Don't pan pantheism

I've noticed that popular Christian writers have a habit of making the most outrageous arguments against "pantheism" (roughly, the idea that everything is part of God).[1] I'm no pantheist, but I've long felt that many of these arguments miss the mark.

For example, it's often argued that pantheism destroys any distinction between good and evil. Consider the following passages from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton:

The Pantheist (at least of the popular kind) says, we are 'parts' of [God], or are contained in Him. […] Because of this fatal picture Pantheism concludes that God must be equally present in what we call evil and what we call good and therefore indifferent to both. (Lewis 1996, p. 135)

There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another. (Chesterton 1909, p. 247)

The basic idea is this. According to pantheism, everything is part of God. Therefore, if pantheism is true, then God must approve of all things equally—in which case, the things that we consider evil are not really evil.

I'm not sure how this argument originated, but there's nothing in it. From the claim that all things are part of God, it does not follow that God approves of all things. An organism need not approve of all of its cells; some of them may be cancer cells, after all. I see no reason why a pantheist could not hold that God is made up of everything and that some things—namely moral agents—are capable of acting contrary to God's will.

It's also argued that if pantheism is true, then genuine love is impossible between humanity and God. As G.K. Chesterton says in his characteristically lyrical prose:

Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. […] The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity [Brahman?] is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. […] Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be a man to love him. (Chesterton 1909, pp. 245-46) 

Again, I'm not sure where this is coming from. Suppose that my cells were intelligent enough to have personal relationships. Couldn't there be genuine love between me and my cells? Likewise, couldn't there genuine love between humanity and God even if humans were  parts of God?

Besides, Christian writers are the last people who should be claiming that unity between X and Y rules out love between X and Y. On this point, I will quote the Zen popularizer Alan Watts:

The notion that any identity of the Creator and creature makes a fundamental “I-Thou” relationship of love between the two impossible is untenable for any believer in the Holy Trinity. How, then, could there be mutual love between God the Father and God the Son, since both, though different, are yet one God? (Watts 1971, Preface)[2]

References: 

Chesterton, Gilbert K. Orthodoxy. NY: John Lane, 1909.

Lewis, C.S. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. NY: HarperCollins, 1996.

Mascaró, Juan. The Upanishads. London: Penguin, 1965.

Watts, Alan. Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion. NY: Random House, 1971.

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[1] Of course, there are different kinds of pantheism. As far as I can tell, the term is most commonly used to refer to the idea that everything is part of God or that God is the "soul of the universe" (as the Stoics held). That is the version of pantheism that I discuss in this blog post. Certain forms of Hinduism teach a different kind of doctrine that might be called pantheism, in which God (Brahman) is the true Self (atman), the experiencer of every organism's experiences: "What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think […] What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see […] What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear" (Kena Upanishad 1.6-8, trans. Juan Mascaró).

[2] Sorry, I don't have a hard copy of the book on hand at the moment, and Google Books doesn't show the page numbers for this book.