Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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ORDER

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Order in the science-religion dialogue

One necessary condition for a mutual relevance of

scientific and religious perspectives on order is that

it is interpreted as divine action in the world. This,

however, is not sufficient because a religiously in-

terpreted order can be explored in science apart

from its religious meaning (methodological athe-

ism). Or the creator may be seen as utterly other

than the created order so that what is known about

nature is irrelevant for what could be known about

God and vice versa (Eastern Orthodoxy, volun-

tarism in Western Christianity and Islam).

One sufficient condition for mutual relevance

is that religious views of natural order serve in sci-

ence as presupposition, sanction, motive, criterion

for theory choice, criterion for the choice of kinds

of explanation (regulative principle), or as part of

explanations (constitutive principle), and vice

versa. The rejection by Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

of the probabilistic view of quantum physics was

regulated by his belief that “God does not play

dice.” In reverse, the switch from a fixed to an

evolving order of nature has motivated the devel-

opment of evolutionary theologies and has consti-

tuted new conceptions of God, creation, divine

grace, divine power, and redemption. For instance,

instead of conceiving of divine power as a coercive

force it is seen as persuasive love because divine

love implies giving the universe the freedom to

produce itself. Here, the biological idea of random

mutation has been translated into the religious idea

of a nature free from divine coercion.

A different type of sufficient condition is met in

reductionism. In it a scientific definition of order is

generalized into a metaphysical ideal of order. For

instance, the empiricists as well as the neo-posi-

tivists reduced the cognitive order to the order of

sensation. Since God cannot be known by sensa-

tion, knowledge of God is not possible and reli-

gion is reduced to belief without grounds in

knowledge. This places knowledge and belief in

different categories preventing a cognitive rela-

tionship between them. Similarly, biologist Edward

O. Wilson (1929– ) replaced a spiritual description

of God as a being independent of matter with a

naturalistic description: God is nothing but an ob-

jectification of the imagination. This was his way of

including God in a kind of order that science can

deal with by gathering empirical evidence. By re-

describing God, sociobiology changed the content

of religious belief and theology.

A third kind of sufficient condition is satisfied

when a reduced view of order functions as religion

(scientism). Biology functioned as (anti-)religion

when biologists Jacques Monod (1910–1976) and

Richard Dawkins (1941– ) interpreted the random-

ness of mutations to mean that there is neither God

nor purpose or when Wilson wrote that scientific

materialism and evolutionism are his substitute re-

ligion in which the purpose of life is to promote

evolutionary progress. This substitute religion mo-

tivated his re-description of God and, thereby, con-

stituted the content of sociobiological explanations

of religion. Here, science as a substitute religion in-

fluences religion.

See also EVOLUTION, HUMAN; PALEONTOLOGY

IAN TATTERSALL

PALEONTOLOGY

Paleontology is the branch of science devoted to

the understanding of past life as revealed by the

fossil record. Normally, when an organism dies, its

physical remains are scattered and destroyed by the

elements in a short span of time. Such elements in-

clude not only wind, weather, and decay, but also

water and the activities of carnivores and scav-

engers of many kinds. Occasionally, however, bony

remains (and, very exceptionally, some soft tissues)

lying on the surface or in superficial cavities may be

covered by accumulating sediments (most often

river or lake muds in the case of terrestrial organ-

isms, and sea-bottom particulates in that of marine

forms) before they are totally destroyed. Among the

remains that escape destruction, complete articu-

lated skeletons are extremely rare; more commonly

preserved are individual bones and teeth, often

broken. Unless the enclosing sediments are chemi-

cally hostile, or become melted by heat from the

Earth’s interior or pressure from above, bones thus

incorporated into the accumulating sediment pile

can survive more or less indefinitely, though their

distortion due to local Earth movements is not un-

common. As water carries minerals in solution

through both the sediments and the contained ani-

mal or plant remains, the organic constituents of

those remnants become replaced by minerals, in a

process most often known as mineralization. If ero-

sion of the enclosing sediment pile subsequently

sets in, the now-fossilized remains may become ex-

posed once more at the Earth’s surface, where they

are yet again subject to the forces of natural de-

struction. However, for a brief period they are also

available to be collected by human beings, who

have been picking up unusual re-exposed objects

for the last few hundred thousand years, at least.

Fossils are found all over the world, and are a

vast storehouse of information about past life.

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Those who professionally find fossils and extract

such information from them are known as paleon-

tologists. From the very beginning, paleontology

has been integral to the study of Earth history,

which began with attempts to order the sedimen-

tary rocks, laid down by water and wind, which

contain fossils. The other grand categories of rocks

exposed on the Earth’s surface include igneous

rocks (extruded from Earth’s molten core by volca-

noes and by the physical rising through the solid

crust of lighter rocks such as granite), and meta-

morphic rocks, which are sedimentary rocks that

have been recrystallized by pressure and heat. Vol-

canic rocks are particularly helpful in dating the

ages of various events in Earth history because reli-

able techniques exist by which to measure the time

that has elapsed since they last cooled. These tech-

niques depend on the phenomenon of radioactiv-

ity, by which unstable forms of certain elements

“decay” to stable states at known rates. Volcanic

rocks do not contain fossils themselves (unless you

count as fossils such things as the vacuities in the

shape of human bodies found at Pompeii, or the

ancient hominid footprints at Laetoli), but they rep-

resent single points in time and are often inter-

leaved among sedimentary fossil-bearing layers,

which can be dated by reference to them.

Early history

The basic principles of the study of sedimentary

rocks were established by the Danish-born natural-

ist and physician Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) in the

mid seventeenth century. These principles state that

all stratified sedimentary rocks—however distorted

they may subsequently have become—started life

as horizontal bands of sediments and that they

were laid down in sequence, with the oldest layers

at the bottom and the youngest at the top. Such

layering is usually readily visible in local sedimen-

tary basins, but there is a problem in correlating the

strata that are exposed in different basins and geo-

graphical areas. This is the context within which

fossils entered the picture. The fossil record clearly

shows that past time has been characterized by a

long succession of distinctive biotas, or communi-

ties of organisms; it was the resulting diagnostic as-

semblages of fossils that were seized upon by early

stratigraphers as the key to ordering regionally ex-

posed rocks into their temporal sequences.

During the early years of the nineteenth cen-

tury, the engineer and geologist William Smith

(1769–1839) demonstrated in England that sedi-

mentary units could be identified by their distinc-

tive fossil content. At about the same time in

France, naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832)

worked out the sequence of sedimentary units in

the Paris Basin using fossil terrestrial vertebrates as

markers, and showed that many large animals had

no living counterparts. In doing the latter, Cuvier

made extinction a reality to be contended with.

And he went farther, showing that as the rocks be-

came younger they contained faunas steadily more

similar to those of today. He concluded that this

pattern revealed an advancing complexity of life,

but he was unable to find gradations among the

various faunas preserved in the Paris Basin (where

stratigraphic discontinuities are in fact rife, as they

are in most terrestrial situations). Instead, he found

that distinctive faunas were replaced by other dis-

tinctive fossil associations. This suggested to Cuvier

that a series of catastrophes had wiped out succes-

sive faunas, which were re-created anew after each

extinction event. Popular opinion rapidly adopted

the last such event as evidence of the Biblical del-

uge, and conveniently equated the earlier faunas

with the biblical “days” of creation.

Thus, improbably, was paleontology born as a

science. For several decades following the pioneer-

ing work of Cuvier and Smith, paleontologists la-

bored within the confines of biblical constructs

even as they gradually built up a robust picture of

the Earth’s sedimentary history based on an ex-

panding fossil record. During this period the begin-

nings of specialization within paleontology began

to appear, with today’s division of the science into

vertebrate and invertebrate branches emerging. The

distinction is important, not simply because of the

distinctiveness and the rapid swelling of the data-

base in each branch, but because invertebrate pale-

ontology came to be dominated by the study of ma-

rine organisms, just as vertebrate paleontology was

dominated by terrestrial forms. Neither branch was

(or is) exclusively focused on one side or the other

of the marine-terrestrial dichotomy, but a subtle dif-

ference in outlook was almost inevitably introduced

because the marine sedimentary record is much

more continuous than its terrestrial equivalent,

which is repeatedly interrupted by erosional cycles.

Paleontology and evolutionary ideas

By the time that Charles Darwin (1809–1882) pub-

lished his epochal On the Origin of Species in 1859,

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the outline shape of the fossil record was fairly

well established. Inconveniently well-established,

in fact, as far as Darwin was concerned. For while

Darwin favored an elegantly simple model of evo-

lution as a more or less straight-line process in-

volving gradual change in living populations from

generation to generation under the guiding hand

of natural selection, the fossil record itself showed

a pattern of discontinuities among taxa (a general-

ized term given to taxonomic units at any rank:

species, genera, and more inclusive groupings

such as families and orders). There was much early

debate over the application of Darwinian ideas to

the fossil record. Some scientists, such as the emi-

nent Victorian comparative anatomist Richard

Owen (1804–1892), who appropriated the study of

the remarkable fossil reptile bones discovered by

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) in the 1820s (and who

coined the term dinosaur), reacted negatively to

Darwin’s publication. Owen preferred to see the

fossil record as evidence of the unfolding of a di-

vine plan, and clung throughout his life to an es-

sentialist view of species as fixed and unchanging.

Others, such as the brash Thomas Henry Huxley

(1825–1895), took up the cudgels on Darwin’s

side, most famously in his debate with Bishop

Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873) in Oxford on June

30, 1860. Huxley supported Darwin’s view of

fossils as witnesses to a process of gradual trans-

formation of organisms over time—although, sig-

nificantly, he never managed to place the newly-

discovered Neanderthal fossil into this perspective,

preferring to interpret it as a lowly form of modern

human.

Interestingly, following a scandalized initial re-

action to his evolutionary ideas, Darwin’s central

tenet of “descent with modification,” whereby all

life forms are related by descent from a common

ancestor, became quite rapidly accepted by scien-

tists and public alike. What was not so readily ac-

cepted was the mechanism of natural selection,

which involves the gradual modification of popula-

tion gene frequencies over long periods of time due

to the greater reproductive success of fitter individ-

uals, those best adapted to prevailing environments.

Indeed, natural selection did not assume its current

central place in paleontology and other branches of

evolutionary biology until the second quarter of the

twentieth century, when the Evolutionary Synthesis

took biology by storm. The product of agreement

among influential geneticists, paleontologists, and

systematists, the Synthesis eventually succeeded in

reducing virtually all evolutionary phenomena to

generation-by-generation changes in gene frequen-

cies. This notion emphasized the linear, transforma-

tional, dimension of evolution at the expense of the

histories of taxa, and it encouraged paleontologists

to ignore the discontinuities in the fossil record that

Darwin had been aware of, but had ascribed to the

record’s incompleteness.

It was not until the 1970s that paleontologists

started to realize that perhaps the gaps in the fossil

record were actually revealing something after all.

Thus was born the notion of punctuated equilibria

(long periods of stasis interrupted by brief bursts of

change), which was presented as an alternative to

the phyletic gradualism preached by the Synthesis.

Paleontologists in general began to realize that the

Synthesis, elegant though its simplicities might have

been, was incomplete as an explanatory framework

for all of the evolutionary phenomena evoked by

the fossil record. It turned out, indeed, that although

natural selection undoubtedly plays a role in the

differentiation of species and in their accommoda-

tion to local environments, many other influences

enter the evolutionary equation. These include spe-

ciation, the set of mechanisms by which new

species come about, and competition among closely

and more distantly related species, which involves

extinction as a regular event. All of this occurs,

moreover, within a context of constantly fluctuating

environmental conditions. Modern paleontologists

are hence much more acutely aware than their

predecessors were of the complexities of the evolu-

tionary process and of the roles played in it by com-

peting taxa, as well as by competing individuals.

Hypothesis formation in paleontology

For many years paleontologists pursued their

work—of sorting out the relationships among the

myriad life forms represented in the fossil record—

largely by intuition and the assessment of overall

resemblance. Admittedly, this process got them a

long way in sketching the outlines of the tree of

life, but it did lead to some anomalies. Thus while

it may appear counterintuitive to claim that lung-

fishes are more closely related to cows than to

salmon, in terms of ancestry and descent this claim

is demonstrably true. Paleontology was thus revo-

lutionized during the 1970s by the widespread in-

troduction of cladistics, an approach to compara-

tive biology that provided an explicit recipe for

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recognizing relationships among taxa. In a nut-

shell, cladistics argues that only the common pos-

session of derived characters, those inherited from

an immediate ancestral taxon, is useful in deducing

relationships among taxa. The common possession

of primitive attributes, those inherited from more

remote common ancestors, shows only that two

taxa belong to the wider group descended from

that ancestor. Thus having a spine shows simply

that you belong to the large taxon of vertebrates,

while having three bones in the middle ear indi-

cates that you are a mammal, a member of a taxon

that is nested inside that group. The distribution of

derived characters within a group is summarized in

a branching diagram known as a cladogram,

which in its simplest form states nothing more than

that “taxon A and taxon B are more closely related

by common ancestry than either is to related taxon

C.” Cladograms are the only statements in system-

atics that are truly testable.

More elaborate is the evolutionary tree, which

adds ancestry and descent as well as time to the

mix. Trees are more interesting than cladograms,

but cannot be tested since the age of fossils has no

direct connection to their relationships, and be-

cause in theory an ancestor has to be primitive in

all respects relative to its descendant, in which case

there is nothing to link them. Yet more complex

(and more interesting) is the evolutionary scenario,

in which paleontologists add everything they know

about function, environment, adaptation, and so

forth to the information present in the tree. Com-

peting scenarios are comparable only on the basis

of their plausibility, which makes them inherently

unscientific; yet their plausibility can be reasonably

objectively judged if they are based on specifically

stated cladograms and trees. Scenarios are con-

structed using a bewildering variety of types of in-

formation derived from many different sciences.

Paleontologists take into account information de-

rived from paleoclimatology (the study of past cli-

mates), taphonomy (the science of what happens

to organic remains after death), sedimentology (en-

vironments in which fossils were deposited),

stratigraphy (in the broadest sense, the sequence

and relationships of rock strata, and their dating by

a host of means), and functional anatomy

(the study of the morphology of fossil forms, and

how they may have functioned in life), to name

but a few of the areas that contribute to the most

complete understanding possible of the lives,

environments, and relationships of fossil species.

Molecular genetics has also begun to contribute to

our knowledge of affinities among extinct species,

and even newer technologies are on the way.

Paleontology in a wider context

Since about 1970, then, paleontology has vastly re-

fined its abilities to teach us about our past and

about the broader biological context from which

our remarkable species has emerged. Literally, pa-

leontology has played and continues to play a cen-

tral role in establishing our own place in nature.

And the lesson is a humbling one. The living world

of today is mind-bogglingly diverse and marvelous

indeed, heedless though so many of us are of its

welfare. But looking around ourselves today we

see only a single slice of time; and when we add

the paleontological dimension we can at last begin

to glimpse the truly extraordinary richness and

majesty of the organic context—creation, if you

will—of which we form part.

This recognition of the vastness of nature in

time as well as in space has had a profound im-

pact. Since medieval times and probably long be-

fore, people in the Western tradition had viewed

Homo sapiens as the center of earthly creation,

around which all else revolved. But paleontology,

especially in concert with the more recent revela-

tions of cosmology, has demonstrated that our

species is in fact an infinitesimal part of an enor-

mous and still-enlarging universe. Among many

members of our egotistical species, the tendency

has been to ignore this uncomfortable fact. But it is

nonetheless a fact to be faced, and some theolo-

gians have sought to reconcile the findings of pa-

leontology with the traditions of Christian theol-

ogy. The best-known of these was the Jesuit Pierre

Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a practicing ge-

ologist and paleontologist, whose posthumously

published The Phenomenon of Man had a particu-

larly broad impact. Teilhard viewed the process

through which humanity emerged in teleological

terms, envisioning the appearance of human con-

sciousness as the outcome of directed change from

a more generalized state, in pursuit of an ultimate

union with the “Omega.” This latter was taken by

many to represent a “cosmic Christ,” as the biolo-

gist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) put it. Teilhard’s ar-

guments are often obscure, but his wide following

bears witness to the profound urge that exists

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among so many to incorporate the perspectives of

paleontology into a wider worldview.

See also DARWIN, CHARLES; EVOLUTION, HUMAN;

RADUALISM; LIFE, ORIGINS OF;

ALEOANTHROPOLOGY; PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM;

EILHARD DE CHARDIN, PIERRE

Bibliography

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural

Selection (1859). New York: Bantam Classic, 1999.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selections in

Relation to Sex (1871).

Eldredge, Niles. “Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses in Pale-

ontology: A Comment on Makurath and Anderson.”

Evolution 28 (1974): 479–481.

Eldredge, Niles. “Rates of Evolution Revisted.” Paleobiol-

ogy 2 (1976): 174–177.

Gould, Stephen J., and Eldredge, Niles. “Punctuated Equi-

libria Comes of Age.” Nature 366 (1993): 223–227.

Schwartz, Jeffrey H. Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and

the Emergence of Species. Chichester, UK: Wiley,

1999.

Schwartz, Jeffrey H. “Homeobox Genes, Fossils, and the

Origin of Species.” Anatomical Record 257 (1999):

15–31.

Tattersall, Ian. The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We

Think We Know About Human Evolution. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1995.

Tattersall, Ian. Becoming Human: Evolution and Human

Uniqueness. New York: Harcourt, 1998.

Tattersall, Ian. “Paleoanthropology: The Last Half-century.”

Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (2000): 2–16.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man.

New York: Harper, 1976.

IAN TATTERSALL

KENNETH MOWBRAY

PANENTHEISM

The term panentheism (from the Greek) literally

means “all (is) in God.” As a concept of God, pa-

nentheism attempts to do justice both to divine tran-

scendence (God is beyond or more than the world)

and divine immanence (God is in the world). Pa-

nentheism maintains that the world is in God, in-

cluded in the divine life, but that God’s reality is not

reducible to nor exhausted by the reality of the

individuals or the structures of the universe or of

the universe as a whole. Thus God is all-inclusive or

all-encompassing with respect to being.

Strictly construed this entails that all divine re-

lations are internal relations, that is, relations be-

tween God as integrated whole and the creatures

as included parts. For panentheism then, while the

universe is part of God, God and the universe do

not form an undifferentiated whole. Panentheism

draws definite distinctions between God as the in-

cluding whole and the nondivine parts of the uni-

verse considered in themselves. Certain properties

of divinity, such as aseity (self-existence) or neces-

sary existence and the all-encompassing attributes

of omnipresence (everywhere present), omnis-

cience (all-knowing), and omnipotence (all power

or all-powerful) apply to God but definitely not to

individual creatures or to the universe itself. (Note

though that process forms of panentheism find the

notion of divine omnipotence problematic.)

Another important distinction drawn between

God and creatures concerns mutual freedom. Pa-

nentheism upholds indeterminism: Spontaneity

and free will in the universe mean that antecedent

causes do not fully determine present events and

actions, so the future is not fully predictable or

foreknown, even by God; creatures have real

choices. In summary, while God is not an individ-

ual simply distinct from the nondivine individuals,

in the way, for example, that one human being is

distinct from another, neither is God to be equated

with the universe or its constituents.

Panentheism as alternative

In construing divine transcendence and imma-

nence as above, panentheism mediates between

deism and certain forms of traditional theism on

the one hand and pantheism on the other hand, at-

tempting to avoid pitfalls of both. Deism, as devel-

oped in the European Enlightenment of the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries, holds that God

created the world to operate according to natural

laws but is uninvolved in its destiny. The God

posited by traditional theism is not as separate

from the universe as is in deism; however, panen-

theists judge what they call classical theism to be

equally inadequate. Classical theism, in affirming

certain divine attributes stemming from ancient

Greek philosophy—immutability (unchangeabil-

ity), impassibility (to be unaffected by another),

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and eternity (in the sense of strict timelessness)—

does not permit God to be in genuine relation to

the world.

The term pantheism literally means “all (is)

God.” That is, everything at least in its true essence

is divine. Clearly panentheism has affinities with

pantheism. American Charles Hartshorne (1897–

2000), the principle theological interpreter and de-

veloper of process philosophy, at first labeled his

concept of God “The New Pantheism.” The trajec-

tory of German idealism produced both pantheists

and panentheists. One could say that panentheism

attempts to get as close to pantheism as possible in

stressing the intimate relationship between God

and nature, while still maintaining clear distinctions

between them. A key difference is that pantheism

tends to a (quasi) materialistic or (quasi) substan-

tialistic understanding of God: Entities in the world

share the divine essence or substance to a greater

or lesser degree. Therefore, any distinction be-

tween God as a whole and the constituents of the

universe is a matter of degree rather than of kind.

In addition, since everything is a mode or attribute

of God, pantheism typically denies indeterminate

freedom.

The metaphor or analogy of the world as the

body of God is popular among panentheists.

Hartshorne compares the God-world relationship

to that between a person’s mind and the cells of its

body. Arthur Peacocke (1924– ), a key figure in the

science and religion dialogue, speaks approvingly

of the feminine, womb imagery that panentheism

encourages: As with a fetus in its mother, creation

is within God. American Christian theologian Sal-

lie McFague (1933– ) has been the principal de-

veloper of the metaphor of world as body of

God. British philosophical theologian Grace

Jantzen (1948– ), in drawing the connection be-

tween God and world so tightly as to jettison in-

determinate freedom, offers a pantheistic version

of the metaphor.

Some connections with science

Panentheism offers diverse advantages for those

interested in the intersection of science and reli-

gion. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), in his

role as a philosopher of science, and others have

observed that the dominant model for the natural

world moved from mechanism to organism during

the nineteenth century. Panentheism offers an

organistic understanding of the God-world relation

in contrast to deism’s mechanistic understanding.

Like deism, panentheism offers a concept of God

where natural laws or processes are respected,

where God refrains from interventions that over-

turn nature. The crucial difference is that panen-

theism posits a God intimately involved, continu-

ously interacting, with the world.

Panentheism’s intimate connection of God with

a world in time entails a God who in some sense or

dimension is also temporal. As the trajectory of

modern science—from the Newtonian mechanics

of the Enlightenment to evolution to Albert Ein-

stein’s theory of relativity—has put an exclamation

point on the temporal nature of reality, panenthe-

ism offers a consonant concept of the divine.

As indicated above, creaturely spontaneity and

indeterminate freedom are crucial for panentheism

in its distinction of God from creation. Both quan-

tum mechanics, in stating that the motions of sub-

atomic particles are probabilistic rather than deter-

minable from known antecedent conditions, and

chaos theory, in demonstrating the unpredictability

of future events, provide openings for panentheists

and other supporters of indeterminacy. In particu-

lar, Peacocke, a British physical chemist, Anglican

priest, and panentheistic theologian, applauds pa-

nentheism’s picture of a God who is continuously

creative in relation to an open universe. It must be

noted, though, that no consensus exists among sci-

entists that quantum indeterminacy or, even less,

chaos theory unpredictability entail any ultimate

indeterminacy in the universe.

Avoiding violation of natural processes is not

only a concern of panentheists but of other the-

ologians involved in the science and religion dia-

logue, including Americans Thomas F. Tracy and

Nancey Murphy. It may seem that such thinkers

must renounce any traditional Christian notion of

special providence, namely, that God causes par-

ticular events in natural or human history (in con-

trast to general providence, that God determines

the general laws or processes of the universe),

however, this is not uniformly the case.

For example, in his later writings, Peacocke

develops his notion of top-down causation, main-

taining that divine action with respect to the uni-

verse not only upholds general laws or patterns

but causes specific events. Whether such divine

predetermination is compatible with indeterminate

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creaturely decisions and their chance interactions

is a major difficulty for this viewpoint.

Murphy and Tracy purchase special provi-

dence by positing that God determines the proba-

bilistic quantum movements of subatomic particles

and that these in turn produce macro-effects that

result in specific events. The virtue of this notion is

that it contravenes no natural laws or regularities:

The quantum events that God determines are

within the scientifically permissible ranges of mo-

tion, and apparently no conceivable method exists

for discerning God’s causation on the quantum

level. At the same time, this “invisibility” is prob-

lematic: That God ultimately causes a valued event

(as opposed to, say, an event issuing in tremen-

dous evil) appears to be a matter of blind faith, at

least as far as physics is concerned. Other prob-

lems for this viewpoint are the speculative nature

of the connection between quantum events and

macro-effects and, for advocates of indeterminacy

and openness, the denial that quantum events are

ultimately indeterminate. More broadly, critics of

the above approaches might judge them to be

backdoor attempts to reintroduce too much tran-

scendent or interventionist causation by God.

Panentheism’s history

The term panentheism was coined by German ide-

alist philosopher Carl Christian Friedrich Krause

(1781–1832). As mentioned above, German ideal-

ism, with strong ties to nature romanticism, pro-

duced various panentheistic and pantheistic

thinkers. The clearest and most fully developed

panentheistic model was that of physicist, experi-

mental psychologist, and philosopher Gustav

Theodor Fechner (1801–1887). Earlier examples of

panentheism or panentheistic tendencies include

Western mysticism and Hindu bhakti (referring to

devotion to a personal god) and its principal the-

ologian Ramanuja (traditional dates, 1017–1137).

These examples are not surprising, as mysticism

generally softens the creator-creature distinction,

while in India that distinction is not drawn as

sharply as is typical in Western religions.

Various philosophers and theologians of the

twentieth century have been labeled panentheists,

including Nicolai Berdyaev, William Pepperell

Montague, Paul Weiss, Karl Rahner, and John Mac-

Quarrie. While the panentheistic affinities of these

thinkers are undeniable, some failed to develop a

clear panentheistic model, others promoted ideas

contrary to basic premises of panentheism, while

still others explicitly refused the label panentheism

for their thought. Coming out of German idealism,

American Paul Tillich (1886–1965), an exile from

the Nazis, is regarded as one of the premier the-

ologians of the twentieth century. Tillichians

widely acknowledge his panentheism. His famous

phrase, “God is not a being, but being-itself,” has

obvious panentheistic implications. Tillich, who

claimed the phrase “eschatological pan-en-theism,”

was accused by some critics of pantheism, to

which he would jokingly respond, “This pantheist

is going to take a walk in his garden.” Tillich’s re-

luctance to disavow the attributes of divine im-

mutability, impassibility, and eternity compromise

his manifest panentheistic intentions, according to

American theologian David Nikkel (1952– ).

The fullest explicit development of panenthe-

ism in the twentieth century came from process

thought. Whitehead, a British mathematical physi-

cist and philosopher, originated process philoso-

phy, its theism developed and to some extent mod-

ified by Hartshorne. For process thought, reality at

its depth is not static being but rather a process of

becoming. God is not an exception to, but the

highest exemplar of, this ultimate or metaphysical

principle. As did Fechner, process thought advo-

cates panpsychism, that all integrated entities of the

universe possess some degree of sentience or feel-

ing. The fundamental unit of reality for process phi-

losophy is an occasion of experience. God, in the

consequent nature for Whitehead or the concrete

pole of divinity for Hartshorne, includes all past oc-

casions of experience. Process panentheism em-

phasizes omniscience and, to coin a word, omni-

pathy (all-feeling). God intimately knows all

experience, is affected by, sympathizes with, all

feelings. As Whitehead puts it, “God is the fellow

sufferer who understands” (1928, p. 351). White-

head purchases divine transcendence through the

primordial nature, which is the reservoir of all pos-

sibility. Hartshorne purchases the same through the

abstract pole of divinity, which refers to the

changeless character of God, namely, that God will

always lovingly know and integrate whatever ex-

periences occur in the universe. If the world influ-

ences God as object of divine knowledge, God

likewise influences the nondivine individuals as

object of their awareness, as a lure providing

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preferences for their actions. To what extent the di-

vine lure only persuades versus constrains deci-

sions as the unavoidable object of awareness is de-

bated by process theologians. What is beyond

dispute is the rejection of omnipotence, if inter-

preted to mean God is all-powerful, which would

overthrow indeterminate freedom.

Contemporary issues

McFague, mentioned earlier in relation to feminist

divine imagery, has presented one of the most

well-known models of panentheism in the late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her de-

velopment of metaphors for a God in intimate re-

lation with the world enflesh and enhance the

sense of the concept of panentheism. On the other

hand, her doubts concerning what we can actually

know about God pose a potential problem for her

panentheism. McFague’s minimal Christian theistic

claim is that there is a power in the universe on the

side of life that is, metaphorically speaking, per-

sonal. When McFague adds that this power is

many rather than one, critics may question

whether God in her concept or metaphor is suffi-

ciently integrated to panentheistically include the

universe; critics may question whether there is a

difference of substance between her view and

American Christian theologian Gordon Kaufman’s

serendipitous creativity, that God should refer to

the cosmic and evolutionary forces that have re-

sulted in life and human life rather than to any

personal or agential reality. Contrast McFague’s

outlook to that of Tillich and Hartshorne, who

maintained that God is “not less than conscious” or

superconscious (while recognizing the anthropo-

morphic dangers of attributing conscious person-

hood to God).

Many theologians in the science and religion

dialogue affirm some notion of God’s sustaining

creativity common to the Western religious tradi-

tions: Every aspect of every particular constituent

of the universe is radically contingent, dependent

upon divine power for its continued existence mo-

ment by moment. Process theism rejects such an

understanding of divine power. Whitehead is clear

that both divine and finite occasions of experience

are manifestations of the ultimate metaphysical

principle of creative synthesis, each such occasion

possessing ultimate independence of being. White-

head reasons that if God were upholding the very

existence of occasions, then indeterminate free-

dom would be overridden and his panentheism

would transmute into a pantheism. Christian proc-

ess theologians, while often neglecting to ac-

knowledge this Whiteheadian perspective on di-

vine power, have not challenged it either. The

question for panentheists who wish to retain a no-

tion of divine sustaining activity is this: Can om-

nipotence be defined as “all power” rather than

“all-powerful”? Can God panentheistically encom-

pass all power by sustaining and thus empowering

the existence of each creature, as an existence with

indeterminate freedom? If such a concept is not

self-contradictory, then one can avoid pantheism

and affirm a notion of divine power more conso-

nant with the all-inclusive logic of panentheism.