Lessons In Apologetics #6: Pantheism

by
Dr. Frederick Meekins
Fellow Of Worldview Studies
Issachar Institute For The Study Of Apologetics & Policy

If Deism is the belief that God is so transcendent from the

cosmos He created that He no longer participates directly in
it, Pantheism must be the worldview at the other end of the
continuum believing that a higher power exists as Pantheism
holds that God is so immanent with the universe that God
and the universe are one. As a worldview, Pantheism has
plagued the religious thought of both the East and West from
ancient times on up through our contemporary day.

Though there are various forms of Pantheism, most share a

set of common characteristics. Pantheists will agree that
ultimately there is but one substance.

Parmenides hypothesized that there is either being or

nonbeing and in order to exist there must be being. And if
everything possesses this quality, everything is of the same
substance as to differ by nothing would be not to exist at all.

Though everything is ultimately one under Pantheism, what

we perceive as multiplicity or distinction are either
manifestations or emanations of the absolute unity.

In the "Enneads", the Greek mystic Plotinus said that from

this impersonal unity flowed the various levels of reality
starting with unity, then inward into mind, then the world
soul, then multiple souls, then to the lowest level of matter.
It is man, Geisler writes in "Christian Apologetics" of this
brand of Pantheism as "the microcosm who possesses mind,
soul, and matter" that the journey back to unity and oneness
begins (175).

Though slightly different, other forms of Pantheism share

considerable similarity. For example, in Spinoza's
pantheism, God is a substance of infinite attributes and we
exist as transient manifestations of the absolute that are
eventually reabsorbed back into it. And in Hinduism, though
that world religion is noted for its multiplicities of
divinities, in its philosophically complex variants, the various
gods all the way down to the material components of the
physical world are the assorted levels of the comprehensive
totality known as Brahman.

Though many Pantheists claim to embrace tolerance as they

contend all religions are merely human efforts to understand
the same all-encompassing God, one is really taking the
serpent to one’s bosom when dealing with Pantheism. For
example, in much of Pantheist thought, it is held that both
good and evil flow from God much in the same way there is
both a light and dark side of the Force in the Star Wars epic.
Other Pantheists claim that God is beyond good and evil as
understood by human beings.

Such positions could be used to not only to justify any

number of atrocities but also to view them in a disturbingly
detached manner or even positively in an around about
fashion. For example, if good and evil are simply just human
conceptions useful for ordering social relations, what is so
inherently immoral about the Holocaust?

After all, were not the Jews the ones anyway that set the ball
rolling on the theism that ended up promoting the conceptual
dualism that now hinders the expansion of consciousness?
Besides, by liberating them of their physical materiality,
aren’t we doing them a favor by reuniting them with
universal oneness? Under Pantheism, the “is” becomes the
“ought” and that is why one sees cows strutting freely down
the streets of India with the baby girls tossed out with the
trash.

by Frederick Meekins