23 Quotes by Paul Harrison

And if the universe is tuned so that consciousness can emerge and evolve, this implies that intelligent life has probably emerged on countless billions of other planets – so humans would have no special status in the design.

Al Hallaj overreached himself when he said “I am the truth” – ie “I am God.” By this he meant, no doubt, that theologically God was in all of us and that he felt one with God: “You have manifested yourself so much that it seems to me that there is only You in me!” But the orthodox viewed statements like these as the deepest heresy. Al Hallaj was put on trial in Baghdad, and executed after horrific public tortures.

Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons “who believe in no other eternal being but the universe.” When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, “The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.

True Pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the late seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death.

Heraclitus mocked conventional religious belief, and held that the cosmos was its own maker and creator: “The Cosmos was not made by gods nor men, but always was, and is, and ever shall be, ever living fire, igniting in measures and extinguishing in measures.

Think of some part of nature that you love – a particular forest, say. Do you expect the forest to love you back? Does it worry you that the forest cannot love you back? Does it make you love the forest any the less?

The Universe is our creator. We are made of star stuff. Our hydrogen and much of our helium emerged in the first few minutes after the big bang, the rest of our elements were forged by fusion inside stars, strewn across space in novae and supernovae, and transformed into heavier elements in successive star generations. Finally they were regathered in our solar system providing the elements that allowed life to evolve.

We are conscious observers of the universe. Even if the universe as a whole possesses no consciousness, we do. In this sense we can be said to be a part of the consciousness of the universe, or of its self-consciousness.

Pantheism is atheistic towards the gods of all traditional religions. It does not believe in any separate creator, or in a personal judging God. Many pantheists of a physicalist bent agree with atheists that all phenomena are a part of nature. They do not believe there are any supernatural beings or spirit realms, and that if any currently unexplained phenomena such as extra-sensory perception should eventually be established as real, they will operate through natural physical forces.