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Christian environmental ethics have always navigated the thin line between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of deism. On the one hand, removing God from the world avoids pantheism but can inadvertently render the divine a distant, absentee father who cares little about what we do with the environment. On the other hand, if we bring the Creator too close to creation, we may begin to blur the distinction between them, fringing on pantheism. While making nature divine might at first seem to heighten the environmental desecration of the earth by making it a literal de-sacralizing of the sacred, this may be only a surface-level reading (or, at least, only true of very carefully nuanced versions of pantheism). For the pantheist, God would not just be the trees but the machines that log them; God would not just be the polar bears but the carbon dioxide that is evicting them. God would be no more present in that which is desecrated than in that which does the desecration (e.g., God would be one with the pesticides, bulldozers, and factory smoke). By making God everything, it becomes difficult to call any person, act, legislation, or event godless. This paper offers Henry More’s view of divine space as a constructive, Platonic Christian middle way between these two extremes, charting a God who is spatially present to nature without being pantheistically reducible to it, in the same way that space is intimately close to the objects within it while nonetheless remaining distinct from them. The bulk of the paper counters potential opponents to this proposal, specifically defending Morean space from the charge that it would break down the Creator–creature distinction and/or cave to the environmental Scylla of pantheism. Full article

Locke contended that knowledge is learned from experience, taught from without rather than innately known from within. The notion of innate ideas has since been seen by many as innately ridiculous, as a battle long ago waged and won in the first book of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. However, there was no fight in the first place, for the most comprehensive defence of innate ideas in the 17th century was not published until the 18th century. Ralph Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was published posthumously nearly fifty years after its writing, and while Locke and Cudworth wrote on similar subjects—and around the same time and place—the fates never aligned for them to meet and ‘have it out’. This paper places Locke and Cudworth into conversation on this question of innate ideas. Such analysis will reveal that Cudworth sidestepped much of Locke’s critique by hanging his argument not on universal consent but on the Platonic principle of like-knows-like. In the process, Cudworth anticipated many of the responses to Locke that would come in the next century from Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Thus, his forgotten role in this narrative in the history of philosophy cries out for reappraisal, along with the renewed insights he might bring to the on-going contemporary discussion. Full article