Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

multiple ways and it’s the splits in the world that reveal a lot of the more intricate philosophical views that have been discussed in earlier chapters. The universe maybe One, but we see it as ‘The Many’, and this is arguably the greatest of all paradoxes as we seek to understand what the world all about.

The Nature of God

A belief in God is really an argument for a split in the world. Even for a God who is ‘immanent’ — that is, present in all things — it’s difficult to escape from this splitting up of the world. Belief in God gives us the ultimate split into a mysterian version of truth. Here, not only is everything of importance happening on the mysterian side of the split, but the mysterian — that is, God — is fully in command of what’s happening in the real world. The real world might just be an illusion (the ‘idealism’ that was considered in earlier chapters) but, with God, this view takes on a different form. It’s God that creates the illusions of reality in our minds. With so much at stake then it’s important to ask, what can be understood of God?

We can make a distinction, I think, between what we might call the ‘philosophical God’ and the God or gods of various religions. A philosophical God is not necessarily one whom people worship. God, in the philosophical sense, is given rather as an explanation of the way the world is. There’s some overlap, of course, as many religions also want to provide explanations of the world, and not simply a context for worship. But the distinction is an important one, nonetheless.

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