What is God?

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician, “E

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The word “God” is like a stick of dynamite. It remains valuable precisely because its utterance sets off such potent cultural and conceptual reverberations. Whitehead, in his own way, used it to name something at once tender and cosmic, intangible yet inescapable, the poet of the world who does not create the world from nothing but helps us make me... See more