Defending Pantheism

[FatAndFaithless]

The utility would be a perceived increase in base value of respect for all things over a naturalist. I don't think it's meant to answer any questions was the point.

Ah, I can kind of see why someone would say that - seems to go along with the whole 'connectedness' idea.  But that still has zero impact on whether or not it's true in any sense.

[tackattack]

@FatAndFaithless agreed

[Belacqua]

Human beings don't "make something holy" via consecration or anything else. It's already holy from the get go. You either recognize it or you don't.

That's interesting. It makes holiness a quality of the thing itself, rather than a valuation or a mental image (as color is a mental image). 
I suspect there are a lot of philosophical ramifications from that. 

Nature is nature, whether science can understand it or not. It's just that, as far as understanding nature goes, we've yet to find a better/more accurate tool than science. 

Right, that makes sense. I just wanted to make sure that we didn't call this epistemological position an essential element of pantheism. I don't know about Spinoza's particular type, but I can imagine pantheists who also believe in strong forms of intuition, or revelation, or unmediated perception of truth, as Christians say that angels have. 

Spinoza's notion that "determination is negation." ie. when you consider an object, let's say a beer can, as separate from everything else in the universe, you (in doing so) negate what it really is. It is a necessary part of the whole first and foremost.

To me, this is a restatement of the whole "One vs. Many" conception which has been crucial since at least Plotinus. The One is the real, the many disparate objects exist independently to us only through limitations in our perception. Mystical experience means losing, temporarily, our perceptual divisions and seeing that everything is in fact One. 

This is all a solid part of Christian Platonism and mysticism. I don't know enough about Spinoza to know how his views differ from this. In my limited knowledge, though, I'd say that most of what you've quoted so far is compatible with a number of serious Christian traditions. 

Spinoza does differ from strict Catholics who insist that while God is imminent in every particle of the universe, he is also transcendent to the world -- always the world + infinity. 

(Funny story: Wordsworth and Coleridge used to take long walks along the seashore enjoying nature and discussing philosophy. The police decided that grown men who seemed to be wandering aimlessly and weren't working must be spies for Napoleon and assigned an agent to trail them. The agent reported back to headquarters that the two men were clearly up to no good, since they were constantly discussing a certain Mr. "Spy-nosey.")

[The Grand Nudger]

The utility would be a perceived increase in base value of respect for all things over a naturalist. I don't think it's meant to answer any questions was the point.

Calling something "god" doesnt add any respect.  You've seen how the faithful treat their gods.

[Belacqua]

When we refer to a specific thing, say, the desk in front of us, we say: "That is a desk." And in doing so we negate it's being because in fact it is not a desk, but rather "God" or "the infinite substance" that stands before us.

There's a long tradition of the "Fall into Division," which is along these lines. In Platonic and mystical Christianity, in Blake especially, this is the Fall. It has nothing to do with disobedience or moral issues, as in more literal readings of the Fall. (Though moral issues follow on; the illusion of division is what enables our bad choices.) 

All of that stuff in Blake about 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

comes from this tradition. I have never found any indication that Blake knew Spinoza's work, though it's possible. Mostly he is in solid (if non-mainstream) Christian tradition. It would be interesting to work out what exactly differs in Spinoza from the Christian versions.

[The Grand Nudger]

A literal reading has nothing whatsoever to do with disobedience or moral issues.  That's just a tradition that's sprung up over time.  

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

We'd taken the wisdom that was forbade us, but this was punished with a curse. It was to prevent the combination of wisdom and eternal life that we got the boot. In the pantheistic and biblical sense, it was done in order to prevent us from becoming fully divine. I get a kick out of how this story is called The Fall. More of a push, really. At least in this version of events, there's no third party to absorb a promethean sentence on our behalf, though.

It's a good example of the amorphous nature of metaphor, as the biblical account, the tradition of disobediance, and the fall into division are three distinct ideas on how we came to be in such a state as we are, halfway between the mundane and divine as we conceive of it. The story, in and of itself, is a metaphor for puberty. As a human comes of age, so too did man. This meant that we had to leave our fathers house, work the earth, and hey ho!..eve was gonna get preggers. Our cursed state.

Joy.

[Acrobat]

Pantheism doesn't posit that any supernatural entity exists. Rather, it looks at the totality of what does exist and pronounces it holy. To the pantheist, things that the religious have always claimed as their own (lie a sense of the spiritual or numinous) are instead understood as properties of the natural world-- not attributes of a supernatural being.

One of the main reasons I sympathize with this way of thinking is that the religious have done the same thing with morality. They say things like: "How can you have a sense of right and wrong without there being a cosmic being who declares some things right and other things wrong." Obviously, theists are trying to claim a monopoly on moral objectivity. And I wonder if they might not have done the same thing with concepts like "holy" or "numinous."

This starts with a very trivial understanding of the religious. The terms supernatural and natural have no clear meaning, even less so hundred of years ago, and most theists have little need to make such distinctions, so they remain relatively agnostic on the terms. No corresponding terms for supernatural nor natural, exists in the bible.

One definition suggested to me by an atheist, which I kind-of like, is ascribing mental elements or prosperities to reality, as supernatural. So ascribing intrinsic meaning, intentionality, teleology etc, and a wide gamut of common religious beliefs classify as supernatural. So i’ll use this.

Under this definition I’d say ascribing things like the numinous, or goodness, a transcendent moral reality, all of which exists outside our minds, into the fabric of the universe itself constitutes as supernatural.

Secondly if you paid attention even to the most basic apologetics, such as WLCs, it’s never that what’s good is declarations of a divine being, but rather good is part of it’s very nature. To be good is to partake in the life of God, rather than the hallow following of some set of rules. Such apologist and theologians also don’t question that atheists have a sense of right and wrong, i mean the Apostle paul even noted that non-christian gentiles understand right and wrong, via their hearts and conscious.

The underly question to atheists is not how can they have any sense of right and wrong while not believing in God, but how can they account for existence of objective morality, absent of teleological assumptions? Without implying some sort of created, or purposeful order.

If we take out the terms supernatural and natural, and just speak of reality itself, some the semantic problems can be reduced here. Perhaps using the term reality instead of the world. For theist God and reality aren’t separate things, God is very much a part of this reality, as an author is to its novel. And we as it’s readers only understand God by the nature of the novel itself, and nothing more.

I'm also curious, how do you define the term numinous ? If it’s not merely some subjective feelings, a person might have.

[Brian37]

I guess I'm a little puzzled as to the value of calling everything "God."  It doesn't help us understand anything, it doesn't have any explanatory power or any utility that you can integrate into your life, it doesn't answer any of the big philosophical questions (why are we here, where are we going, etc).  Is the only reason because it helps some people feel some sort of connectedness?

If that's the case, then that's fine - but a feeling derived from a proposition isn't anything close to a reason to believe that proposition.

I agree.  I get that more skeptical humans want to avoid the pratfalls of gap filling, but trying to compete with old mythology, by creating new language that is just as hollow and gap filling, isn't the answer.

"Why we are here".... Because we are. There is ultimately no reason. What matters isn't "why" but trying to find answers as to process. There does not need to be a "super" anything to find answers.

[The Grand Nudger]

The underly question to atheists is not how can they have any sense of right and wrong while not believing in God, but how can they account for existence of objective morality, absent of teleological assumptions? Without implying some sort of created, or purposeful order.

By demonstrating how a given moral statement reduces to a natural fact, the truth of which is wholly independent of some other fact about the existence of gods.  

Just as the sky is not blue if, and only if, there are also gods...a moral fact is not true if, and only if, there are also gods.  Adding and subtracting gods doesn't alter the truth value of some statement that doesn't refer to their existence.

[vulcanlogician]

"Pantheism" is simply another superfluous gap label.

It isn't, though, because the pantheist doesn't try to explain any phenomenon in nature using their god concept. To the pantheist, if science (or another reliable investigative method) hasn't found the answer, then humankind simply doesn't know the answer to said question. There is no "godidit" in pantheism. The pantheistic God doesn't do anything. It just is.

The universe is not a "God" of any kind, it is simply a giant weather pattern in which life is simply riding in as a temporary blip.

This assessment of the universe is not at odds with pantheism at all.

We do not need to make up metaphoric language to describe our observations.

You're right there. Calling the universe God is something of a metaphor. But so what? Metaphors can be accurate. Calling a southern abolitionist a "beacon of light shining over dark waters" is a poetic rendering of what the man is. You could more "accurately" say that he was "a man who lived in the south in 1820 whose views concerning slavery differed from those around him."

But you lose something in the second less metaphorical rendering of what the man is. That means that the first rendition, the metaphor, has something that the non-metaphorical description lacks.

That's what interests me about pantheism. It has something that the "ordinary," purely scientific description of the universe lacks. But this doesn't contradict or oppose a naturalistic view of the universe. Again, pantheism makes no claims about the nature of the universe. It simply pronounces the universe holy.

I think Walt Whitman conveys the sentiment best:

"To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle."