The Tempest in a Teapot for Pantheists
The trivial difference between pantheism and panentheism
Is panentheism just pantheism deluxe?
The pantheist collapses theism into naturalism, identifying every trace of nature as inherently divine, owing to nature’s creative supremacy, as established by scientific explanations rather than theological fiats. So, the pantheist is an atheist who, in recognizing the sublime implications of scientific understanding, repudiates theistic religions for trivializing rather than honouring the divine fact that there’s something rather than nothing.
But the panentheist says that while all nature is divine, God extends into the supernatural so that nature doesn’t encompass all of God. God is nature plus something more, and God’s transcendent part is superior to the natural part, so that we retain the distinction between the sacred and the profane.
Panentheism strikes me, however, as a contrived half-way house that either gives too much credit to theism, contradicting the naturalistic basis of pantheism, or amounts to a difference of emphasis that emerges from our cognitive limits.
To see this, we need to understand what’s meant by “nature.” The best way of making sense of that word is to say that nature is the domain of contents that can be…
