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Naturalistic Pantheism

From pp. 222-242 of Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language, by Quentin Smith, Yale University Press, 1997.

27. Naturalistic Pantheism and Global, Naturalistic Perfectionism

It might appear that our conclusion is that human life lacks a religious meaning but possesses an ethical meaning. But our negative conclusion is merely that it lacks a monotheistic religious meaning. This conclusion is consistent with the thesis that the religious meaning of human life is described by a naturalistic pantheism. According to naturalistic pantheism, everything (“pan” = all) is holy.

“Holiness” has a different sense in naturalistic pantheism than it does in mono theism. According to monotheism, holiness implies supernatural purity and maxi mal metaphysical greatness: perfect goodness, omniscience, omnipotence, eternality. This is the fundamental sense of holiness for monotheism. The derivative sense of “holy” in monotheism applies to people and places (holy man, holy ground) which stand in a certain relation to the being that has fundamental holiness.

Naturalistic pantheism, which involves a type of religious attitude different from that of monotheism, implies that all is holy. Because all things include the bad as well as the good, “holiness” does not mean what it does in monotheism. The attempt to combine pantheism with the monotheistic sense of “holiness,” which implies the omniattributes, results in absurdity, as in Plantinga’s (mis)definition of “pantheism” in A Companion to Metaphysics: “Pantheism is the doctrine that all is God—not, absurdly, that each thing is God, but that the totality of things is somehow God. (‘Somehow’, since it is not easy to see how the totality of things could be able to do or know anything at all, let alone be almighty and all-knowing.)”[1] Contra Plantinga, pantheism is not the doctrine that all things are “holy” or “divine” in the monotheistic sense of these words. According to naturalistic pantheism, “holiness” means has all naturally instantiated values, negative as well as positive. (In chapter 6, I often used “valuable” in one of its senses, that is, good, but I am using it here in a broader sense in which it includes both negative and positive values.) The holy, what has all naturally instantiated values, is all things. A thing is a concrete object (a mere physical thing, a mere organic thing, or an animal), and a value is naturally instantiated if and only if it is instantiated by some concrete object. The statement that the holy has all naturally instantiated values does not mean that each thing has all naturally instantiated values. Rather, it means that (i) for each value F that is naturally instantiated, there is some part of the holy that instantiates F, (ii) each part of the holy instantiates some value, and (iii) all and only concrete objects are parts of the holy.

Because holiness includes all naturally instantiated badness as well as all naturally instantiated goodness, the holy is both horrifying and awesome.

The holy is the conjunction of all things: Jane and Jack and Fido and this lizard and that tree and that star, and so forth. The conjunction of all things is awesome in respect of the conjunction of all positive values that are naturally instantiated, and the conjunction of all things is horrible in respect of the conjunction of all negative values that are naturally instantiated. This means, in effect, that the holy deserves the emotional response of horror in respect of all the decreases and preventions of developments of things’ natures; it deserves awe and admiration in respect of all the developments of the natures of things and the conjunction of all things with a developed kind of nature.

There is an additional element to the awesome aspect of the holy, which implies that the holy at its base level is purely good. Each thing, if it is a physical thing, animate thing, animal or human, is good intrinsically in that it exemplifies a kind of nature; each kind of nature (for example, physicality, organicity) is a kind of natural development and thus a kind of goodness, because goodness natural development. A good is a kind of nature (for example, animality) or a development of a kind of nature (for example, an animal’s satisfying its desires).

This implies that there is one sense in which it is better that there is something rather than nothing. It is better that there be things of some natural kinds rather than no things at all. But it does not imply that it is better that there are these things than any other conjunction of possible things (or kinds of things), or that it is better that the history of these things is better than any other possible history of these things. Further, the fact that it is better that there are things rather than nothing does not imply, “Regardless of what things there are, and regardless of the history of these things, it is better that there are things rather than nothing.” For suppose all that exists is a tiny rock (or rocklike) enclave inside of which there exists a human child (or something human childlike in the relevant respects) all of whose bones are broken, who is dying of starvation and thirst, and whose agony is so great that she is literally crazed with pain. This universe exists for two days and ceases to exist when the humanlike being dies. Here are two kinds of things, a rocklike thing and an intelligent organism, which are good inasmuch as they are developed kinds of nature. But the evil consisting in the prevention and decrease in the development of the organism’s animate, animal, and rational nature outweighs the good of the existence of an inanimate kind of thing and a rational kind of thing. This indicates that “it is better that there be things of some natural kinds rather than no things at all” is consistent with the falsity of some (other) sense of “it is better that there is something rather than nothing,” namely, the sense “it is better that there be things of some natural kinds rather than no things at all, regardless of the history (actual circumstances and behavior) of these things.” What is the distinction involved?

It is based on the fact that there are two criteria of goodness, but only one of badness. A thing’s possession of a kind of nature (for example, animality) is intrinsically good and not intrinsically bad. And a thing’s development of its kind of nature (for example, an animal’s satisfying its desires) is intrinsically good. Badness consists only in preventions and decreases of the development of things’ natures (for example, an animal’s desire for food being unfulfilled). (This was argued in chapter 6.) Now if we consider things only in respect of their possession of a kind of nature, then we can say that (in this respect) it is better that there be something rather than nothing. Indeed, this is a necessary truth. But if we consider instead the total situation produced by the degreed developments of these things’ natures and the preventions and decreases of these things’ nature, the total situation may have more negative value than positive. It would then follow, as a matter of logic, that this situation ought not to exist. If the total situation S has negative value, this implies S ought not to be. This in turn implies that (a) it is better that there be nothing at all rather than S and (b) it is better that there be another total situation S’ rather than S or nothing, such that S’ is any total situation that has (overall) positive value.

If the total situation that exists has overall positive value, that does not imply that the bad in the universe is morally justified or that each bad is necessary for some equal or outweighing good. Many preventions or decreases in the development of things’ natures are gratuitous evils. What it means is that despite the gratuitous evils, the total situation produced by the existence and history of the kinds of things is more good than bad, and in this sense has “(overall) positive value” and ought to exist. (Of course, this is not simply a matter of counting the goods and evils because we need to consider the total situation as an “organic whole” in G. E. Moore’s sense.)

We are not in an epistemic situation to know for certainty whether the total situation that exists is more good than bad. But I think it is fair to say that if the rest of the universe is not radically different from the tiny part of the universe about which we know, then it is more probable than not that the total situation is overall good (even if the good just barely outweighs the bad).

Given this, what are the appropriate attitudes to the holy? There are several. It is appropriate to have positive appreciations of the facts that (a) there are some kinds of things rather than nothing, that (b) there are some developments of the natures of the inanimate, animate, animal, and rational things that exists (for example, some desire-satisfactions), rather than no developments, and that (c) the available evidence, admittedly very limited, suggests that the total situation is more good than bad and thus ought to exist rather than nothingness.

But it hardly follows that the emotional attitude to the holy that takes into account everything relevant to the appreciation of something is unambiguously positive. There is no Spinozist “intellectual love of God” as the supreme pantheistic attitude. This would require a blindness to the gratuitous evil that exists. The most appropriate emotional appreciation of the holy in all its respects, good and bad, requires an emotion of profound ambivalence. One is in a state of ambivalence between horror and awe, or joy and despair, when one contemplates the whole. One feels horrified awe at the universe or a joy tinged with sadness and despair.

Because the word “awful” in its ordinary use is ambiguous, sometimes used in the sense of “horrible” and sometimes in the sense of “awesome,” we may use “awful” to express both these senses and say simply: the holy is awful. Webster’s New World Dictionary lists as two different senses of “awful” highly impressive and appalling, which are appropriate predicates of the holy.

Regarding joy and despair, we may say the holy is “good in some respects but still tragically hopeless.” The importance of despair in naturalist pantheism—and the different role it plays in pantheism and monotheism—is discussed further in a later section. But here I note that these results show that naturalistic pantheism is immune from the Freudian charge of “wish-fulfillment” which Freud argues is the psychological origin of religion.

What is the argument for the existence of the holy? The moral realist and global, naturalistic perfectionism articulated in chapter 6 entail naturalistic pantheism. The ethical theory I developed entails that each thing has value, and this entailment (conjoined with the premise that some things exist) entails that the concept of holiness is instantiated.

“The holy” has the same designata as “all things,” but the two expressions have a different cognitive significance. The cognitive significance of “the holy” has elements that are common to the various uses of “the holy” across religious traditions, monotheism, polytheism, naturalistic pantheism, and so on. These elements are of necessity vague or ambiguous, given the disparity of the religious traditions. These items are that the holy is in some sense “more valuable than anything else” and is in some sense “more real than anything else.” The vague or ambiguous expressions “more valuable than” and “more real than” have been given familiar precise senses in the “perfect being” theological tradition of Judeo-Christianity. In naturalistic pantheism, they mean that the holy is the conjunction of all concrete things (and thus there is no thing—no concrete object—apart from the holy that is real) and the conjunction of all that is positively or negatively valuable (and thus that no concrete object apart from the holy has any value).

The cognitive significance of the naturalist pantheist use of “the holy” is also its reference-fixing description, which is that “the holy” directly and rigidly refers to the conjunction of all things that exemplify positive and/or negative value. Because the reference is rigid, “the holy” picks out the conjunction of all things in the actual world in respect of every possible world to which it refers.

“The holy” is a referentially used definite description in Marcus’s sense, not in Donnellan’s. In Donnellan’s sense, the same definite description can sometimes be used attributively and sometimes referentially (for example, “the man in the corner who is drinking a martini”), but in Marcus’s sense a referentially used definite description is constantly used referentially and behaves like a name.

The rigidity of “the holy” reflects the fact that the modal difference between absolute actuality and relative actuality is of crucial religious significance. The actual world cc is the only world that is absolutely actual (this means that only a is actual), but each world is relatively actual in that it is actual at itself (that is, for each world w, w would have been actual had it been actual). But the actual world is not to be confused with the holy; the actual world is the maximally true proposition W; for each proposition p, W includes p as a conjunct or includes the negation of p as a conjunct, such that W includes only true conjuncts. But a maximally true proposition is an abstract object, and the holy is the conjunction of all and only concrete objects. Thus the holy corresponds to (or is a truth-maker of) a part of the actual world, namely, the relevant propositions about the natures of things or the developments (or preventions or decreases in developments) of the natures of things. (Because correspondence is a symmetrical relation, if a proposition corresponds to a situation, that situation corresponds to the proposition.)

The fact that “the holy” is a rigid designator, a referentially used definite description, shows that the contingent fact of existing is a metaphysically necessary condition of being the holy. If it is true that something does not exist but might have existed, then its failure to possess the ontological status of existence deprives the possible thing of any claim to being a part of the holy. Of course, the phrase “the holy” might have designated a different conjunction of things, if a different possible world had been actual (just as “water” might have designated XYZ rather than H₂O if XYZ had satisfied the reference-fixing description of “water”). But given the contingent ontological facts, only these things—the existent ones—have the good (or bad) luck of being the designata of “the holy.”

Thus, “the holy” does not designate different things in respect of different possible worlds. It designates only the things that have the world—indexed property of existing-in-a, where a is the actual world. Things that merely might have existed do not have a high enough ontological status to be parts of the holy.

“The holy is all things” is necessarily true if “all things” is used in a directly referential way. Because “the holy” is a directly referential expression, a referentially used definite description, this sentence will be necessarily true “all things” also is directly referential. Sometimes “all things” is directly referential and has existential import (contra the definition of this phrase in modern logic textbooks). For example, “All people on the block are old” uses “all people” in a directly referential way, as I have argued elsewhere.[2] The de re proposition expressed by“ The holy is all things” (given that “all things” is directly referential)  is true in each possible world in which this proposition exists, but it exists only in the worlds in which all and only the actually existent things exist, because it contains these things as parts. (“The holy is all things” is an informative sentence because “the holy” and “all things” have a different cognitive significance.)

If “all things” is used in the way that is standard in logic textbooks, then “The holy is all things” is contingently true. For there are some possible worlds that include all the things that exist in a and in addition some other things. In these worlds, it is false that all things with the world—indexed property of existing in a—the designata of our use of “the holy”—are all things.

Because the fact that the property of holiness is exemplified is known by being deduced from global, naturalistic perfectionism and because this normative ethics is known to be true only a posteriori, “The holy is all things” is known a posteriori to express a true proposition.

In one sense of the question, “Why is holiness exemplified?” the answer is that something exists and that global, naturalistic perfectionism is true. But in another sense, the question is about why the things that, in fact, are the designate of “the holy” exist rather than some other things or nothing at all. The second sense of this question pertains to the supreme good of theoretical reason.

The supreme good of theoretical reason is knowing the explanation of the holy. By knowing the explanation of the holy, I not only know the holy (as that which is explained) but also know why the holy exists. I know why there is something rather than nothing, and why this universe exists rather than something else.

Note that this contrasts with monotheism, which implies that knowing the holy is knowing the explanans of the universe; the explanans is God or God’s decision to create the universe. But in naturalistic pantheism, knowing the holy is knowing the explanandum, the universe itself. The explanans is not the holy; rather, it is some law of nature, for example, a wave function of the universe. The holy belongs to this explanative knowledge as the conclusion of the argument (“the universe exists”), rather than as the premises (which refer to the relevant law of nature).

For example, if the wave function of the universe developed by Hartle and Hawking explains why the universe exists, then we would have this explanation of why the holy exists:

EXP.

WF. y[h_ij, f] = N ò ¶g ¶f exp(-I[g, f])  

Therefore, it is probably true that:

H. The holy exists.

The integral is a path integral over all finite four-dimensional space-times g with matter fields f that have the three-dimensional space h_ij, and matter field f as a boundary. The square of the modulus of the amplitude, |y[h_ij, f]|², gives the probability that there begins to exist (uncaused) a universe with the three- dimensional space h_ij and matter field f. As Hartle and Hawking say, the wave function equation (WF) is “the [probability] amplitude for the universe to appear from nothing.”[3] (In this equation, N is the normalization constant. I is the Euclidean Einstein action. It is obtained by replacing the time t with (-it) in the normal Einstein action and adjusting the sign so that I is positive. The four-dimensional space-times summed over have a positive definite signature.) The explanation is probabilistic because the wave function, when squared, gives a high probability that a universe of our sort will “appear from nothing.” Although it is doubtful that (WF) is the correct explanation (for example, the unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics has not yet been accomplished, and this unification is assumed, not proved, in [WF]), if (WF) is the correct explanation, then knowing (EXP) is the supreme moral goal of human life.

The supreme ethical purpose of human life is equivalent to the purpose of increasing the goodness of the holy, to make the holy more impressive and less appalling. This is tantamount to maximizing the development of the nature of the universe (the nature of all things).

In this section, I have given a relatively formal explanation of naturalistic pan theism. In the next several sections, I shall discuss its intuitive content, in a way that makes manifest its distinctive religious nature.

28. Independent and Dependent Naturalist Pantheism

The fact that the holy includes negative as well as positive values is something that naturalistic pantheism shares with polytheistic religions. The Greek Homeric religion, the ancient Egyptian religion, the Babylonian religion, and so forth all imply that the deities do evil things as well as good things and that the holy character of these deities embraces their evil dispositions as much as their good dispositions. For polytheism, as well as for naturalistic pantheism, there is no “problem of evil.” The existence of natural evil and moral evil (as they are called in the philosophy of religion), far from being evidence against the existence of the holy (as it is in monotheism), is instead part of the evidence for its existence. When Plato redefined “the holy” or “the divine” to imply perfect moral goodness in The Republic, he introduced “the problem of evil” into the philosophy of religion, rendering the religious worldview both logically and evidentially in conflict with the observed fact, or so at least I argued in chapter 5. Plato’s redefinition of “the holy” to include perfect goodness is probably his most influential mistake (at least in the area of the philosophy of religion).

Naturalistic pantheism is not experientially or intellectually “derivative from” Judeo-Christian monotheism or any other sort of theism but has an independent source in an independent type of religious experience and thought. We can distinguish several sorts of pantheism and distinguish independent naturalistic pantheism, the sort I am describing, from a naturalistic pantheism that is dependent on religious notions taken from traditional monotheism.

There is supernatural pantheism, nonnatural pantheism, and naturalist pantheism. Supernatural pantheism is exemplified by the later Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bhat Shankara and other Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist writers. This view holds that the universe, in some sense, is identical with a supernatural mind, even though it normally appears not to be identical with this mind. Nonnatural pantheism is exemplified by the works of Plotinus, Spinoza, John Leslie, Michael P. Levine, by my book Language and Time, and by my article “An Analysis of Holiness.”[4] Spinoza is mistakenly regarded as a naturalistic pantheist by many philosophers, he exception being the majority of Spinoza scholars (for example, Edwin Curley, Harold Joachim, and others); as Curley notes, by “God or Nature” Spinoza is in fact referring to a platonic realm of abstract objects. Spinoza’s “finite modes” would correspond to our concrete things, but Spinoza denies that the conjunction of all finite modes is the holy. Perhaps we could say that what we call “the holy” is the conjunction of all the finite modes of the attributes of Extension and Thought in Spinoza’s metaphysics. But for Spinoza, the holy is instead the platonic realm, a view he shares with Plotinus, Leslie, and others. Spinoza held a nonnaturalist pantheism (much as Moore ’s platonic realism committed him to a nonnaturalist moral realism).

In “An Analysis of Holiness” I argued the existing of the universe is holy and in the conclusion of Language and Time I implicitly suggested that the presentness (= existing in the present tensed sense) of all concrete and abstract objects is holy. Taking the existence of the universe as the proper object of pantheistic awe is a view also reflected in Milton Munitz’s writings, especially the last chapter of his Logic and Existence. Munitz denies that the existence of the universe is a property, or at least a normal sort of property, such as redness, but his view suggests a nonnatural pantheism inasmuch as the Existence of the universe is not identical with the natural universe. I discussed Munitz’s interesting theory in more detail in “An Analysis of Holiness.”

Michael P. Levine’s book Pantheism (1994) compares various concepts of pan theism, theism, monism, and other ideas. Levine’s discussion is clearly relevant to any pantheistic philosophy, but his ideas seem to diverge from our naturalistic pantheism in that he characterizes pantheism in terms of a “divine Unity” and regards this divine Unity as a morally good order of reality. Levine says that “living in accord with the Unity is ethically good and violating it in some way, going against it etc., is ethically wrong. . . . what is morally correct will be in accord with the Unity.”[5] This differs from naturalistic pantheism, which implies that all is holy and that all ways of living are in accordance with the holy or “the divine,” both good ways of living and morally bad ways of living because each thing, no matter how it lives, is just as much a constituent of the holy as any other thing. Levine’s pantheism is nonnatural because the holy is identified with a morally good order rather than with the natural universe.

Two books that come closer than any other to a naturalistic pantheism are my The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling (which is based on a theory that rejects moral realism) and John Post’s The Faces of Existence (which is based on a moral realist theory).[6]

The Felt Meanings of the World can be regarded as a pantheistic philosophy of religion only with some important qualifications. For one thing, it does not fall in the category of an analytic philosophy of religion. In this early work, I attempted to develop a philosophy that falls outside of the current divide between “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy” and that unifies both sorts of philosophizing into a different and new way of thinking. Bruce Wilshire wrote, “A colleague has called The Felt Meanings of the World the most important book in phenomenology yet written by an American. I tend to agree.”[7] I would say the book is neither phenomenological nor analytic. Panayot Butchvarov correctly described the goal I had in mind when he wrote in his review that The Felt Meanings of the World “presents a picture of our cognitive relationship to the world that is radically different from virtually all other such pictures.”[8] What is germane to my present discussion is whether the book can be interpreted as presenting a naturalistic pantheism. At the time of its writing, I did not see this book as a version of naturalist pantheism, but in hindsight it seems to have many points in common with pantheism. Moral values are rejected in favor of objective “ways of being important,” and the target of the relevant emotions (awe, reverence, despair, and so on) is not the conjunction of all things, but the whole of all things, where “the whole” refers to a concrete thing that is distinct from all other things and that stands to them in the relation of being composed of them. This whole, the world—whole, is a natural aggregate composed of all the natural things that presently exist, and the global affects described in the book can be viewed as the variety of affects a pantheist could experience. The “metaphysics of feeling” developed in this book can be interpreted as a naturalistic pantheism based on the tensed theory of time and moral antirealsm.

John Post’s The Faces of Existence may be regarded as presenting a naturalist pantheism based on the tenseless theory of time and moral realism. In fact, an analytic philosopher who is a pantheist may rightly regard Post’s book as the most fruitful and valuable book on the philosophy of religion since Spinoza s Ethics. I want to make several qualifications to my characterization of Post’s theory as pantheistic.

Post’s theory best exemplifies a “dependent naturalistic pantheism,” and I shall discuss his pantheism at some length in order to distinguish it from the “independent naturalist pantheism I am articulating.

I need to distinguish the dependent naturalistic pantheism articulated in chapters 1-7 of Post’s book from the versions of nontraditional monotheism Post discusses in chapter 8. Post’s project in chapter 8, entitled “God,” is to formulate various types of philosophical theologies that are consistent with physicalism. Post distinguishes two nonreferential versions of monotheism and one referential version.

One nonreferential version of monotheism may be called “normative monotheism,” although Post does not use this phrase. According to this version, which treats “God” as nonreferential, God is the maker of heaven and earth is objeclively true, even though “God” fails to refer. Normative monotheism implies that this sentence is objectively true in that it expresses objectively correct moral values and a certain way of life. The moral values it expresses are monotheistic values, and normative monotheism requires us “to see what there is as essentially good.” In response to a possible objection that monotheistic moral values are not instantiated, Post suggests we may adopt a second version of nonreferential monotheism, one which construes “God exists” as meaning simply that moral realism is true, without specifying which moral values are instantiated.

The referential version of monotheism that Post outlines comes close to being a sort of pantheism, even though Post denies this version is pantheistic. Post’s referential version of monotheism implies that “God” refers in some predications but not in others. We treat “God” as referring to the Universe in negative predications; God or the Universe is immutable, not in time, not dependent on anything, and so forth. Post denies this theory is pantheistic because he takes “pantheism” to mean that the Universe has some positive monotheistic properties. He writes, “Pantheism not only identifies God with the Universe but holds that therefore all and only the positive predications that can be true of God are those that can be true of the Universe, including ‘God is the proper object of our worship, reverence, and awe’ “ (362).

Yet it is not this sense of “pantheism” that I have in mind when I say that Post’s book can be viewed as presenting a naturalistic pantheism. Chapter 8 of the book is less about naturalist pantheism than are chapters a 1-7 which are ostensibly not about the philosophy of religion but other subjects, such as explanation, physical ism, and values. Chapters a 1-7 in fact articulate in great detail a philosophy of religion to which Post gives no name but which may be called a “dependent naturalist pantheism.”

The naturalist pantheism articulated in these chapters is a dependent pantheism in the sense that it is derived from the religious categories of monotheism. Post writes that the universe is

(a) the symbol and source of truth, beauty, and goodness, if only because facts about its aspects or its parts determine such matters. We may go further and recall that by Chapter 3 the universe is also (b) the eternal, immutable, uncreated, independent, self-existent, explanatorily necessary First Cause of all that is. For many, (a) and (b) will be more than enough to justify according the universe the role of divinity—of such divinity, at any rate, as we were ever entitled to believe in or ever will be . . . the universe is the divine. (325)

Although Post does not include himself among the “many” who unreservedly endorse this “dependent pantheistic” theory, he gives the best articulation of this sort of pantheism that is available in the literature. Post gives special meanings to the terms “eternal,” “explanatorily necessary,” “First Cause,” and so forth that differ from the monotheistic meanings and that can be truly predicated of the natural universe, conceived in accordance with a tenseless theory of time.

Post argues that religion should accord with the science of the day. Just as Aquinas saw that Christianity should be formulated to accord with the Aristotelian science of his day, so religion should now be formulated to accord with the scientific and physicalist worldview of the twentieth century. Accordingly, Post gives a meaning to the traditional monotheistic predicates “First Cause,” “explanatorily necessary,” “immutable,” and so on that are consistent with contemporary science. Two of the basic ideas are “First Cause” and “immutable,” in terms of which we can understand his definitions of the other predicates.

The Universe is the First Cause, but not in the normal sense of an efficient cause. Post first notes that an ultimate explainer in a parade of explanations is some explanatory factor E that explains other facts in the parade but is not itself explained. He introduces the novel principle,

P. If x explains y, then all the wholes of which x is a part also explain y.

It follows from this principle that the Universe is the ultimate explainer of every thing that has an explanation. For every other ultimate explainer is a part of the Universe, the greatest whole. From Post’s principle (P), it follows that the Uni verse explains everything that is explained by any other ultimate explainer. Because the Universe itself has no explanation, it is an ultimate explainer.

But the Universe is not just one ultimate explainer among many; it has the unique status of being the First Cause. Post defines a cause as an explainer, and the Universe is the First Cause or First Explainer in the sense that it is the whole of all the ultimate explainers plus anything else that has no explanation. In this way, the description “the First Cause” can be redefined in a way to make it consistent with a naturalist pantheist view of the universe.

The First Cause is the Universe. But what is the Universe? According to Post, the Universe is the spatiotemporal whole of which every physical existent is a part. The Universe is distinct from the manifest universe; the manifest universe is the physical universe as conceived through present-day scientific categories. The Universe is the real physical universe, the universe that science aims to know and to which its theories are successively better approximations.

The Universe is immutable in that it is not subject to change. The Universe is a four-dimensional spatial—temporal whole. What changes are spatially three-dimensional objects that persist through time, but the four-dimensional space-time does not itself persist through time or acquire and lose properties. It is also tenseless, timeless, and eternal in senses relevant to a four-dimensional space-time ontology.

If we identify this Universe with God, as Post suggests we might, we have a version of naturalistic pantheism. We can say with truth that the Universe or God is the First Cause, immutable, eternal, timeless, and necessary; because the Universe instantiates the suitably redefined predicates that the monotheistic god was said to instantiate, we can justifiably identify the Universe with God.

This religious view has some plausibility, assuming the tenseless theory of time is true. But the relevant point I wish to make is that this view is not the independent naturalistic pantheism articulated in the previous sections. Independent naturalistic pantheism is not experientially or intellectually “derivative from” Judeo Christian monotheism or any other sort of theism but has an independent source in an independent type of religious experience and thought. Naturalist pantheism is not constructed by saving whatever can be saved from monotheism, consistent with twentieth-century science. There is no need for the ontological predicates of monotheism—being the First Cause, immutability, explanatory necessity, being eternal, and so forth—to be instantiated in order for independent naturalist pan theism to be true.

A certain passage in Post’s The Faces of Existence suggests that he is partly aware of this independent sort of naturalistic pantheism. He writes, “The totality of natural fact might suffice to determine that certain value terms are true of the universe—say, that it is beautiful, terrible, awesome, eerie, intriguing, astonishing, and more. . . . In addition, the universe could have meaning in the sense that it is the appropriate object of certain emotions—not only, on occasion, of terror or awe but of acceptance and even reverence” (324-25). Post does not clearly segregate this independent pantheism from the dependent sort, however: he proceeds to assert in the next paragraph that if we regard the universe in addition as an “eternal, immutable, uncreated, independent, self-existent, explanatorily necessary First Cause,” then the universe may be regarded as being “divine.”

An independent naturalist pantheism is approached more nearly by some writers on the “Great Goddess religion,” writers such as Marija Gimbutas and Donna Wilshire.

Although Gimbutas has not convincingly shown that there is archeological evidence of such a religion in prehistory (the consensus of archeologists is that Gimbutas’s claims are mistaken), there are a few practitioners of a Great Goddess religion now, and that seems sufficient for such a religion to exist. We can abstract from questions of archeological accuracy in Gimbutas’s writings and extract the religious content. She writes that the Great Goddess is plausibly identified with Nature:

[It is] appropriate to view all of these Goddess images as [representing] aspects of the one Great Goddess with her core functions—life—giving, death— wielding, regeneration and renewal. The obvious analogy would be to Nature itself, through the multiplicity of phenomena and continuing cycles of which it is made, one recognizes the fundamental and underlying unity of Nature. The Goddess is immanent rather than transcendent and therefore physically manifest. . . [and is] in animals, plants, water, mountains, and stones. The Goddess may be a bird, a deer, a vase, an upright stone, or a tree.[9]

If the Great Goddess is this bird and that deer and that vase and that stone and that tree, and so on, for each concrete thing that exists, then the Great Goddess is identical with what independent naturalistic pantheism calls “the holy.”

Donna Wilshire also writes in a way that is suggestive of an independent naturalistic pantheism. She says that “the Great Mother Goddess Hera” is not a supernatural person governing nature but a metaphor for nature itself. She writes, “The Goddess’s Inner Wisdom tradition promotes awareness that all life is of and in this material world—universe (not some immaterial otherworld ‘out there’), that all life is sacred (not fallen, illusory, or evil), and that life is meant to be lived and shared ecstatically (not dutifully). In this Old Way one can fearlessly embrace All-That-Is and passionately accept one’s full Self, one’s whole body, all emotions and dreams,”[10]

This material world-universe is sacred for what it is, because it consists of stones, deer, and people, and not because it satisfies any monotheistic ontological predicates, such as being a First Cause or immutable or eternal or explanatorily necessary. According to dependent naturalist pantheism, “the holy” would be defined in terms of the ontological predicates (immutable, and so forth) of the monotheistic god, without the personal predicates (loving, good, and so on). Naturalistic pantheism would in effect be monotheism without the personal element.

As I have suggested, however, an independent naturalistic pantheism derives from its own religious sources, feelings of harmony with, horror, despair, awe, and joy at all the good and bad natural things and states of natural things that exist. We do not retrieve whatever we can from the concept of the supernatural and apply it to nature; rather, we begin from within the nature that affects us and is manifest to us and includes us, and experience it, and from these experiences one derives the concepts of what constitutes the holy.

Certain poems express an independent pantheism that is clearly distinct from a dependent pantheism. A type of natural pantheist religious experience is expressed in these lines from “Meditation at Oyster River ” by Theodore Roethke:

Now, in this waning of light,

I rock with the motion of morning;

In the cradle of all that is,

I’m lulled into half-sleep

By the lapping of water,

Cries of the sandpiper.

Water’s my will, and my way,

And the spirit runs, intermittently,

In and out of the small waves,

Runs with the intrepid shorebirds—

How graceful the small before danger!

In the first of the moon,

All’s a scattering,

A shining.[11]

Here there is no reference to such monotheist sentiments as worship or the feeling that a loving person is watching over one or even any sense that there are any minds other than the minds of organisms. There are no dependent pantheistic sentiments about an eternal, immutable, necessary, self-explanatory universe that is a “First Cause.” The sentiment is independently pantheistic because there is an emotional response to “all that is,” understood as all that there is in the universe or nature: all matter and organisms throughout all of space and time.

Roethke is feeling in harmony with all that is; he feels himself to be a part of all that is, a part that is harmoniously related (at least in certain respects and at that time) to all other parts: “I rock with the motion of morning; / In the cradle of all that is.”

Further, Roethke’s poem evinces a positive appreciation of the universe that is not dependent on believing that there is a good moral order of the universe, that everything is ordered to the good. The feeling of being a harmonious part of all-there-is requires that there be enough good in all-there-is so that the realization of my nature can (at least at some times and to some degree) be allowed by the way things are. It also requires only that other things manifest some degree of harmony in this sense, that all things are interrelated in such a way that they permit or promote the development of some things’ natures to some degree. These requirements are consistent both with there being gratuitous evil and with there being more evil than good in the universe.

The holy is harmonious in some respects and dissonant in others. The pantheist feeling of harmony is an emotional response to the holy in its harmonious aspect. The emphasis in the feeling of harmony is on the positively valuable aspect of all there is. Roethke is appreciating the beauty of the water, the moonlight, the natural skill and grace of the shorebirds. He is quite conscious that the holy wears another face besides the harmonious and beautiful. He writes in “Journey to the Interior,”

As a blind man, lifting a curtain, knows it is morning,

I know this change:

On one side of silence there is no smile;

But when I breathe with the birds,

The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing,

And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.

There are two sides of silence, the wrathful, dark side where death has negative value, and we cannot at these times be reconciled with death. This aspect of all-there-is is the dissonant aspect: various parts of nature destroy, harm, or impede the realization of other parts of nature. But there is also a positive side of silence, where there is a smile; in respect of this side, the opportunity I have to participate in all-there-is feels like “a blessing” and is something good. In this respect, I feel fortunate, for sometimes and in some respects I and other parts can realize their natures constantly with one another. I feel harmonious with the birds and the rest of nature, and I am reconciled with the fact that all that lives must die. Death destroys me and in this respect is bad, but it allows new life-forms to be born, evolve, and participate in all-there-is, and in this respect death is good.

I would suggest that the most rational way for me as pantheist to be reconciled with death is to realize how insignificant my life is in the grand totality that constitutes the holy. My self and my life are but a drop in the oceanic spread of space and time, and the cessation of my self is the cessation of something that has very little value in comparison with the total aggregate value of everything else. A true emotional crisis would be rationally elicited by a belief that the whole universe is about to cease to exist, for in this case all that is valuable would disappear. But an emotional crisis at the thought of one’s own death seems to be an egocentric delusion based on an overestimation of the value of one’s self.

It seems that Einstein felt in some respects a natural pantheist attitude. He writes,

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his con sciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our per sonal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in it self, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.[12]

Although Einstein aptly expresses the sense of transcending the narrow circle of what we experience to be important—ourselves, family, career, and so on—he seems guilty of adopting the wish fulfillment approach to religion, in which religion is defined as a route to happiness. Perhaps, more charitably, he can be interpreted as expressing one aspect of the natural pantheist attitude—feeling com passion, focusing on the beautiful aspect of nature and the positive feeling of liberation. One may feel compassion, for example, for the twenty million people who died of the plague in the fourteenth century, but one cannot blind oneself to the horribleness of the fact that this gratuitous natural evil exists at all. Insofar as inner security is a goal, it cannot honestly be attained by focusing only on the positive side of nature, “the whole of nature in its beauty.” Given that the universe is awesome, beautiful, horrible, and grotesque, inner security can be attained only by realizing one’s insignificance and thus that the good and bad things that happen to one (including one’s death) do not matter very much in the broad scheme of things. One feels secure in the face of fate because one is too unimportant for anything very important (bad or good) to happen to oneself.

There are other ways for a naturalist pantheist to attain a religious peace of mind, but it is important to note that peace of mind is not “the ideal state” for the naturalist pantheist, for peace of mind can be attained only by not taking into account the horrifying aspect of the holy. At some times and in some respects, the naturalist pantheist will justifiably achieve a peace of mind, but to live a genuine religious life, the pantheist at other times must not be at peace with the way things are. A religious state of mind that is equally as “ideal” as peace of mind is to be deeply saddened or fundamentally discontent at the way things are.

Is the harmonious and discordant universe enough to satisfy human religious needs? Is even the positively valuable aspect of Nature enough? To quote from another Roethke poem, “I’m Here”:

Is it enough?—

The sun loosening the frost on December windows,

The glitter of wet in the first of morning?

The sound of voices, young voices, mixed with sleighbells,

Coming across snow in early evening?

We may take these few lines of verse as suggesting to us several different questions.

First, is holy Nature enough to satisfy the religious desires of each actually extant human? The answer is clearly no; most humans with religious needs have a mono theistic need to relate to a Good and Loving Supernatural Person who governs Nature. (Not all humans have religious needs or desires. This is clear from empirical observations of human behavior, and only a religious ideology—for example, Christianity—would require one to believe that “despite the evidence” all humans have a religious need. Some people have no desire to relate to the holy in any of its senses, be it monotheistic, pantheistic, or whatever. Perhaps someone like W V. O. Quine would have such a nonreligious personality, as is suggested by his auto biography. Perhaps most atheists have no religious desires, although some clearly do [even if they are unfulfilled, as with Nietzsche and Camus].)

Second, is holy Nature enough to satisfy all humans in some possible world in which they had no religious delusions, that is, recognized that supernaturalism and other false religious beliefs are in fact false? The answer again is no, for some humans clearly do have a need to relate to a monotheistic god even if they believe that no such god exists.

Third, is holy nature enough to satisfy the religious desires of the naturalist pantheist? The naturalist pantheist believes that the holy is horrific. Does the naturalist pantheist desire or need to relate to what is horrible? In one sense, the answer is yes: the pantheist wants to contemplate the Holy in its horrifying aspect as well as in its sublime aspect. Watching a documentary film on the Nazi extermination camps or a documentary on the slaughterhouses for cattle and pigs currently operating in America counts as a religious activity for the naturalist pantheist. The Horrible is as much a part of all-there-is as the beautiful and majestic, and a pantheist desires to appreciate what-is.

The question, Does the naturalist pantheist desire or need to relate to what is horrible? has a negative answer if the question is taken in a noncontemplative respect. Perhaps it goes without saying that the pantheist does not desire herself or others to be gratuitously harmed or destroyed by the horrifying aspects of Nature; she does not desire herself or others to die of AIDS, become insane, or be raped. In this respect, the naturalist pantheist has an aversion to the Holy as much as an attraction to it. In naturalist pantheism, we need to talk about both “religious desires” and “religious aversions.”

In monotheism, there is a place for religious aversion; for example, the Christian religion, on some interpretations, implies that Satan and some atheistic humans have an aversion to God in that they do not want to submit to God’s authority (the “sin of pride”). But this aversion to the holy is a defective way of living religiously in monotheism; it is living in a religiously improper way. In naturalistic pantheism, however, an aversion to the holy is a proper and appropriate way to relate to the holy, for the horrible facet of the holy deserves aversion or repugnance. Indeed, the naturalist pantheist must have an ambivalent attitude to the holy.

The naturalist pantheist will thus answer the Is it enough? question by saying the Holy qua sublime or good is enough to satisfy her desires to relate in a positive way to the Holy, and that the Holy qua horrifying is enough to produce aversion in her to the Holy.

The Is it enough? question also has a different answer when we contrast the despair / joy affects with the horror/awe affects. There is another important sense in which holy nature is not enough to satisfy. In despair, I feel dissatisfied at the universe’s lack of nature development. This is different from horror. In horror or repugnance at the universe, there is no belief that changing the universe for the better is a hopeless task. But in despair, the actual degree of nature development in the universe is deemed hopelessly insufficient. There is nothing I could do to bring this nature development to a point that is satisfactory to me. This may be because the kinds of things that exist are insufficiently developed kinds (there appears to be nothing more developed in the universe than mere humans). If all that exists are humans, lizards, and stars, then the natural kinds belonging to the holy are too insignificant for any activity regarding them to be worth the effort. And one may also be in despair because, even if the kinds of things are sufficient, their actual or present degree of development is hopelessly insufficient, and no activity could increase their development to a degree that would make any activity worth the effort. Despair is not a deluded affect; one cannot “refute” the beliefs upon which it is based by pointing out that there are some activities one can undertake to better the universe. For the despairing person takes as her ideal of goodness something that is higher than anything that actually exists or is attainable. If such an ideal matters to one, then despair is indeed the appropriate attitude. Despair can be alleviated if the person chooses to have a lower standard of goodness matter to her; what matters to her will become the attainably good, not the unattainably good.

In monotheism, depression or despair is seen as a “distance from the holy,” as something from which one is alleviated by a proper appreciation of the holy. Mono theism holds out the promise to depressed and despairing people that there is in deed hope and happiness after all, if only one has faith in the monotheistic god. But naturalist pantheism is not offered as a panacea for despair, an opium for the masses, or a magical fulfillment of one’s deepest wishes. Rather, naturalistic pantheism sanctifies and justifies the despair of the depressed person. Despair is an end in itself, for the holy is fully understood only if despair is included among one’s responses to it. It is indeed true that there are ideals of goodness that are actually unattainable and unrealizable, regardless of one’s efforts. To remain blind to this fact in order to “be happy” implies a failure to view the universe from all true standpoints.

Despair contrasts with joy, an equally important naturalist pantheist attitude. In despair, one is comparing the universe with the Ideal; but in joy, one is comparing the universe to nothingness—there being no things at all. There being things at all, rather than nothing, is taken to be a matter for rejoicing. In addition, one may rejoice at the actual instances of goodness, the actual ways things develop their natures. Further, one may also rejoice that the limited evidence we possess seems to suggest that the totality is more good than bad, and therefore that it is better that this totality exist rather than nothingness.

But there is more to be said about the Is it enough? question. Note that in his poem, Roethke is really asking if the beauty or sublimity of Nature is enough to satisfy his desires to relate positively to something holy. Roethke is asking whether all the religious desires he has, which may include monotheistic as well as naturalist pantheistic desires, are satisfied by the sublimity of holy Nature. And here the answer is no; Nature in its sublime aspect cannot satisfy a monotheistic religious need. In “Meditations of an Old Woman: First Meditation,” Roethke suggests that he has both monotheistic and naturalist pantheistic religious needs, and so he is only sometimes religiously satisfied:

A flame, intense, visible,

Plays over the dry pods,

Runs fitfully along the stubble,

Moves over the field,

Without burning,

In such times, lacking a god,

I am still happy.

Here is the basic joy that this universe exists at all, rather than nothingness. And here we see Roethke in transition from a despairing atheism at the “death of God” (the loss of monotheistic belief) to a way of viewing things in a naturalist pantheist light.

The “death of God” despair has cognitive import for naturalist pantheism, for it shows that the holy is not the maximally good or perfect being, something that is capable of making me completely fulfilled and happy; there is conceivable something that is better than holy Nature. If one’s ideal is that there exist a reality that is enough to make one continuously and fully satisfied, then naturalist pantheism will justify an attitude of despair. The religions of the supernaturalists are designed precisely to ward off this despair. A reasoning based on wish fulfillment may go like this: “A continuous and complete satisfaction cannot be attained on earth, in this life; therefore it must be attained in a heavenly afterlife.” In supernaturalist religion as in no other place do we see how humans’ desire for happiness affects their belief-formations.

An independent naturalist pantheism has its basis in a certain sort of religious experience, just as monotheism has a basis in a sort of religious experience, for example, St. Paul ’s on the road to Damascus . For the pantheist, these experiences are of Nature.