Nautilus

The Case for Cosmic Pantheism

by Mary-Jane Rubenstein Aug 28, 2017 4 minutes

Einstein, a professed pantheist, wrote that he experienced a “cosmic religious feeling,” a persistent awe at the “sublimity and marvelous order” of the universe. He was not alone.Credit: Internet Archive

Aren’t those opposites?” people often ask me, when they discover I study science and religion. As a professor of religious studies, I am particularly drawn to the places where religion and science seem antagonistic, but turn out to be entwined. The multiverse, I would argue, is one of those places. This may come as a surprise, because the multiverse is so often used as an argument against the existence of God.

The multiverse hypothesis has been around since the late 1950s, but it gained traction in the late 1990s when physicists

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