Pantheism and panentheism are two approaches to theism that either completely misrepresent the core of the philosophy or venture into the territory of inherent vagueness or details that contradict reason, not to mention sheer irrelevance to the first steps and most abstract truths about metaphysics. Though their names are similar, they are distinct enough to merit separate refutations. Whereas pantheism holds that God is synonymous with the entire universe and usually is never thought of in a way that even distinguishes between the universe and something as important as the laws of logic, panentheism holds that the universe (as opposed to other metaphysical existents like reason or the space that holds matter, not that panentheists are slightly likely to ever be as precise as is needed) exists inside God and that God is in the universe.
What the hell does it even mean for God to be "in" the universe without the universe being part of him? Either God is the universe (conventional pantheism), in which case theism actually is not true because there is not really a deity in existence and thus pantheism is a contradictory ideology, or God is separate from the universe but potentially omnipresent, which is the case with an uncaused cause. Even a single massive consciousness that inhabits every particle of matter would not be the same as the cosmos, but a mind that presides over it and inhabits is, so pantheism and panentheism fail on these fronts. The vital issue of the distinction between the universe and the laws of logic, time, space, human minds, and other provable or hypothetical things has also been completely ignored in every take on pantheism I have seen from others.
This issue aside, what cannot be true is the universe or any contingent thing that is not God's mind existing "in him," unless "in" him simply means "because of" him. The universe can metaphysically depend on God so that if he vanished from existence so too would the universe, but it cannot be true that the universe is literally within any mind because mind is not matter, the former being immaterial and the latter being physical. There is no world of matter if it is not outside of a consciousness, whether it is divine, angelic, human, or animal. The only kind of cosmos that exists within a consciousness is one that is an illusion of the senses or imagination. This is what panentheism reduces down to if God is thought of as truly being in the universe and the universe is thought of as being in God, yet this is not what panentheists appear to mean at all.
Pantheism is an asinine denial of the distinction between the uncaused cause and other things, especially the natural world it is often characterized as equating God with, and a philosophy that ultimately cuts off its own legs. If there is no distinction between God and nature or anything else, there would be nothing divine about the universe, human consciousness, or whatever else pantheism conflates God with. The only way pantheism could be true is if only God exists, and yet any physical matter that exists is outside of but dependent on God, reason is a set of necessary truths that do not depend on either God or matter, and so on. Panentheism is almost just as asinine.
With panentheism, there are related mistakes in metaphysical identification present that just have a slightly different setup. The difference is that pantheism wrongly equates distinct concepts and things while its counterpart with a similar name mistakes one thing for being "in" another just because it is caused by it. Both are erroneous, although panentheism, in more clearly referring to the universe itself instead of confusing the physical cosmos for literally everything that exists alongside God, has a lesser stupidity. Panentheism is more just a bizarrely flawed attempt to make something far less sophisticated than it is seem more philosophically deep, a somewhat misrepresentative exaggeration of the basic metaphysical dependency of matter on the uncaused cause, or something a person encounters with no ability to independently prove it with reason which emotional awe still drives them towards.
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