Wrestling with Religion

Judge Paul Toomer, 1902 Above Columbus and Girard, above the City Mill dam, the Alabama bank of the Chattahoochee steepens while the Georgia side sprawls flat and prone to flooding. On the Alabama ridges lounges the community of Summerville, where I live year round and well-off Columbusites lodge their families during the malaria season.  The trail that plaits along the riverbank below my farm, around boulder and tree trunk, once led up to the footbridge to Clapp's Factory three miles north of town. Now the bridge is gone, the factory in ruins, but industry still thrives in Columbus, plenty jobs for workers who during Reconstruction were recruited from as far away as Manchester, England, where agents offered millhands and their families free passage to Georgia. No longer a road to work, the trail remains a natural park, unspoiled since Indian days. The steep bank prohibits agriculture, and on summer Sundays couples stroll here as if it were Central Park....

 Pantheism is the theory that nothing exists outside of God or--in a logical if not intuitive equivalent--that no God exists outside the world. This includes a vast range of ideas, from (1) seeing the universe as thought in the mind of God to (2) seeing it as a mechanistic system of matter and energy that evokes reverence. The first is theistic idealism, the second science overlaid with awe--what Richard Dawkins mocks as "sexed up Atheism" ( The God Delusion , 2007, p. 40). Between these extremes, a cafeteria of flavors is outlined by Michael Levine in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ("Pantheism"). I recommend that article but will only consider a few flavors.  George Berkeley, an Irish bishop (1685-1753), uses his scientific theory of vision to argue that what we experience as the phenomenological world is merely a set of mental constructs, ideas existing solely in our minds. We construct a world of three-dimensional things from an amorphous field...