Argument

Pantheism vs the Christian God

Intro

Pantheism says God is everything: the universe, nature, energy, all of it, is God. The Christian answer is that God made everything: the universe is real and good, but it is God's work, not God Himself.

That one difference changes everything else:

• Pantheism's God cannot know you, love you, hear you or save you, because it is not a someone. It is the sum of all things, including you, the cancer cell and the murderer.
• The Christian God is personal. He knows your name: "I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine" (Isaiah 43:1, ASV). He made a world distinct from Himself, so that there could be others to love.

Pantheism is attractive because it sounds humble and connected. It says the sacred is everywhere and you belong to it. Christianity agrees that God is everywhere present ("in him we live, and move, and have our being," Acts 17:28, ASV). But it says the One who is everywhere is not the same as everything. A painter is present in every brushstroke without being the paint.

When the two are compared question by question, the Christian God explains more about the world we actually live in:

• It began.
• It is orderly.
• It contains real evil.
• It contains real persons who love.

It also offers more at the end: not dissolution into the All, but a resurrected life with the God who made you.

Quick reply for a live conversation: "If God is everything, then God is also the cancer and the abuser, and God can't love you, because there's nobody there to do the loving. The Christian God is everywhere present but not identical to the world. He made it, He's good, and He knows your name."

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

Cheatsheet

The 30-second reply:

Pantheism says God is everything. Christianity says God made everything. If God is everything, God began when the universe began, God includes every evil, and God is not a person who can know or love you. The Christian God is the uncaused cause of a universe that began, is perfectly good so evil is a corruption He judges, and is personal, so He can love you and you can know Him.

The fast facts:

1. Ultimate reality. Pantheism: one impersonal whole. Christianity: one personal God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, distinct from His creation.
2. The universe began. A God identical with the universe began with it. The Christian God is its cause. See Creatio ex Nihilo and Kalam Cosmological Argument.
3. Evil. Spinoza held that good and evil "indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves" (Ethics IV, Preface). Christianity holds that "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, ASV).
4. Love. Love needs a lover and a beloved. The Trinity means love is eternal in God (John 17:24). An impersonal All has no one to love and no one to love it.
5. The self. Pantheism tends to make the individual a passing wave or an illusion. Christianity makes each person an image-bearer, known and named (Genesis 1:27; Matthew 10:30).
6. The ending. Pantheism: absorption, the drop returning to the ocean. Christianity: resurrection, and seeing God face to face (Revelation 22:4). See World Religions Compared by Their Ultimate Ending.
7. The best pantheist witness concedes the point. Einstein said he believed in "Spinoza's God," and added in the same breath that this God does not concern himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

The 4 strongest counter-moves:

• "God is love, and love is the energy of the universe." Energy does not love. Love is chosen and given by persons. If you mean love literally, you need a personal God; if you mean energy, you have dropped love.
• "Christianity separates God from the world; pantheism sees the sacred everywhere." Christianity also sees God's glory everywhere ("The heavens declare the glory of God," Psalm 19:1, ASV), without confusing the artist with the art.
• "Separation is the illusion. Everything is one." Then the difference between true and false, and between you and the person you are trying to convince, is an illusion too, and so is the argument.
• "Your personal God is just a projection of human qualities." Personhood is not a human limitation projected onto God; it is the highest kind of being we know. An impersonal God is a lesser God, not a greater one. Lewis made this point in Mere Christianity: pantheism does not rise above the personal, it falls below it.

Reciprocal concessions (grant the small point, then collect a bigger one):

• Grant: God is present everywhere. Now collect: then God is not limited to any one thing, which is exactly why He cannot be identical with the sum of things that are each limited.
• Grant: nature is sacred and should be honored. Now collect: then it has a value it did not give itself, and value given to something comes from someone. That is the doctrine of creation.
• Grant: everything is connected. Now collect: connection needs at least two things to connect. Pantheism's oneness would erase the very connections it values.

The closing line:

Pantheism says you are a wave on God's ocean, soon gone. Christianity says the God of the ocean knows your name.

In full

Pantheism (from Greek pan, "all," and theos, "God") identifies God with the totality of what exists. Its main forms are:

• Philosophical pantheism, classically Spinoza's Ethics (1677), where God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) is the one infinite substance.
• Non-dual Hindu thought, especially Advaita Vedanta, where the self (atman) is identical with ultimate reality (Brahman), "thou art that" (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7).
• Stoic pantheism, where divine reason pervades the cosmos.
• Popular New Age and nature spirituality, where God is energy, the universe or consciousness.

See Pantheism for the history and varieties, and Panentheism for the view that the world is in God without exhausting Him.

The Christian doctrine of God holds that God is one being in three persons, personal, perfectly good, eternal, and the free Creator of everything else out of nothing. He is present to everything He made and holds it in being, but He is not part of it (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.3 a.8).

This page compares the two on eight questions every worldview has to answer, and argues that the Christian God is the better explanation of the world and the better hope for the person.

Side by side

Argument structure

Master objections to the whole argument

MO1: "You're comparing a sophisticated philosophy to a cartoon of it."

• The page addresses Spinoza, Advaita and popular forms separately where they differ. The core problems (no personal God, evil inside the divine, the self erased) belong to pantheism as such, not just to its popular versions. Spinoza himself denied that God loves or hates anyone (Ethics V, proposition 17, corollary).

MO2: "Christianity is just one tradition's story. Pantheism is what all the mystics agree on."

• Mystics do not agree. Christian mystics such as Augustine and Teresa of Avila insisted on the distinction between God and the soul even in the deepest union. Theistic schools within Hinduism (Ramanuja, Madhva) rejected Shankara's non-dualism. "All mystics agree" is a slogan, not a finding.

MO3: "A personal God is too small. Personhood is a human category."

• Personhood is not smallness. It means knowing, willing and loving, which are the highest things we know of. A God without them would be less than the people who worship Him. The Christian God is personal without being limited: three persons in one infinite being.

MO4: "Science shows everything is one: energy, fields, interconnection."

• Science shows that everything is connected and governed by common laws. That is exactly what you would expect from one rational Creator. It does not show that the laws or the fields know you, love you or deserve worship.

Premise 1, The universe began, so its source is not the universe

Affirmative case

1. On standard cosmology the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. See Big Bang and Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem.
2. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. See Causal Principle.
3. A God identical with the universe began with it and cannot be its cause.
4. The Christian God is eternal and distinct from the universe: "Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these" (Isaiah 40:26, ASV). See Creatio ex Nihilo and God Is the Eternal Atoms Objection Defeater.

Anticipated objections

1. "The universe might be cyclical and eternal."

Rebuttals

1. Cyclical models face the thermodynamic problem (each cycle would wind down further) and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin result for expanding histories. And even an eternal cycle would be a changing physical system, not an unchanging God. See Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Premise 2, Persons are best explained by a personal source

Affirmative case

1. The universe contains persons who know, choose and love.
2. Pantheism says the ultimate reality behind them is impersonal.
3. That makes the highest things in the universe (minds, love) products of something lower than themselves.
4. Christianity makes them reflections of their source: "God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27, ASV).
5. A personal God also explains why reality can be known at all: a rational mind made a rational world and rational minds to study it (Psalm 19:1).

Anticipated objections

1. "Consciousness is fundamental, so the universe is conscious."

Rebuttals

1. If the ultimate reality is conscious, then it knows and wills, which is what Christians mean by a personal God. The view has moved toward theism. The remaining question is whether that conscious reality is identical to the world or its Creator, and P1 answers that.

Premise 3, Real evil needs a real good

Affirmative case

1. Everyone knows some things are truly evil: torturing a child for fun, genocide, abuse.
2. Pantheism has two options. Either evil is part of God (so God is partly evil), or evil is an illusion (so the victim's suffering is not truly wrong). Spinoza took the second: good and evil "indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves" (Ethics IV, Preface).
3. Christianity says God is wholly good ("God is light, and in him is no darkness at all," 1 John 1:5, ASV), that creation was "very good" (Genesis 1:31, ASV), and that evil is a corruption of good, not a part of God. See Evil as Privation of Good.
4. Christianity also promises evil's defeat (Revelation 21:4). Pantheism cannot, because evil is part of the eternal whole.

Anticipated objections

1. "Good and evil are dualistic thinking. Enlightenment goes beyond them."

Rebuttals

1. Then going beyond them is no better than not going beyond them, since "better" is also dualistic. The view cannot recommend itself without using the distinction it denies. See Moral Argument.

Premise 4, Love needs an other

Affirmative case

1. Love is a relation between persons: a lover, a beloved, and a gift between them.
2. An impersonal All has no one to love. If all is one, there is nothing outside it to love, and nothing inside it is a true other.
3. The Christian God is love in Himself, because the Father loves the Son in the Spirit "before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24, ASV). See Trinity.
4. He extends that love to creatures who are truly other than Him: "I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3, ASV).

Anticipated objections

1. "Love is the realization of oneness, not the relation of two."

Rebuttals

1. Lovers do not want to stop existing in each other. They want to be together. A love that erases one of the lovers is not fulfilled love; it is the end of love. See Argument from Love.

Premise 5, Science needs an orderly, non-divine nature

Affirmative case

1. Science assumes nature is orderly (so it can be studied) and contingent (so you have to look rather than deduce).
2. Christianity supplies both: a rational God made the world, so it is orderly, and He made it freely, so it could have been otherwise and must be investigated.
3. A divine nature invites reverence rather than experiment. Paul's charge was that people "worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25, ASV).

Anticipated objections

1. "Spinoza and Einstein were great rationalists, and both were pantheists."

Rebuttals

1. Both relied on nature's order, which theism explains. Einstein wrote that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" ("Physics and Reality," 1936) and left it a mystery. The point is not that pantheists cannot do science, but that theism explains why science works.

Premise 6, The Christian ending is better for the person

Affirmative case

1. Pantheism's ending is reabsorption: the drop returns to the ocean, and the individual is gone.
2. The Christian ending keeps the person: "we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is" (1 John 3:2, ASV), with a raised body (1 Corinthians 15:42-44).
3. See World Religions Compared by Their Ultimate Ending for this ending set beside every other.

Anticipated objections

1. "Wanting to keep your self is ego. Letting go is peace."

Rebuttals

1. Christianity also calls for letting go of self-centeredness (Luke 9:23). But it promises that the self, freed from selfishness, is restored, not erased. "Ego" is a problem with how the self is oriented, not with the self existing.

Scripture on Creator and creation

The Bible's whole picture of God depends on the distinction pantheism denies:

• God created the world; He is not it. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1, ASV).
• God is beyond comparison with creation. "To whom then will ye liken me, that I should be equal to him? saith the Holy One" (Isaiah 40:25, ASV).
• God is present to all without being all. "The God that made the world and all things therein... in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:24, 28, ASV). Paul said this to the Stoics, pantheists of his day (17:18).
• Creation points to God and is not God. "The invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made" (Romans 1:20, ASV).
• God knows persons individually. "O Jehovah, thou hast searched me, and known me" (Psalm 139:1, ASV); "the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matthew 10:30, ASV).

Live-cite kit

Scripture:

• Genesis 1:1, God created the heavens and the earth.
• Isaiah 40:25-26, "To whom then will ye liken me?... see who hath created these" (ASV).
• Acts 17:24, 28, Paul to the Stoics: Creator, yet "in him we live" (ASV).
• Romans 1:25, "worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (ASV).
• 1 John 1:5, "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (ASV).
• Isaiah 43:1, "I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine" (ASV).

Scholarly:

• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677): God or Nature; good and evil "nothing positive in things"; God does not love or hate.
• Albert Einstein (1929): "Spinoza's God," who does not concern himself with human fates.
• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952): pantheism is below the personal, not above it; and if God is everything, there is no ground to call cancer bad.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.3 a.8: God does not enter into the composition of things.
• Augustine, Confessions XII.7: God made the world neither from Himself nor from anything else.

Aphorisms:

• "Pantheism says God is everything. Christianity says God made everything."
• "A painter is in every brushstroke without being the paint."
• "If God is everything, God is also the cancer."
• "An impersonal God is less than you, not more."
• "The drop goes back into the ocean. The child goes home to the Father."

Tactical notes

• Find out which pantheism. A Spinozist, a Hindu non-dualist and a New Age seeker need different first moves. Ask: "When you say God is everything, do you mean God is a person who is everywhere, or that the universe itself is God?"
• Honor what is true. God is everywhere present, nature is sacred as God's work, everything is connected. Say so.
• Press the personal question. "Does your God know your name?" is the shortest route to the heart of the difference.
• Press the evil question gently. "Is the abuse a child suffers part of God?" is hard for any pantheist to answer yes to.
• Offer the better ending. Pantheism promises dissolution; the gospel promises a Father's welcome.

See also

• Pantheism, the view in full
• Panentheism, the world in God, but not identical to Him
• God Is the Eternal Atoms Objection Defeater, the material-pantheist "we are eternal atoms" argument
• Creatio ex Nihilo, creation out of nothing
• World Religions Compared by Their Ultimate Ending, every worldview's ending side by side
• Trinity, love eternal within God
• Evil as Privation of Good, why evil is not a thing God includes
• Baruch Spinoza, the classic philosophical pantheist
• New Age Spiritualism, popular pantheism today
• Hinduism, including non-dual Advaita