Panentheism: God, Nature and the Problem of Evil

Photo by iuliu illes on Unsplash. We think of streams as pure, clean water, but they can have mud in them. Is the stream of energy-information we’ve considered also muddied?

The fourth in the series on panentheism which means “all in God,” but which has a range of definitions. It is a sort of middle ground between traditional theism and pantheism. Here I explore the advantages it offers in understanding God’s role in nature, but also the challenge of the existence of evil when God is seen as intimately tied to and involved with nature.

God is necessary or doesn’t exist

Either God is, or is not. Either God is the source of being and created all there is, or He is not and did not. Science cannot and never will answer those questions, but in this series we’ve seen how a number of scientists — spiritually-oriented and not — point to an underlying reality that some equate to spirit or the Spirit. In Biblical terms, the Spirit is the Third Person of the Trinity, the immanent power of God operating in, through and with creation. The idea we’ve been exploring is that in this reality both mind and matter are to be found. This is also known as dual aspect monism.

Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg is the one who, in my understanding, most developed the concept of this underlying reality as a field of energy that he equates with God the Spirit. Pannenberg in his book Toward a Theology of Nature put the issue of God and nature in the simplest terms and in a form worthy of…