That is, according to pantheism, an umbrella term for a set of beliefs that suggest God did not create the universe—but that God is the universe. After all, a pantheist, by definition, rejects the idea of God as something transcendent, something greater than the universe, something personified. And today, physicist and consciousness researcher Nicolas Kuske, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute in France, has advanced the controversial theory. Kuske proposes that the universe is conscious and that it possesses a sense of purpose—that it is divine. If every entity has some degree of subjective experience and intention—every pebble, every atom—is that enough to call everything in the universe divine?