Yet many modern pantheists do not agree with Spinoza on this. Modern pantheism does not believe in any creator or personal God outside nature and the universe. Scientific pantheism does not believe in any spirit or soul of the universe. Scientific pantheism accepts that only the material universe exists - but has a religious reverence for it and for nature. In other words, pantheism does not believe in the type of God that atheism attacks any more than atheism itself does.
Pantheism is just as scientific, and scientific pantheism is just as materialist, as atheism.
The only real difference is that pantheists have strong feelings of reverence, awe, love and sense of belonging to nature and the universe, and they wish to express those feelings through meditation, ceremony, and ethical action. Pantheists don't just want to be negative about Gods and heavens beyond this world. They want to be enthusiastically positive about this life, this earth, this universe. Hume was a leading philosopher of the British empiricist school, expounding his philosophy in A Treatise on Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding . His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , written during the 1750s, contain some of the most telling critiques of theism ever devised.