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An act of faith

Pantheism is the religious belief that God is not merely omnipresent, but that God is the universe. Although some forms are very mystical and linked with New Age beliefs, it was in the 17th and 18th centuries associated with rationalism and even atheism, as a philosophy that denied a supernatural God existing outside the known universe. This latter version has continued to be popular with scientists.


Although associated with Giordano Bruno in the late 16th century and Baruch Spinoza in the 17th, the word "pantheism" was coined (or at least popularised) by John Toland (1670-1722), an Irish philosopher who like Spinoza tried to use reason to explain all aspects of the universe; his other influences included the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius and the empiricist John Locke. Toland was originally linked with Protestant dissenters, but became far more radical and attempted to explain how everything about Christianity could be explicable by science in works such as Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which earned him accusations of blasphemy and demands for him to be burnt at the stake. The word "pantheism" first appeared in Socinianism Truly Stated, by a pantheist (1705), although it's not clear how much he considered himself a pantheist - he was a believer in keeping private and public religions separate, and restricted his more extreme ideas to his most trusted friends (Socinianism was an eccentric non-Trinitarian version of Christianity in Poland and Transylvania in the 16th and 17th centuries that was later held as an exemplar of rationalism, with questionable accuracy). His Pantheisticon (1720) set out plans for a secret society of pantheists, including a moral code based on reason.[1][2]









Quote mining[edit]


See also[edit]

  • Atheism
  • Pandeism, according to which a creator becomes a universe
  • Deism - belief in a non-personal god (a god not regarded as a person)
  • Panentheism, which sees divinity in everything without conflating divinity and everything
  • Theism, a belief in the existence of one or more gods


  1. Toland: the father of modern pantheism, Paul Harrison, World Pantheism
  2. See the Wikipedia article on John Toland.

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