Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

God intervenes on some occasions and not others.

There is however another idea which can be put forward here. It seems like a simple yes or no question to ask whether God exists. But perhaps this is a mistake. The question just assumes a certain traditional view of what God might be like — it assumes that God is a thing or a person. The question: ‘is there a God?’ then becomes too simplistic. The distinction between ‘God’ and ‘not God’ is as arbitrary as the distinction between ‘believer’ and ‘unbeliever’. If a broader view of the concept of God were to be taken, then maybe the question just becomes an irrelevance. It would be like a fish trying to decide on the existence of water. Perhaps the universe is just an experience that some choose to call God and others not. Maybe then some common ground could be found between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. In this sense, everyone is a believer, because everyone is part of life.

Somehow, attributes such as goodness and beauty seem to reach us from beyond ourselves. If the need to attach these attributes to a Person could be set aside, then perhaps this is a positive step. Life has these qualities and they arise intrinsically, rather than from a supernatural being.

Schopenhauer alluded to grace in his writing but he didn’t explain the source of this grace and it doesn’t relate too well to his descriptions of the noumenon. In fact, both Schopenhauer and Plotinus, as we saw earlier, had a rather negative take on the noumenon/the One. But

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