A Pantheist Theology

Part III follows the Ethics in thinking a naturalized world is at bottom a religious one. This part considers two ways to understand God and God’s relationship to Nature understood naturalistically: pantheism, to which this chapter is dedicated; and panentheism, the focus of Chap. 9 . On the dominant, pantheist, interpretation of the Ethics, God and Nature are one and the same thing. But the Ethics doesn’t explicitly explain why it needed to introduce God at all. This chapter tries to answer this question by turning to the quest for meaning. If an activity is in the service of something greater than itself, its trials can be rendered meaningful and therefore worth doing despite its tribulations. The Ethics proposes that discovering the scientific principles that are at work in Nature is just such an activity. A problem with this is that its religiosity is intellectualistic and elitist. To address this problem, the chapter broadens the conception of religion by using Spinoza’s own concept of intuition as the highest form of knowing. To intuit ourselves as modes of Nature is to see ourselves as agents of God/Nature, and as such to gain meaning by having a part to perform in the being of the cosmos. However, such talk neglects the warlike character of Nature. Its resulting horrors might be mitigated if they were in the service of some end whose achievement would render these sufferings meaningful, but alas, Nature has no such end other than merely sustaining its existence. So pantheism doesn’t seem to have the resources sufficient to provide meaning to its adherents in the face of the suffering inherent in being a mode of Nature. Is there a more viable alternative theology?