.

Ishtar, Parmenides, and Kant (oh my!)

Since comparative religion/mythology has become popular, a lot of folks are familiar nowadays with the myth of Ishtar traveling through the gates of Death.

Ishtar, the goddess of love, goes to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the goddess of death. This is not a simple jaunt across town, though. Ishtar has to go through a series of gates; to pass through each one, she's got to give up one of her garments--the last being her crown. Figures that a myth about a sex goddess would incorporate a striptease... Anyway, it turns out that Ereshikigal is kind of a bitch (who'da thunk it?), and since Ishtar's nekkid, she's also powerless.

Everyone on Earth stops having sex.

This is where it gets a little confusing. In some versions of the story, she's there to rescue her dead husband, Tammuz; in others, Tammuz comes to pry her from Ereshkigal's evil clutches. Either way, Ishtar manages to get out, but either she or Tammuz wind up having to spend half the year with Death from that point on. Hence the seasons, and later on we get Ceres quasi-rescuing Persephone from Hades, and Orpheus' failure to rescue Eurydice.

The important part of this myth, of course, is the striptease. (No, really.) As Ishtar goes further and further into the realm of Death, she gradually loses all of her power. In other words, Love is powerless over Death. (A new religion later developed which had some verses about God being love, and the gates of death being broken. Same themes, radically different message.)

***

Fast forward a thousand years or so to a guy named Parmenides.

Parmenides lived right at the hairy edge when explanatory myth was beginning to give way to natural philosophy. People started investigating the causes of natural events, instead of just writing stories about gods to explain where winter came from. Sometimes these philosophers had rather weird explanations, but they were kind of the first scientists, in that they wanted to explain things as natural, rather than supernatural.

Parmenides wrote a rather strange poem in which he gets kidnapped by aliens receives an invitation to visit the realm of Night. But instead of having to strip at each gate, the guardians of each gate bow down to him, the gates opening (with trumpets blaring and lions roaring and stars dancing and all sorts of CGI effects). And instead of being captured by the goddess, he is bestowed with the light of reason.

Love may have no power over Death, but Reason trumps Ignorance every time.

Night tells Parmenides that there are two ways to go about gaining knowledge of things. You can study the things which exist, or you can study the things which do not exist. Unfortunately, knowledge of that which does not exist is reserved for the gods. But humans can study what does exist, and gain knowledge that way.

In essence, Parmenides is using a myth to knock over mythology, by having Night (who hides all knowledge) show him how to gain understanding. It's a primer for a philosophical method, buried in mythological verse. The most important thing this method said is that appearances can be deceiving. The whole thing about "what exists" and "what does not exist" is just as deceiving, because the idea of existence he's talking about isn't what we normally think of. When Night says that humans can only study what exists, she means that humans can only study what we perceive to exist.

Parmenides was a monist who declared that time, death, change, and everything around us--including us--are all illusion. Many of the natural philosophers who followed him scrambled to either prove him right or prove him wrong. Except Empedocles, who got to have it both ways.

***

Fast forward another two and a half thousand years to a gentleman named Immanuel Kant. Kant distinguished between phenomena and numena--our sensory experiences of things, and things as they exist in themselves. He was basically saying the same thing as Parmenides: We can study what we can perceive, but there is an existence beyond what we can perceive which we will never reach--not even through Parmenides' much-vaunted Reason.

Because we can't experience the numenal world, we essentially take it on faith that our sensory world mirrors reality. All our science, all our reason, all our physical understanding, is based on a leap of faith. We've come back full circle to Ishtar at the gates of Death.

Parmenides' monism was based on faith. Everyone's philosophy is based on faith of some sort. We all start at the gates of Death.

Pantheism vs. Pantheism vs. Pantheism

If one of the things that makes a religion a "real" religion is schism, then I guess pantheism is a "real" religion. There are three types of pantheism--at least three, but these are the three major denominations (?) that I'm familiar with.

***

The first I'll call ecological pantheism. I don't know if it has an "official" name or not, but this name suits. Most people these days calling themselves pantheists are probably ecological pantheists. (There are also a lot of scientific pantheists; more on that below.) Ecological pantheism is based on feelings of awe and reverence before the beauty and splendor of nature, coupled with the desire to preserve and protect that which inspires those feelings. It's easy to agree with people who revere nature, as these feelings seem to have been an intrinsic part of human spirituality since the era of cave paintings.

Ecological pantheism is a close cousin of animism, in which everything, living and inanimate, is seen as having a soul. When my daughter was (for a time) an animist, she explained an important part of her beliefs: Everything natural has a soul, from sun and moon to rock and tree. A fallen tree retains its soul--but when humans use a tree to make a table, or transform iron ore into steel cookware, the soul of the original object is destroyed. In changing a natural object into a "man-made" one, we destroy something intrinsically sacred about it.

Again, easy to understand the idea, certainly at least on an aesthetic level.

The same sentiment is at work in ecological pantheism. In some sense, humans are intruders upon the landscape and in the natural ecosystem. Perhaps we were once part of nature, but somewhere during our cultural development, something went awry. We fell from grace. Often the biblical passage about man's dominion over nature is cited as evidence of our un-Natural perversion.

This idea is hard at work in the recent James Cameron film Avatar.

[Spoilers!]

In the final scene of the movie, the protagonist Jake Sully has his consciousness permanently transferred into his Na'Vi avatar. On the one hand, it's a triumph over his disability, and it allows him to truly find a new home with the woman he's fallen in love with and the tribe who adopted him. But there's a subtle message here: Sully cannot gain salvation without fully giving up his humanity. His injured legs are a symbol of humanity's ecological original sin, with the only way to natural salvation being to refute that humanity. (Of course, it was that very humanity that led him to fall in love with Neytiri and her tribe.)

[End spoilers.]

Though many ecological pantheists may be refugees from Christianity, the same anti-human idea about our inherent spiritual depravity is a shared concept. And in extreme ecological pantheism (just like extreme Christianity) the only way to overcome our original sin is to turn away from our own humanity, becoming Christlike or returning to some idealized noble savage state.

I believe this sort of extreme ecological pantheism carries a dangerous and nihilistic message about the future of humanity. Religion, if it and we are to survive and improve, must take into account--even rely on--our humanity, including all our flaws. Our salvation lies in our own humanity; paradoxically, of course, so does the possibility of our self-extermination.

Of course, there's a lot to be said for revering the divinity of nature. If care for the natural world around us was as strong as care for our families and our society, a lot of our resource- and pollution-based problems wouldn't be anywhere near so pressing. The popular message of ecological pantheism is an important (maybe even vital) one. And it's one that can make itself at home in most, if not all, major religions. For example, Christianity has slowly but steadily been building up ideas about stewardship of the earth as a religious duty. Ecological pantheism will continue to be an important movement in Western society, provided it doesn't fall into the trap of extremism.

***

The second form of pantheism I want to talk about is called (officially) scientific pantheism. You can find it espoused by the World Pantheist Movement and the Universal Pantheist Society. (How do they know the rest of the universe belongs to their society...?)

When people talk about science becoming a new religion, this is often what they're talking about. The scientific method has nothing religious about it, of course: it's nothing more (and nothing less) than the best way we have to improve our understanding of physical reality, relying on research, experimentation and peer review.

Scientific pantheism is sometimes called "atheism with a handlebar mustache." It's a combination of poetic atheism and soft theism. You can find literature expressing the pantheist need to form a "personal relationship" with the Universe--in short, replacing a personal God with the awe-inspiring, beautiful aspects of nature. (Does a scientific pantheist really wish to form a personal relationship with ebola, though?)

Scientific pantheism has the problem of encouraging people to view science as its own religion. Although science and religion often talk about the same subjects--not least the origin and possible destinies of our species--and although they both produce similar feelings of awe and wonder, they should not be confused. Science is a source of information; often this is information that can be used to help us create a better world. But it says nothing about how we should behave towards one another. Even the young science of evolutionary psychology can only tell us why our morals have developed the way they have; it can't tell us whether our morals are good.

It does, however, share the same advantages of ecological pantheism. The universe is a holy place, and we're part of it. Learning about it can be seen as a sacred duty, both to ourselves and to the divinity we participate in. It also avoids the problem area of ecological pantheism, as it sees humanity as part of nature. Being part of nature is, for the scientific pantheist, the very reason we must take care of it.

***

Finally, I want to talk about my type of pantheism. I've decided a good name for it (because I don't know if it's already been named) is philosophical pantheism. This is sort of an "original" pantheism, in that it existed well before either modern science or the Transcendentalist movement that helped spawn Western ecological awareness. Like both ecological and scientific pantheism, philosophical pantheism begins with reverence for nature, the idea that nature is in some way divine.

Philosophical pantheism is less overtly theistic than ecological pantheism (which often views "Mother Nature" quite literally), but more theistic than scientific pantheism, with its handlebar mustache.

To understand philosophical pantheism, you have to begin with Lao Tzu and Marcus Aurelius. Of course pantheism was a part of religion before them, but the Tao te Ching and the Meditations are both seminal works. They are startlingly similar in tone and content--almost like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls in Japan!

Philosophical pantheism--while it does rely on emotional nature reverence--is a thinking religion. Spinoza's Ethics (which I still haven't finished, after over two years of reading) requires a lot of brain power (which is why I still haven't finished, after over two years of reading). It lays out its ideas in a geometrical procession--axioms, postulates, propositions, corollaries, and a whole lot of Q.E.D.'s. But being a thinking religion is apt, because Mind is one of its essential concepts.

Where philosophical pantheism differs the most with its ecological and scientific siblings is the idea that the universe is a thinking Being. This is not some quasi-mystical New Age panpsychism, though. The universe is an orderly place because Mind creates its order. Human consciousness is the way it is because the universe is the way it is. God orders itself from Being, to Mind (or Spirit), to the material universe--which is again ordered in our minds to create the experiential world we live in. Nature is fractal, recursive, and holographic: divine Logos creates the human mind.

This version of pantheism (unfortunately?) lacks the urgent ecological message. Determinism (but not fatalism) is a big factor. Although I'm responsible for my own behavior, I can't change anyone--or anything--else. Things happen because they must, because it's turtles all the way down. No matter what we do or do not do ecologically, the state of the planet is ultimately out of our hands. Our responsibility is not to "save the planet"--the Earth will take care of itself--our responsibility is to adapt ourselves to our changing environment, and support our neighbors in doing the same.

There's nothing inherently good or evil in the universe. Nature--God--is amoral, at least as far as human morality is concerned. We can't rely on divine revelations; all we have is the morality that our evolution has provided us with. Fortunately, we're still working out our social morality, and physical and cultural evolution will keep the best systems going, as long as our species lasts. Our humanity is essential to our salvation.