here's an interesting piece by russ douthat on popular pantheism. very true. but one thing i would point out is that pantheism of the sort he's describing is a lot more like the standard religions than douthat or its acolytes would allow, because fundamentally nature is treated as an agent: it tries to achieve an equilibrium; it wants balance; and it wants your worship or connection. our distance from it is like - in fact is - the distance of a sinner from his god. i like the idea better than i like the idea of a transcendent spiritual intelligence, for one thing because that conception can't even be made out: it is nonsensical or contradictory. but on the other hand the modern pantheist hasn't achieved immanence in the object of her worship either, hasn't at all seen that nature is a morally arbitrary system by our standards, that it's not trying to get anywhere, etc. "it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong": it might as well be a scripture: nature as a text, and as the author of a text.

douthat's conclusion - that we are half-animals and half-not, that we are moral creatures and hence not merely natural - is the traditional monotheistic view. here it is used in a really compelling critique of pantheism: that is some of the best philosophical writing i've ever seen in an op-ed column. but i must say that the modern pantheist thinks exactly the same thing in slightly transposed terms: that we stand partly outside the order of nature - which we can harm or nurture - and have to engage in a process to reconnect with it. this sort of pantheism just is a monotheism, perhaps a competitor with judaism, islam, christianity, but also, like each of those in relation to the others, part of the same history.

in fact, you can see it emerging in the same history, together with the emergence of the reformation and modern science. spinoza is obviously a site, and he's trying to show that that treating nature as god is not heretical, is entailed by judaism and christianity. or you get emerson's development from unitarian minister to pantheist minister, which is a far less profound change than it might appear to be. i put thoreau in aslightly different category: his nature is more equivocal and less conscious. but he has been read as a pantheist pope.

now we do have examples of consciousness and goal-directed behavior emerging from material systems: namely in ourselves and each other. so it could be that the universe as a whole is like a giant brain from which consciousness could emerge. however do you really believe that? and why? you're anthropomorphizing the whole kit and caboodle: saying the universe is made in our image or vice versa. also i would point out that consciousness emerges in organisms in an environment, that consciousness is consciousnes of something outside ourselves, is a form of alertness or sensitivity to a world. but what would the world be consious of? itself i suppose: a kind of onanistic god.

at any rate, the structure, while not quite as unbelievable as the traditoonal monotheisms, is unbelievable, or is fundamentally a matter of sheer faith, and is also bent to whatever our purposes might be: it's as it were political rather than an attempt to ascertain the truth.