God-Nature Progressing: Natural Theology in German Monism

Abstract

ArgumentDuring the 1860s Ernst Haeckel, German zoologist and one of the foremost popularizers of Darwinism, proposed a natural philosophy called “Monism.” Based on developmental thinking, natural selection, and sound natural laws, the scientific Weltanschauung of Monism was to supersede Christian religion in all its accounts of nature. Haeckel's new scientific religion, this essay argues, fused the religious joys of reveling in the beauty of “mother nature” with the assurance of progress based on scientific certainty. Even though Haeckel and his followers polemicized against dualistic and teleological interpretations of nature, and despite their fierce struggle against the Christian churches, Monism cannot conceal its roots. All central arguments of natural theology reappear – albeit sometimes in causal or reductionist phrasing. Haeckel's aesthetics of nature in particular shows his indebtedness to the concept of a divine economy of nature. His Monism is an evolutionary and pantheistic natural theology.

Pantheism, Panentheism, and Ecosophy: Getting Back to Spinoza?

“…According to Haeckel (1893), Spinoza (with Bruno and Goethe) formulated the "most perfect system of pantheism," since they perpetuate the ideas of "cosmic oneness" and of "connection of […] spirit and matter-or […] of God and world." Such ideas sustain, at the same time, the Haeckelian cosmological and naturalistic religious vision, so much so that we could define his monism as "an evolutionary and pantheistic natural theology" (Kleeberg 2007). Thus, Haeckel's pantheism "must support a monist view of God and the world" (Wood 1985, 152).…”

Monism in Indian philosophy: the coherence, complexity, and connectivity of reality in Śaṃkara's arguments for Brahman

“…Thus, a key factor in Vedānta's differentiation of the divine Brahman from the non-divine materials of other schools seems to have been its self-evolving, self-structuring, supercausal status. One is tempted to say that here, as Kleeberg (2007, 558–559) says of Haeckel's German monism, that ‘God = The Law of Causality – an immanent version of divine providence . .…”

Ludwig Edinger: The Vertebrate Series and Comparative Neuroanatomy

“…He was an atheist and a proponent of monist pantheism, founding a society devoted to the promotion of this philosophy. He saw biological processes as the outgrowth of blind mechanistic physical laws (Bowler, 1996;Kleeberg, 2007;Gliboff, 2008;Richards, 2008). In his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen [General Morphology of Organisms] he wrote that "We see in Darwin's discovery of natural selection .…”