  One of the strongest and most commonly raised objections to pantheism is that it is simply inappropriate to call the universe ‘God’. Thus Schopenhauer complains that “Pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism,” for “to call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word world” (Schopenhauer 1851, I:114, II:99). It has been described as nothing more than ‘materialism grown sentimental,’ (Illingworth 1898, 69) while more recently Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion complains that “Pantheism is sexed-up Atheism” (Dawkins 2007, 40). It is clear that the more naturalistically the cosmos is conceived the stronger that objection must seem, but to estimate more carefully its validity the following six sections take in turn a number of characteristics which the cosmos possesses or might possess and which could be thought to make it divine. We may proceed from the least to the most contested, noting that not all pantheists will agree on all marks.