Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

God, as a concept in philosophy, is nevertheless highly perplexing. Put yourself in God’s shoes for a moment. What if you were God? What if you had unlimited power?

If you were an interventionist God and performed one miracle, aren’t you then compelled to do a few other miracles? And once these ones are out of the way, would there not be further miracles needed to tidy up the effects of the previous ones?

The problem seems to be that once you start off on the interventionist track, then with each new intervention there is a little less free choice for those of us who are the creation of this God. And if intervention had to go on and on then eventually the loss of freedom would become absolute.

It is the classic dilemma of religion — or at least one of them.

There’s another dilemma for God that is somewhat related to the interventionist problem.

Let’s just say, as discussed above, that things started off with The One — the Perfect Being, we could say, complete unto itself. The One is completely inscrutable. Everything and Nothing, Eternal and Infinite yet timeless and dimensionless. And so on and on. There is really no statement about The One that makes any sense. But now, think about the created world. There needs to be two or more things in order for there to be difference in things. There

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