Theism is the belief in a transcendental principle managing and manipulating the world. This supreme principle is personified as God. But where is God located? One ancient view was that there is a glorious region up there in the depths of space (heaven) that is the kingdom where God resides and reigns.

Centuries ago, Vedic sage-poets in India, like their counterparts in other cultures, saw divinity in the sun and moon, sky and dawn. Countless thinkers in many cultures, traditions, and ages, from Parmenides and Confucius and Lucretius to Thoreau, Tagore, and Einstein, have seen God’s presence in the natural world.

The term “pantheism” has been popular among philosophers and theologians for more than three centuries now. In its broad meaning, it sees an impersonal God’s presence everywhere in the created world. Baruch Spinoza is sometimes regarded as one of the first to popularize pantheistic ideas in the post-Galilean Western world.

The word “panentheism” made its entry into the language in early decades of the 20th century. Here, the idea of God permeating the universe may be interpreted in two different ways. One is that everything is in God. This implies that every quark, lepton, and boson, every plant, animal, and star is embedded in the divine just as every land animal is immersed in an ocean of air. Another view of panentheism is that God is in everything, just as electric charge is in every ordinary material substance. In either interpretation, panentheism makes the universe sacred and worthy of reverence, for everything is linked one way or another to God.

Another view is that every element in the universe, simple or complex, is an aspect of God, i.e., everything in the universe is God. This may also be regarded as a key idea of pantheism. In the Hindu vision, for example, Brahman (cosmic consciousness) is undergirding the universe. We find this idea in the terrestrial context in Urabe-no-Kanekuni of the Shinto tradition: “Even in a single leaf of a tree, or a tender blade of grass, the awe-inspiring deity manifests Itself.”

Eighteenth-century German thinkers like Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven resonated with some Hindu (Upanishadic) metaphysical views, and were drawn to pantheism. Nature poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge don’t differentiate between pantheism and panentheism. Recall Walt Whitman’s lines:

I hear and behold God in every object.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

This is pure pantheism. But it is panentheism when he says in the same poem:

I see something of God each hour of the twenty four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.
I find letters from God dropped in the street—and everyone is signed by God’s name,
I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.

We may also look upon pantheism as saying that the creator is the creation. In other words, the orbiting electron and the blossoming flower, the rain, the river, and the mountain, the sun and the galaxy are themselves divine. As Margaret Atwood puts it, “god is not the voice in the whirlwind, god is the whirlwind.”

Both pantheism and panentheism are compatible with any God-believing system: After all, panentheism simply says that the creator is present one way or another in all of creation. Is not the poet present in every poem she writes, the composer in every glorious music, and the artist in every painted canvas? We may not always think consciously of the poet, the composer, and the painter, but who can deny their presence in what we experience from their created work?

But, you may ask, how can the poet actually be the poem, the symphony actually be the composer, or the sculpture the sculptor? This does seem impossible with human beings. But not with God, if we choose not to accept a personal (anthropomorphic) God.

In so far as theism generally attributes to God immanence and omnipresence, it also has a pantheistic aspect—yet pantheism can be nontheistic when it concerns itself only with nature and is indifferent to what may be behind it all. Indeed, many modern pantheists are not so much interested in the theology of pantheism as in its relevance to life and living. They see the divine in the microcosm and in the Milky Way, and are struck by the majesty of the universe, of course. But more importantly, they revere rivers and rainforests, whales and woodpeckers, not so much as manifestations of an unfathomable God, but as God’s precious products that must be preserved and protected. Saving the biosphere is, to them, more important than building churches and synagogues, singing psalms and bhajans, or repeatedly proclaiming that God is great.

There may be a grain of truth in suspicions that pantheism is atheism in a theistic garb, materialism with mystical mantras, and paganism picturesquely painted. Yet, pantheism can also serve as a bridge between traditional theism and science-based materialism. It is prompted by the recognition that our existence depends on the laws, constraints, and parameters of nature. It sees divinity in the order, beauty, and grandeur of the world. In the face of mystery, it experiences humility. If anything is sacred, pantheism says, nature is sacred, for there is no loftier manifestation of cosmic splendor. As Dante put it, “La natura è l’arte di Dio”: Nature is the art of God.

V.V. Raman is an emeritus professor of physics and humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology and most recently the author of Truth and Tension in Science and Religion.