Of Shakespeare, Berkeley, and God

George Berkeley, an English Philosopher, was an empiricist, to the extreme that he envisioned the world as a place in which existence required that an observer be conscious of the existent thing. In such a world, things are not perceived because they exist; they exist because they are perceived.

Of course, most people have difficulty with this idea because it seems to require that we give up on our early-acquired concept of object permanence; the idea that things don’t disappear when we turn our backs to them, and re-appear as soon as we can see them again. Berkeley maintained object permanence by his belief in God. If God is omniscient, seeing everything that exists at all times, then the room doesn’t vanish when we leave it. There is still a mind comprehending it’s existence, along with the existence of everything else in the universe.
This kind of idealism (by implication even though Berkeley was an empiricist), which ascribes ultimate reality to the sphere of the mind and understands physical reality as a kind of illusion or, if you will, a hologram projection of the contents of a supreme mental sphere, sometimes takes the shape of an analogy which is commonly used to help us understand the relationship between God and the world, particularly the relationship between divine predestination and human free will. The analogy is that of God as the author of a supreme narrative, in which human persons are characters. Shakespeare is to Hamlet what God is me. In this way, we can see a way in which human actions can be free and determined at the same time. Shakespeare has imagined and written down what Hamlet will freely choose to do. This is like Berkeley’s idealism in the sense that the world is understood as an emanation of the mind of God. Just as Shakespeare imagined worlds of characters interacting in a story, so God imagined our world and its characters, and imagined it into existence.

But here’s the question: is this a good analogy? In the large scope of things, does it help or hinder our understanding of reality? I am arguing the latter, for several reasons. The first has to do with the nature of the physical world. Of course, the universe and everything in it ultimately has it’s origin in the mind of God. That’s part of our understanding of God’s nature. He is the originator of all things; the One who has the power and authority to speak things into being out of nothing but his shear creative will. In that sense, the entire world is clearly dependant of God. But just how dependant is it? Absolute dependence implies that the world is ultimately a thought in a corner of God’s mind, and vanishes if he chooses not to think about it. If it is absolutely independent, then it exists whether or not God wants it to. A type of moderate dependance might entail that the world originated from God and requires his continual input and word of authority to have the right to exist, but that he has created it with a kind of built-in object permanence of its own.

Now of course, if God is omniscient, then if he is not cognitively aware of something, it does not exist. But this may be true in one of two ways. The first is that his awareness of say, a banana, is the active cause of the banana’s existence. The second is that the banana’s existence is the active cause of God’s awareness of it. God created bananas, but made them to have an objective existence on their own rather than exist as a figment of his imagination.

As I see it, the trouble with absolute dependence is this: it implies that God is either a sort of magician playing with smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of a real world which really just imaginary, or that he is simply too lazy to create a world with objective existence. When God created the world, he went so far as to call it very good. Would an imaginary world be as good as a real one? In a line of reasoning similar to Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, I might imagine a world that is much better than the real world, but I reason that because it is better, it must be real. That is not to say that everything I imagine must be real, but rather that the things which make it good, if they are really good, must derive from an ultimate reality of goodness. My imaginary world in which all things are as they should be is but an imperfect glimmer of the real world which God made and intended this world to be like. However, supposing that I lived in a colony somewhere in the depths of outer space and had never seen Earth, I might imagine it. In this case, my imagination of earth, if it was accurate to what Earth is really like, would not be as good as the real earth, for the very reason that it would be imagination and not real. Therefore, would not a world in God’s imagination be inferior to a real world which God had created? It seems that it is inherent in God’s infinitely good nature to create worlds that are real rather than simply entertain multiple imaginary figments. After all, one does a greater thing by inventing a car and then building it, than one who simply invents.

The second problem relates to God’s relationship with the characters in his master novel. After all, how can Shakespeare really have a relationship with Hamlet? Hamlet’s choices are free only when one imagines him as a real prince of a real Denmark, as Shakespeare intended his audience to do. As soon as we remember that he is really an imaginary character whose entire existence is confined to script, then any semblance freedom and ability to relate disappears. Now, it might be possible for Shakespeare to become furious with Macbeth and seek to punish him, or to fall in love with Juliet, but we would probably call that schizophrenia. Macbeth may deserve justice within his play, but to call him morally responsible in the same way in which we are, is insane.

The third, and probably greatest problem with God as an imaginative novelist has to do with both humankind and the physical world. If one follows the implications of this system seriously, he arrives at some version of pantheism. If all of creation is simply God’s imaginative activity, than we and the entire universe with us is nothing more than part of the mind of God: part of his very being. This not only destroys the distinction between creator and creation, but also the distinction between good and evil. Our actions, good or otherwise, are nothing but divine fantasies.

I may have a flawed understanding of the claims of this analogy, and of Berkeley’s idealism, I mean, empiricism. But I maintain that as we wait for a better world, a world for which we were created and is more real than we can even imagine, we must know that we too are real: our world, our choices, our relationships. We are made in the image of a real God who desires nothing less.