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Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In Pantheism, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and its philosophical basis is examined. Michael Levine compares it to theism, and discusses the scope for resolving the problems inherent in theism through pantheism. He also considers the implications of pantheism in terms of practice. This book will appeal to those who study philosophy or theology. It will also be of interest to anyone who does not believe in a personal God, but does have faith in a higher unifying force, and is interested in the justification of this as a legitimate system of thought.

Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. InGod Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interruptedalso provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.

This paper is an attempt to consider an alternative pluralist pantheism (Mary Jane Rubenstein) as the next step in the evolution of interpersonal, interspecies, and God–human–nature relationships and its possible realisation in (post-)Christian ecofeminism and its epistemology. It follows the methodology and epistemology of theological ecofeminism, which assumes that the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature stem from the same constellation of phenomena: patriarchal domination, dualistic anthropologies, and global hypercapitalism. Recognising that pantheism is a very complex phenomenon and should not be viewed as a single codified viewpoint, but rather as a diverse family of different doctrines, this paper understands pantheism primarily as the paradigm that asserts that everything is part of a divine unity consisting of an all-encompassing, manifested deity or God/Goddess. The paper first explains the pan-en-theistic turn in Christian ecofeminism as a tool for deconstructing the dominant Cartesian dualistic binaries and their symbolism and metanarratives, and as the first “safe” phase of transition from Christian anthropocentrism. From this standpoint, Grace M. Jantzen’s defense of pantheism as an alternative to transcendental theism is further explored as she argues that divinity is found “in” the physical and material world and nowhere else. The paper then moves to the second phase, proposed in the final part of the paper, on the possibility of the theoretical adoption of pluralist pantheism in (post-)Christian ecofeminist ecotheology. Here, the question of the “fear and horror of pantheism” in Western thought is discussed.

This essay will present Richard Rohr’s central claims about Jesus Christ and the presence of God in creation and then consider them in light of Aquinas’s teachings with particular attention to his . This essay attempts to show that Rohr’s claims are incomplete and ultimately misguided and that Aquinas’s participatory account of creation and the Incarnation allows him to cultivate an awareness of God’s presence in all of creation while also maintaining the salvific uniqueness of the Incarnation.

Many traditional theists maintain that God is the ultimate explanation of the universe, for why anything exists at all. For the traditional theist, only a being who is fundamental and transcendent can provide an ultimate ground and explanation of the universe. This requirement that God transcend the universe in order to ultimately explain it poses a challenge for pantheism, the view that God is numerically identical with the universe. If God is identical with the universe, and God is supposed to be the ultimate explanation of the universe, the result is an instance of circular explanation. And circular explanations are allegedly illegitimate. In this article, I develop two explanatory models in an attempt to show that pantheism is consistent with non-circular explanations of the universe. All else being equal, I argue that pantheism is not explanatorily deficient in comparison to traditional theism.

This article revisits Feuerbach’s “break with speculation” in the early 1840s in light of issues raised by the original Pantheism Controversy, initiated in 1785 by the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza. The article first describes the concerns underlying Jacobi’s repudiation of Spinozism, and rationalism more generally, in favor of a personalistic theism that disclaims the possibility of philosophical knowledge of God. It goes on to reconstruct Hegel’s alternative to Jacobi’s famous salto mortale before considering how Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, as well as the personalism of the so-called Positive Philosophy (inspired by the late Schelling), was influenced by both Spinoza and Jacobi in ways that have not yet received sufficient attention.

This study introduces a novel method for predicting the sunspot number ( S N ) of Solar Cycles 25 (the current cycle) and 26 using multivariate machine-learning techniques, the Sun’s polar flux as a precursor parameter, and the fast Fourier transform to conduct a spectral analysis of the considered time series. Using the 13-month running average of the version 2 of the S N provided by the World Data Center—SILSO, we are thus able to present predictive results for the S N until January 2038, giving maximum peak values of 131.4 (in July 2024) and 121.2 (in September 2034) for Solar Cycles 25 and 26, respectively, with a root mean square error of 10.0. These predicted dates are similar to those estimated for the next two polar flux polarity reversals (April 2024 and August 2034). Furthermore, the values for the S N maxima of Solar Cycles 25 and 26 have also been forecasted based on the known correlation between the absolute value of the difference between the polar fluxes of both hemispheres at an S N minimum and the maximum S N of the subsequent cycle, obtaining similar values to those achieved with the previous method: 142.3 ± 34.2 and 126.9 ± 34.2 for Cycles 25 and 26, respectively. Our results suggest that Cycle 25 will have a maximum amplitude that lies below the average and Cycle 26 will reach an even lower peak. This suggests that Solar Cycles 24 (with a peak of 116.4), 25, and 26 would belong to a minimum of the centennial Gleissberg cycle, as was the case in the final years of the 19th and the early 20th centuries (Solar Cycles 12, 13, and 14).

This paper concerns itself with postulating the necessity of God for Good, in answer to the titular question posed in this edition: “Is an Ethics without God Possible?”. To achieve this end, I consider a specific pantheistic ethic centered on Murdochian love and evaluate a potential contradictory element to this brand of ethic, while also highlighting several important terminological considerations integral to the debate concerning objective moral realism. I tentatively provide a demonstration of moral goodness without a ‘capital G’ God while examining and demystifying the underpinning concepts of goodness and ‘Godness’ (the nature of God).

Buddhism is a tradition that set itself decidedly against theism, with the development of complex arguments against the existence of God. I propose that the metaphysical conclusions reached by some schools in the Mahayana tradition present a vision of reality that, with some apparently small modification, would ground an argument for the existence of God. This argument involves explanation in terms of natures rather than causal agency. Yet I conclude not only that the Buddhist becomes a theist in embracing such explanations as legitimate, but also ipso facto abandons their metaphysical project and ceases to be a Buddhist.

Studies of variations in the solar differential rotation are important for understanding the underlying mechanism of solar cycle and other variations of solar activity. We analyzed the sunspot-group daily data that were reported by Greenwich Photoheliographic Results (GPR) during the period 1874 – 1976 and Debrecen Photoheliographic Data (DPD) during the period 1977 – 2017. We determined the equatorial rotation rate [ A ] and the latitude gradient [ B ] components of the solar differential rotation by fitting the data in each of the 3-year moving time intervals (3-year MTIs) successively shifted by one year during the period 1874 – 2017 to the standard law of differential rotation. The values of A and B around the years of maxima and minima of Solar Cycles 12 – 24 are obtained from the 3-year MTIs series of A and B and studied the long-term cycle-to-cycle modulations in these coefficients. Here we have used the epochs of the maxima and minima of the Solar Cycles 12 – 24 that were recently determined from the revised Version-2 international sunspot-number series. We find that there exits a considerably significant secular decreasing-trend in A around the maxima of solar cycles. There exist no secular trends in both A and B around the minima of solar cycles. The secular trend in B around the maxima of solar cycles is also found to be statistically insignificant. We fitted a cosine function to the values of A , and also to those of B , after removing the corresponding linear trends. The cosine-fits suggest that there exist ≈54-year (≈94-year) and ≈82-year (≈79-year) periodicities in A ( B ) around the maxima and minima of solar cycles, respectively. The amplitude of the cosine-profile of A ( B ) around the minima of solar cycles is about 41% (65%) larger than that of A ( B ) around the maxima. In addition, the cosine profiles of A and B suggest a large (up to 180 ∘ ) phase difference between the long-term variations of A , and also between those of B , around maxima and minima of solar cycles. Implications of all these results are discussed briefly.