Pantheist Worldview

The pantheist worldview sees reality as one and the same with divinity, and rejects the idea of a personal god or gods. For example, the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza became a major source of pantheism as a separate theology and philosophy in post-Renaissance Europe. Spinoza identified God with Nature. Consequently, Spinoza did not contrast God and the world as different and distinct as cause and effect. Thus, Spinoza rejected the idea that God was the immaterial/supernatural cause of the material/natural world (Stumpf, 1975). In fact, for Spinoza the whole of reality consists of a single substance (i.e. God/Nature) with infinite attributes; with people being just one mode of some of these attributes of God/Nature. Hence, given that for Spinoza humanity was an integral part of Nature/God, there could be no relationship between God and humanity, but only a fundamental unity between them (Stumpf, 1975).

It is also worth noting that Spinoza also argued that all modes of God’s attributes (i.e. all possible aspects of reality) are fixed from eternity; and that neither the universe, nor human history, nor even behavior of individual humans, has any end, purpose, or final cause (Stumpf, 1975).

References

Stumpf, S. E. (1975). Socrates to Sartre: A history of philosophy (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.