Pantheism - Robert Merrihew Adams

Professor Robert Merrihew Adams discusses three questions: First, what pantheism is or might be. Second, whether traditional theistic beliefs have metaphysical implications that fit some form of pantheism. And third, if such implications were accepted, how it would be reasonable to characterize the relation between God and the world. There are two general ways to understand pantheism. One can either start with the idea of God and understand the universe as a part of God; or one can start with the universe itself as the great unity, and then go on to identify it with God. Thus, one side is theistic, where everything becomes a part of God, while the other side is atheistic, where God gets swallowed up in the unity of the world itself. Professor Adams approaches pantheism from the more theistic side, arguing that this idea of pantheism does not necessarily rule out a personal conception of God in the way that traditional pantheism was thought to (like, most famously, in the work of Spinoza).

This talk was given at Rutgers University. It's from the Marc Sanders Foundation.