History & overview · every faith gets one
God is not in the universe. God is the universe.
The position that there is one substance and the world is it — that God and Nature are two words for the same thing, with nothing outside and no one listening. It is old and scattered, it has been held inside Hinduism, Taoism and Sufism as well as against Christianity, and since 1999 a naturalistic wing has organised itself, certifies celebrants for weddings and funerals, and asks members to sign a pledge to the Earth.
Why it is filed this way
A position rather than a body for most of its history, and one that people have arrived at from inside half a dozen religions rather than by joining anything. It is filed as a philosophy on that basis, though the World Pantheist Movement, founded in 1999, is an organisation with members and celebrants and would arguably qualify as a movement in its own right. Whether pantheism is religion or an elegantly worded atheism is the argument that has followed it since Toland.
Never organised until the twentieth century and still barely organised now. The World Pantheist Movement has run since 1999 and issues certified celebrants; most pantheists belong to nothing.
The founding
Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, published in the months after his death in 1677, argued that there is only one substance, that it is infinite, and that God and Nature are two names for it. The word "pantheist" was attached to positions like his by John Toland early in the following century. Spinoza himself had been expelled from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community at twenty-three, twenty-one years earlier.
No single founder — Pantheism accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. One infinite substance; everything that exists is a mode of it.
The divine. Not a being within the universe and not a person outside it. God is the totality, considered as one thing — Spinoza's Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. It has no will, no preferences and no plans, so it cannot answer prayer; what pantheists report instead is that the appropriate response is awe. Whether this counts as theism at all has been disputed since the word was coined..
Death and after. None for the individual, generally. Matter and energy persist and are reused; the person does not..
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
Dave Stevism — Dave Steves is the physical manifestation of the Universe.