{"id":369,"date":"2010-07-25T09:20:28","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T23:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=369"},"modified":"2010-07-25T09:20:28","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T23:20:28","slug":"naturalistic-pantheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=369","title":{"rendered":"Naturalistic Pantheism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Question from Jim:<\/strong><br \/>\nI wanted to ask you if atheists in general, consider a person who is naturalistic pantheist to be an atheistic person.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<strong>Answer:<\/strong><br \/>\nGenerally, I think we do.  I certainly do.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA pantheist thinks that God is everything, that is, the whole universe.  The naturalist view is that the laws of nature, whatever they may actually be, cannot be broken.  A naturalistic pantheist, therefore, thinks that God is beholden to His inherent natural laws and cannot go against them to serve His own purposes.  In other words, not only can&#8217;t He perform miracles, He can&#8217;t make <em>anything<\/em> happen which wouldn&#8217;t happen anyway.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe only practical difference between a naturalistic pantheist and an atheist, therefore, is that an atheist doesn&#8217;t bother to call the universe a god.  It&#8217;s just a universe.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/smartlx\">SmartLX<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The only practical difference between a naturalistic pantheist and an atheist, therefore, is that an atheist doesn&#8217;t bother to call the universe a god.  It&#8217;s just a universe.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[26,127,53],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","tag-atheism","tag-naturalism","tag-pantheism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pB6tr-5X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}