Nothing is too foolish for clever people to entertain. This week, I was reminded of a nice man called Arthur Peacocke who, in 2001, won the million-pound Templeton prize. He gave it away, which was not at all foolish, but when I congratulated him, he took the opportunity to outline the notion of panentheism, which he embraced.
It is, he carefully explained, not pantheism, the idea that everything is God. It is, rather, the idea that everything is in God. He showed me a little diagram in a book he’d written. A big circle represented God. The universe, everything that there is, was represented by a smaller circle within it. Hey presto: panentheism.
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