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Hartmann
There are three fundamental illusions about the value of life. The first illusion is that “Happiness is attainable in the present stage of development of the world” (573). This is an illusion,
All religion, Hartmann declares, must have a pessimistic starting point, with reflection on the origins of evil and suffering (87, 115).
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The proper form of religious belief—and the best theory of the value of life—should therefore be a synthesis of what Hartmann calls “eudemonic pessimism” and “evolutionary optimism”, where the former is the thesis that happiness is unattainable in this life, and where the latter is the thesis that we can make moral and cultural progress in history. It is the belief in evolutionary optimism, in progress in history, that Hartmann saw as characteristic of the Western world, and as having no place in any of the oriental religions (Judaism, Islam and Buddhism). But it is just this belief, he insisted, that we must defend if we are to have a sense for the value and meaning of life in the modern world.
It is another great advantage of pantheism, Hartmann contends, that it can provide a foundation for ethics. Ethics, he insists, cannot be separated from metaphysics. An ethics without metaphysics simply “hangs in mid air” (84). Moral principles require that we surrender the claims of egoism, that an individual cease to put self-interest first, and that he or she recognize the equal claims of others. Pantheism satisfies this requirement, Hartmann argues, because it is a form of monism, according to which the identity of each individual is connected with that of everyone else, and according to which all particular individuals are really only one self (84, 116-17). One individual cannot harm another, then, without also harming his deeper and better self.
Hartmann is convinced that there is a better solution to the crisis, a middle path between the dilemma of atheism or theism: spiritual pantheism. Pantheism avoids the anthropomorphisms of theism because its God is an impersonal universal substance; and it escapes materialist naturalism because it sees nature not as matter in motion but as a purposive organic whole. Pantheism not only fulfils the dreams of the mystics but it is also a strictly rational religion (116). Unlike theism, which believes in miracles and the supernatural, there is nothing irrational or supernatural about pantheism, which identifies the divine with the single universal substance that manifests itself in the laws of nature.
Free enquiry or criticism has undermined theism in two ways: first, it has questioned the belief in the authority of the Bible, which has been the main source of evidence for theism; and, second, it has shown that the personal attributes of God are anthropomorphic projections, hypostasizations of forms of human consciousness.