21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

value-free version of the physical universe, built from the ground up, as it were, with blind force and a few varieties of elementary particles has become commonplace. But our lives are lived in direct opposition to this view. Our experience of the world is a highly subjective one and very much defined by value. Life, as it is lived, is all about choosing and valuing. How very different things look if the universe is thought of as having said ‘yes’ to life — as a choice and not just as an accident. I think that this makes the universe always on the ‘half-full’ side of things, weighted to the positive. It is not the bland, valueless, morally-neutral, entropy-burdened and indifferent place sometimes portrayed to us, with consciousness perceived as a mere by-product of matter. How different the world might look, for instance, if we believed that our essential nature, our essence or soul, stands somehow outside of our everyday selves. Compare this with the idea that we are just the product of genetic information provided by our parents, perhaps with some random differences that cannot be accounted for. Both views are an act of faith, and it is only our culture’s bias towards a scientific world view that might make us favour the materialist version over the more mystical one.

We saw in an earlier chapter how regarding ‘God’ as an ‘object’ (that is, a fully transcendent ideal) brings difficulties. But to regard God as a subject also leads to problems. It leads to the very difficult questions that so-called ‘unbelievers’ often pose of religion. For instance, why does a good God allow evil to exist? In trying to make God into a person or at least somehow knowable, religion has actually

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