Panentheism, Spirit and access to truth
There are only two ways to live your life:
as though nothing is a miracle,
or as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein
We ended the last post on Arthur Eddington and how his idea of “background” and “spirit” can lead to a panentheist view of God. Panentheism, in its simplest form, means “All-in-God.” We’re exploring this increasingly popular view or doctrine of God to see if it is helpful in answering some big questions about God, creation, involvement in creation and the existence of evil.
In his book The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington said that the revolution in science happening in 1927, the year he offered the Gifford Lectures on which the book is based, made it possible for a reasonable scientist to also be religious, or in his case, Christian. Quantum science, he said, eliminated the strict and closed causality of physicalism and pointed strongly to the “background” that he equated with spirit. But, he also said that while science can point to a “colourless” form of the divine, it cannot establish anything specific about this idea. Pantheism, he says, works as well as theism from what science has to say.
Eddington was a deeply religious man, a Quaker who believed in a “mystical” connection between God and the creatures made…
