In defense of pantheism

A couple weeks ago I went to see Fern Gulley III: Pandora's Cry in 3D IMAX. You can imagine my disappointment when they instead showed James Cameron's Avatar.

Yes, Hollywood loves pantheism, but what some do not understand is that pantheism is a legitimate religious outlook. Ross Douthat's December Op-Ed column in the New York Times used James Cameron's Avatar as a launching point to decry pantheism as a religion. His argument is pretty weak. He would be better off arguing that people should consider pantheism more carefully before dismissing it as a legitimate religion entirely.

Douthat opens with a definition of pantheism and its relation to Avatar:

“Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

So far so good. His definition is pretty accurate, if short to fit in print. He then gets into the requirements of a religion:

The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

To a degree, I accept this proposal, but I would tone it down to accommodate all religions, not just the Abrahamic ones. Let's replace the violent imagery of a crusading spirit with message. Yes, those are different things, killing with the goal of spreading your religion does not legitimate it. In fact, you don't even need to spread your religion in order to make it legitimate. In fact, the crusading spirit should probably be disregarded outright. But I digress. Let's trade the thou shalt nots for philosophy. Let's exchange eschatology (view of the "end time," whether this is communal or personal) for piping-hot apocalypse.

Let's take a look at pantheism.

• Message: We are all of this earth.
  
• Philosophy: Respect life. Find your balance.
• Eschatology: You will die and rot. If you have a soul, it will even return to the "all." But don't expect singing angels.
  

Okay. Now we can all speak together productively about this. But Douthat doubts that pantheism deserves a voice:

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

The comparison is absurd. The problem of evil that monotheisic religions deal with is very difficult to argue, and imbues the religion with a great deal of mystery. By Douthat's logic, pantheism is not a legitimate religion because the causes of suffering and death are accounted for. Wait, a religion with an empiracally-provable philosophy? Why haven't we all hopped onboard? Douthat is blinded by monotheistic eschatology such that he thinks the only religion worth having is one with a parent-child relationship: if you eat all your food and are a good little boy, you'll get ice cream for dessert. He can't imagine a religion without that happy ending: "Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms [of death and decay]."

Whereas monotheistic religion promises heaven, Douthat argues, pantheism presents a "downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago." Pantheism does not hope for a future of bliss, but it does have an eschatology of individual death, which is really communal death, as everything on earth is subject to death and decay. Further, Douthat perceives a "re-merger with the natural world" to be feeble as compared to today's robust monotheistic religions. Anyone who takes a course in philosophy knows that the "appeal to belief" is fallacious. Any number of people believing X does not make X true.

Douthat concludes, "But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back." Wait, let me try this from the other side. "But except four our souls, the existence of which has not been proven, the all-benevolent creator whose existence has not been proven cannot take us back." In either case, a person is retuning to something he or she believed in. I believe that's what faith is.