Not caring whether the universe is god
Pantheism and Apatheism having a drink
Long ago, it was a curious feeling finding myself in a position where the existence of God seems neither plausible enough to warrant belief nor absurd enough to warrant energetic denial. For those who move through the world with a mathematician’s instinct for parsimony and a philosopher’s taste for well‑formed questions, the entire theological enterprise can begin to resemble a piece of machinery that continues to run long after the problem it was designed to solve has been quietly retired. The machinery is impressive, certainly; it has produced cathedrals and crusades, the Summa Theologica and the Tractatus, a vast and often sublime literature of longing and certainty. But soon we begin to suspect that the question it labours to answer, “Does God exist?”, is not so much insoluble as mislaid, like a key that was never meant for any lock in particular.
This suspicion, when pursued with sufficient rigor, tends to deposit us at the crossroads of two philosophical dispositions that are rarely considered in the same breath. One hand we find pantheism, an ancient and recurrent notion that whatever we mean by “God” is not a being separate from the universe but the universe itself, its laws, its substance, its total facticity. On the other hand, we have apatheism, a more recently christened (…) attitude that the question of God’s existence is, for all practical and intellectual purposes, a matter of indifference. At first glance these seem to pull in opposite directions: pantheism makes a substantial metaphysical claim, while apatheism shrugs at the very project of metaphysical claiming. Yet they are drawn together by a shared recognition that the God of classical theism, the personal, providential, morally concerned superintendent of the cosmos, is not a viable interlocutor for modern thought and once that figure is set aside, the boundary between reverent identification with nature and serene unconcern with the divine begins to dissolve. What emerges is a worldview in which we can call the universe “God” without feeling any particular urgency about the name and in which the practices of religion are replaced by the quieter disciplines of attention, ethics and a kind of amused resignation before the vast, impersonal machinery of existence.
The impulse to identify God with the world has a pedigree long enough to make the average university press catalogue groan under its weight. In its Western form it reaches a kind of crystalline perfection in the thought of 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics presented a universe in which God and Nature (Deus sive Natura) are one substance, possessing infinite attributes of which thought and extension are the only two available to human understanding. This God does not love, does not command, does not answer prayers and does not punish. The intellectual love of such a God consists in the calm, adequate knowledge of the necessary order of things. Once we understand that order, we are freed from the worries of hope and fear that attend the belief in a personal deity who might or might not intervene on our behalf. Spinoza’s contemporaries called this atheism; the more careful reader will recognize it as a form of piety so stripped of the usual markers of piety that it becomes, from the perspective of conventional religion, indistinguishable from a kind of philosophical apathy.
Precisely this indistinction interests the apatheist. If the divine is nothing more than the totality of nature, operating according to laws that admit of no exception, then the practical implications for human life are exactly what they would be if no divine existed at all. The rain falls on the just and the unjust because of atmospheric pressure, adiabatic cooling and the Coriolis effect rather than caused by some form of divine calculus. We can, if we like, call that chain of causation an expression of God’s will, but the will in question is indistinguishable from the physics. The term “God” becomes a poetic gloss on a set of processes that function perfectly well without the gloss. Insisting on the gloss is a matter of temperament, not of explanatory necessity. And temperament, as the apatheist is fond of observing, is not a reliable guide to ontology.
This should not be understood as the notion that the pantheist and the apatheist end up in identical places. The pantheist typically feels something that the apatheist does not: a sense of reverence, of participation in something sacred, of the world’s being worthy of a response that goes beyond intellectual acknowledgment. The pantheist may speak of nature with the hushed intensity of a medieval mystic, may find in a stand of old‑growth redwoods or the spiral of a galaxy an occasion for something very like worship. The apatheist, by contrast, tends to regard such responses as optional ornamentation, pleasant, perhaps, but no more obligatory than a taste for opera or cricket. Where the pantheist says, “The universe is God, therefore I am in the presence of the holy,” the apatheist says, “The universe is what it is; whether one calls it God or not makes no difference to the fact that the mortgage is due and the cat needs feeding.”
These two attitudes can coexist in a single mind without the kind of contradiction that keeps philosophers awake at night. We can hold, with Spinoza, that the universe is a single substance of which we are finite modes and simultaneously hold, with the apatheist, that the question of whether to call that substance “God” is a matter of such profound irrelevance to how one lives that it merits no more than a raised eyebrow. What may seem a logical incoherence is a recognition that metaphysical labels, once they have done their work of orienting thought, can be set aside in favour of the concrete concerns that actually shape a human life. The mathematician knows this pattern well. We can work comfortably in a formal system without constantly interrogating the ontological status of its objects; we can prove theorems about real numbers without having resolved the ancient dispute between Platonists and nominalists. The question of whether numbers exist is interesting, even important, but it is not the sort of question that needs to be settled before we get on with the business of analysis. So too with God. We can adopt a pantheistic ontology, the universe as the only divine, and then, having adopted it, treat the question of divinity as a closed file, its contents catalogued and returned to the shelf.
This quiet closure is, in its own way and certainly from my personal perspective, a form of intellectual maturity. It acknowledges that some questions, however grand, do not deserve sustained attention. They are not false, exactly, nor are they meaningless; they simply run out of consequences. The God of classical theism, with all of its preferences and judgments, had consequences everywhere, in ethics, in politics, in the interpretation of natural disasters, in the intimate details of our inner lives. To believe in such a God put us in a perpetual state of vigilance, watching for signs of favour or displeasure, calibrating our actions to an unseen will. The God of pantheism, in contrast, has no preferences. It is the structure of reality, not a subject with opinions. Believing in such a God frees us from this vigilance. We can still feel awe, certainly; we can still feel the humbling smallness of being a temporary arrangement of atoms in an ancient universe. But we do not have to worry about whether our prayers are being heard, whether our doubts are being counted as sins, whether our afterlife is being secured or forfeited. The apatheist simply notes that these worries, which have caused so much human anguish, are predicated on a conception of the divine that pantheism has already dissolved.
There is a line of thought, running from the pre‑Socratics through Spinoza to certain strands of contemporary naturalism, that treats the impersonal character of the universe as a solution rather than a problem that, as it is usually framed, is that the universe appears to operate according to laws that make no accommodation for human purposes. Earthquakes do not spare the devout; diseases do not respect moral virtue; the same physical processes that produce life, produce its annihilation with equal indifference. The classical theist must either explain this indifference as an apparent one, a matter of divine hiddenness or of tests that refine the soul, or else reconcile it with the premise of a benevolent personal God, a project that has consumed libraries of apologetics without ever arriving at a conclusion that persuades anyone who was not already persuaded. The pantheist, however, feels no need to reconcile. The indifference of the universe is exactly what we would expect if the universe is God. A God who is identical with the laws of nature cannot be expected to bend those laws for the benefit of particular creatures. The laws are what they are; the creature’s task is to understand them, to navigate within them and perhaps, like Spinoza’s mystic, to achieve a kind of equanimity by seeing our own lives as an expression of the same necessity that governs the motions of the stars.
This equanimity has a superficial resemblance to apathy, and the resemblance is not entirely accidental. The logos of the Stoics, who were pantheists of a sort, was immanent in the cosmos, made a virtue of what they called apatheia, a state of being undisturbed by the passions, achieved by aligning their will with the rational order of nature. Too much worrying about outcomes beyond our control was, in the Stoic view, a misunderstanding of our place in the whole. The wise person does not rail against the indifference of the universe; the wise person accepts it and finds in that acceptance a freedom that the anxious believer can never know. The apatheist of the modern variety makes a similar argument, though in a more deflationary key. The Stoic mystic aimed at a kind of cosmic harmony; the contemporary apatheist is more likely to say that since the universe does not care about our beliefs, we are under no obligation to care about its metaphysical pedigree. It is a move from heroic resignation to something closer to a shrug.
And yet the shrug, when examined closely, reveals itself to be a response to the same structural fact that the Stoic and the Spinozist identified: the world does not answer to our categories of concern. It does not reward faith or punish scepticism. It simply proceeds, in accordance with patterns that we can describe with increasing precision but cannot alter to suit our preferences. By recognising this, we recognise that the whole apparatus of theological anxiety, the worry about whether we believe correctly, whether we are among the elect, whether we have offended a being who holds the power of eternal torment, is a form of suffering that we have invented for ourselves. It is a drama in which we are both the audience and the playwright, and the curtain never falls because we keep rewriting the script. The pantheist‑apatheist synthesis is, in essence, a decision to walk out of the theatre.
This decision is not an abdication of seriousness. On the contrary, it requires a certain kind of discipline, the discipline of attending to what is actually the case rather than to what we wish were the case or fear might be the case. The mathematician working in intuitionism knows something about this discipline. Intuitionism rejects the classical law of excluded middle as unwarranted in contexts where we cannot construct a proof of either a proposition or its negation. The intuitionist is not an agnostic about mathematics; she is a person who insists on grounding mathematical truth in constructive mental activity, in the operations that a mind can actually perform. She does not ask whether a mathematical object exists in some transcendent realm; she asks what it means to construct it, to work with it, to make it present in the flow of thought. The parallel with the apatheist’s approach to theology is suggestive. The apatheist does not ask whether God exists in some transcendent realm; she asks what difference that existence would make to the actual conduct of inquiry, of ethics, of life. And finding that it makes none that she can discern, she sets the question aside with the same clean economy with which the intuitionist sets aside the law of excluded middle when it cannot be constructively justified.
What remains, when the question of God has been set aside, is the world in its ordinary richness. There is the texture of experience: the way light falls through a window in the late afternoon, the precise weight of a well‑made tool, the satisfaction of a proof that finally arranges itself in the mind. There are the claims of others: the demands of justice, the obligations of care, the small and large negotiations that constitute a life among other lives. There is the natural world, which demands nothing but offers everything, a system of such intricate interdependence that we could spend a lifetime learning its patterns without ever exhausting them. For the pantheist, these things are holy because they are the substance of the divine. For the apatheist, they are simply what there is and they are sufficient. The synthesis allows us to move between these framings without any strain: we can feel, on a walk through a winter forest, that we are in the presence of something that deserves the name of sacred and we can also, on returning home and finding a leaky faucet, treat the sacred as an aesthetic experience rather than a metaphysical imperative.
The ethical implications of this synthesis are worth dwelling on for a bit, because they are often misunderstood. It is frequently assumed that a worldview without a personal God must lack a foundation for morality, that without a divine lawgiver we are left with nothing but individual preference or brute social convention. This assumption is a piece of theology masquerading as philosophy. The pantheist‑apatheist does not derive ethics from the nature of the divine in the way that a divine command theorist does. Instead, she locates the sources of ethical obligation in the same place that the rest of us do, whether we admit it or not: in the concrete conditions of human life, in the capacities for sympathy and reason that evolution has given us, in the practices of reflection and dialogue through which we work out what we owe to one another. The pantheist may add that these conditions are themselves expressions of the same unified reality that she calls God, but the addition does not change the content of the obligations. It merely sets them in a larger frame that emphasizes continuity rather than rupture. The apatheist, for her part, finds that the absence of a divine lawgiver relieves her of the need to reconcile morality with the inscrutable will of a personal deity, a project that has historically required a great deal of intellectual contortion. She can attend directly to the question of how to live, without the mediation of a cosmic authority whose demands are always subject to interpretive dispute.
This directness is characteristic of the whole attitude. It is the directness of someone who has decided that life is too short to spend on questions that do not repay the investment. The decision is not anti‑intellectual; it is, in its way, hyper‑intellectual, a rigorous application of Ockham’s razor to the architecture of our concerns. If a question has no answer that would make a difference to anything else, then it is not a genuine question but a pseudo‑question, a piece of linguistic machinery that has outlived its usefulness. The classical theist might object that the question of God’s existence is not like that, that it makes a difference to everything. But the classical theist is operating within a framework where God is personal, providential and judgmental. Once that framework is replaced by a pantheistic alternative, the difference evaporates. The world does not become different, only the description changes. And if the description changes without altering the world, then the description was never really about the world. It was about something else, about our need for narrative, perhaps or our desire for a kind of significance that the world does not naturally supply.
The desire for significance should not be dismissed too lightly. It is one of the engines of human culture, driving art and philosophy and the long project of trying to make sense of our brief transit through a universe that seems, on its own terms, indifferent to our existence. Pantheism offers a way of satisfying that desire without resorting to the apparatus of supernatural agency. It says: you are not a stranger here, a visitor from another realm who must appease an alien power. You are a part of this, a local expression of the same reality that produces galaxies and lichen and the curious phenomenon of self‑awareness. Your significance is not bestowed from above; it is intrinsic to your being a part of the whole. The apatheist may find this a bit too poetic, but she can acknowledge the impulse behind it. She might say, more prosaically, that the desire for significance is itself a natural phenomenon that we can meet by engaging in activities that genuinely matter to other beings, without needing to inflate those activities into cosmic events. The synthesis allows to hold both positions: to feel, in moments of reflection, the deep continuity with the universe that pantheism articulates and to conduct our daily life with the apatheist’s focus on the particular, the local, the genuinely actionable.
There is a precedent for this kind of doubleness in the Daoist tradition, which has a way of treating metaphysical questions with a light touch that can seem evasive to the Western mind, but that reveals, on closer inspection, a profound pragmatism. The Daodejing opens with the famous warning that the Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way; it then proceeds to speak of it for 81 chapters. This is a method, not a contradiction. It acknowledges that the ultimate nature of things is not something that can be captured in propositions and it refuses to let that acknowledgement paralyse thought. We work with the concepts we have, use them as far as they are useful and then set them aside. The pantheist‑apatheist operates in a similar spirit. The concept of God, in its pantheistic form, is useful for certain purposes: for expressing a sense of unity, for framing an ecological ethic, for providing a vocabulary of reverence that connects the scientific understanding of the world with the older human need for a sense of the sacred. But when the concept ceases to be useful, when it threatens to become an object of disputation rather than a tool for thought, we can set it aside without a second thought. The Daoist would recognise this as wisdom; the analytic philosopher might call it a pragmatic theory of meaning; the ordinary person, whose life goes on regardless of whether she calls the universe God or not, might simply wonder what all the fuss was about.
The fuss, historically, has been considerable. The history of Western philosophy is in large part a history of arguments about the existence and nature of God, arguments that have consumed the energies of some of the most acute minds our species has produced. It would be an act of intellectual hubris to dismiss this history as merely a mistake. These arguments have sharpened our understanding of logic, of causation, of the limits of language. They have given us the ontological argument and the problem of evil, the concept of infinite regress and the distinction between necessary and contingent being. While working through them, we receive an education in philosophy that nothing else can quite replace. But we can work through them and emerge on the other side with a kind of gratitude for the exercise, without feeling that the exercise must issue in a conclusion. The apatheist’s indifference is not ignorance; it is the cultivated indifference of someone who has read the literature and found that it does not settle anything that needs to be settled.
The pantheist, too, can read this literature with interest, seeing in it the many attempts to articulate what it might mean for the finite to participate in the infinite. Spinoza’s geometrical method, for all its austerity, is a kind of love letter to the intelligibility of the world. It says that the same reason that allows us to prove a theorem about triangles can allow us to understand our place in the whole and that this understanding is the highest human good. The contemporary pantheist might express the same idea in the language of physics, saying that we are made of stardust, that the elements in our bodies were forged in the hearts of long‑dead stars, that our capacity to know the universe is itself a product of the universe’s evolution. This is not a claim about the existence of a personal God; it is a claim about the continuity of nature, a claim that has the virtue of being empirically supported. The apatheist can accept this claim without feeling that it imposes any further obligations. She can acknowledge that she is stardust and then get on with the business of being a particular arrangement of stardust that has a grant proposal to finish and a friend to call.
What makes the synthesis of pantheism and apatheism genuinely interesting is that it offers a way of being in the world that is both intellectually respectable and emotionally sustainable. It avoids the brittleness of atheism that defines itself too narrowly against what it denies; it avoids the earnestness of pantheism that insists on sacralising every last pebble; it avoids the despair that can accompany the sense of cosmic meaninglessness by refusing to take cosmic meaninglessness as a problem that needs to be solved. The universe is what it is. We are what we are. Our lives have meaning in the ways that lives always have meaning: through relationships, through work, through the pleasures of understanding and the satisfactions of creation. If we want to call the larger context of these activities “God,” we may do so; if we prefer not to, we may refrain. The choice is a matter of temperament, not truth. And temperament, as has been noted, is not a reliable guide to ontology, but it is a perfectly good guide to how we might prefer to spend our finite and rather improbable time as a conscious knot in the fabric of being.
The mathematician in her study, working on a problem in intuitionistic logic, is not troubled by the question of whether the objects of her thought exist independently of her construction of them. She is too busy constructing them. The journalist on deadline is not troubled by the question of whether the events she is reporting have a cosmic significance; she is too busy getting the facts straight. The philosopher who has spent a decade thinking about the foundations of mathematics may occasionally glance up from her work and consider the larger questions, but she knows that the larger questions have a way of receding the moment she tries to grasp them. They are like the horizon, always visible, never reached. The pantheist‑apatheist proposes that we treat the question of God in the same way: as a horizon, not as a destination. We can acknowledge its presence without feeling that we must march toward it. We can let it frame our view without letting it determine the steps we take.
This conclusion will certainly not satisfy everyone. There are those for whom the question of God is a matter of bitter urgency, a question that cannot be set aside without a loss of something essential. The classical theist will find the pantheist‑apatheist synthesis a dilution of what she takes to be the very substance of faith. The militant atheist will find it a cowardly retreat from the clear statement that there is no God. But for those who find themselves in the middle, who have read the arguments, felt the attractions and discovered that the question does not, in the end, command their attention, the synthesis offers a way forward that is neither a confession of failure nor a denial of complexity. It is an acknowledgment that some questions, however grand, are not our questions. They belong to other people, other times, other temperaments. We can respect them without inheriting them. We can understand why they mattered without pretending that they still matter to us. And we can go about our lives of research and teaching, of friendship and reading, of watching the light change on a winter afternoon, with the quiet confidence that we have not abandoned the search for truth but have simply learned to recognise it when it appears in the modest, local forms that are actually available to us.
The universe does not require us to call it God. It does not require anything of us at all. That is its nature that we can either find chilling or liberating, depending on our temperament. The pantheist finds it liberating because it allows her to see herself as a participant in something vast and beautiful. The apatheist finds it liberating because it releases her from the obligation to have an opinion about matters that make no practical difference. The synthesis allows us to be both: to feel the liberation of participation and the liberation of indifference, sometimes in the same moment, sometimes alternating like the two sides of a coin that has finally stopped flipping. We do not need to decide once and for all whether the coin came up heads or tails. We can simply put it in our pocket and walk on, attending to the path, the weather, the other walkers, the long way yet to go.