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According to pagan myth, the natural world is all there is.  This is the meaning of Huxley’s phrase, quoted earlier in these posts, “a divine Reality substantial to the world.”  So, there is “divinity,” but it is found as an element of the world.  There is nothing outside the created cosmos of a different order of being.  Therefore, divine nature is alone worthy of worship. “Myths” must be invented to bestow divine status on Mother Nature – hence the vast network of goddess-worship in the ancient world.  Paul attributes this concept to “teachings of demons” (1st Timothy 4:1), because the demons teach that the so-called Creator is evil or non-existent.

Any system of though that attempts to describe the world exclusively by the world is in principle monistic.  Take, for example, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677). He was accused of atheism because he declared that there was only “one substance” in the entirety of being, that there is nothing outside of creation, and that “God” was merely the laws of nature.  Likewise, Stephen Hawking, the British physicist, identified with the laws of nature, and Einstein spoke of God but explicitly endorsed Spinoza. Thus, atheism and rationalistic humanism are in that sense monist.  They, like their spiritual cousins, make no place for a transcendent, personal Creator, and so share at the deepest level the same reality as very spiritual but monist systems.  It is interesting that the modern atheists in the news attack Christianity (Creator/creature system), the God of the Bible, but find few or no problems with the New Spirituality.  A contemporary French atheist attacks exclusively the Judeo-Christian metaphysics, that is, the Creator God who is distinct from his creation.  Other forms of spirituality are no threat to atheism because they all share the same worldview (this is all there is). This is the conclusion of the atheistic philosopher Mitchel Silver, who teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Silver examines the “new” Jewish spirituality based on mystical kabbalah in its relationship to atheism, in particular the spirituality to Micheal Lerner, who as an advisor to Hillary Clinton proposed his “politics of meaning.” This is “dog whistle” to pagan thought. Silver is a thoroughgoing atheist who states openly that “the new god (as opposed to the God of the Bible) may be the only god that has the ghost of a chance of being believed by his contemporaries.” Nevertheless, he concludes that “the new god” is not so “new,” since it echoes and develops religious thought of Hinduism.  He shows that this not-so-new “new god” is no more useful than a belief in no god to describe the nature of human existence.  The final judgment of Silver is most telling.  The new god of spirituality (based on ancient pagan spirituality) “is so thoroughly naturalistic that a godless nature can be expected to perform about as well as a godly one.”

The “godless” and the newly “godly” can surely get along.  The BBC journalist and successful author John Humphrys observes that the secular West “is losing its reticence about religion.” Thus we enter the era of the postsecular.  The postsecular, created in large part by the postmodern destruction of secular rationalism, involves a renewed openness to questions of the spirit while retaining the secular habits of critical thought.  But the ensuing religion, according to philosopher Mike King, will reject both close-minded atheism and “the old religion” (Christianity).  Rather, the coming religion will be a mix of the “religious Left,” “the New Age,” and Eastern ‘mysticism.”  This has apocalyptic implications.

Before we move on:

  1. What belief unites spiritual and secular monists? In what ways do they hold the same view of nature? 
  2. How have postmodernism and postsecularism prepared the West to embrace monism?