Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Here’s what I mean. Say you read a Bible passage. It is obscure, but you feel in your heart that God has a personal message for you within the text. God makes it very clear to you what that message is. Now, I’d argue, you face a similar situation to everyone else on Earth. Given what I know, what should I do? So what are you going to do with the knowledge God has given you?

This is not to disparage those of religious faith. It is just to point out that life is not necessarily made any simpler by faith — in fact faith may make things a whole lot more complicated.

A belief in God — either the philosophical or the more religious kind — leads us into tricky questions. If, for instance, we asked some innocent question like why is the sky blue, the answer might be, because God made it that way. But you’ll see that this probably just leads to a further why question. The God answer, whilst it may indeed be true, has not delivered us with very much information. It has, if you like, just been a step on the way — if anything, adding complexity to our questions rather than solving them.

There’s a couple of views of God though that lead us into our further discussions in this chapter — the views of ‘pantheism’ and ‘panpsychism’.

Pantheism is the idea that the universe is God. We are, if you like, immersed in God, and any question of what exists ‘outside’ of God or the universe is just nonsensical. In many ways this is a satisfying idea. Non-believers can just refer

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