God and/as the Universe

Abstract

I address the issue of what the role of the particular theoretical physical model of the Universe we inhabit should be in one's pantheistic or panentheistic theology, as this question is scarcely addressed in the traditional pantheistic or panentheistic views. Pantheists and panentheists do consider the God-Universe relation as crucial, but they do not delve into the physical theory, that is, into cosmology. This might be due to their thinking that the particular cosmology is not important as long as we have the general picture of how God is supposed to be related to the Universe. In this essay, I argue that as compared to the Big Bang model of the Universe, the more recent Big Bounce model, based on quantum cosmology, is more congenial to a naturalistic version of panentheism.