Chapter 3
The nature of reality
Are there two kinds of realities or is there just one? Is there a perceptible physical world and an imperceptible but mentally explorable metaphysical world?
I intuit that there is only a perceptible physical world around us and there is God, an imperceptible personal force that encompasses our physical reality and that we don't have permanent sensory access to. What classical philosophy refers to as metaphysics is inside our head and is part of our perceptible physical world. The title of this book uses metaphysics in this sense.
The assertion that God is personal means that the God-part of reality cannot be detected, explored, measured or even conceptualised, because God is an ever-moving, ever-changing reality that interacts with us all the time but that we cannot interact with at will. Our two-way communication with God is controlled most of the time by God. Using William of Ockham's intellectual parsimony rule, we should seek the most economical explanations to phenomena, i.e. intentianally leave God out of our practical models of reality. Not because that's necessarily the "truth", but because that's the most practical solution to the problems we seek to solve. We want to make Earth a better place and we don't want to enlist God as a physical team member to do the job for us.
This means that we treat the subject of God with respect and reverence, but we don't think God should perform our daily chores. We deal with God in our model of reality only to the extent that God impacts on our daily life. In other words, we don't seek to know or phychoanalyse God personally, and only explore the God-phenomenon as an integral part of our life on Earth. This basically restricts God's presence in our model to morality, where God or something God-like turns out to be indispensible.
Though I personally believe in God, for the purposes of philosophical discourse I do not assert that God (doesn't) exist. I only assert that the assuption of a God-like entity lies at the heart of our morality and should be explored only as a core component thereof. For our purposes, God is like Harry Potter wearing the cloak of invisibility: we won't chase invisible Harry around the world hoping to find out all about him this way, instead, we limit our study to the points where he comes in contact with our visible reality. Even there, we accept that we can't really tell if our visible objects changed because of invisible Harry or for some other reason. We are simply not in a position to even conclude that invisible Harry exists, at best we can only intuit it or make an educated guess about his existence.
As for the physical world, the best way to explore it is science, rather than faith. As for morality, the best way to describe it is also science, and not faith. As for God, the best way to approximately understand God is faith through studying revealed (or supposedly revealed) religious texts seriously, in the absence of anything else to rely on. Where revealed information contradicts our scientific data about the physical world, science should take precedence. Where revelead moral rules contradict our scientific rules of conduct... Wait a minute: there are no scientific rules of conduct, hence no contradiction is possible there. Moral rules can only be declared authoritatively. God either exists and revealed supreme moral rules to us, or we need a God-like figure and accept its authority in order to prosper as a community.
In short: we study the physical world and human behaviour through science, but we respect revealed moral rules and limit our study to the role they play in our behaviour and our world. We do not dedicate scientific efforts to the study of God, because we realise that an imperceptible and ever-changing personal force cannot be studied methodically.
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