Religion

“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,

Gravity enveloped the whole Cosmos with its embrace. What many people don’t know and schools don’t teach is that, to Newton, gravity was inseparable from God.

He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we

Galileo and Newton appeared to have removed God from these everyday workings of the world, explaining it instead as the clockwork of a vast machine of impersonal force and mass, but even they still needed the Clockmaker to wind it up in the beginning, to imbue the universe with the potential energy that has run it ever since.