What if the Universe is All in God’s Head?
Testing the merits of naturalism and metaphysical idealism
Maybe the best way to explain consciousness — and indeed the only way to take it seriously — is to assume that nothing else exists.
Maybe only conscious minds and their mental contents are real, and what seem like material things such as our bodies are just contents within minds. The external world would have been real even before our species came along because it was all contained in the greatest mind of all, God’s. And we too and everything else would be figments of God’s imagination.
Metaphysical idealism to the rescue
This was George Berkeley’s infamous metaphysical idealism, and Prudence Louise defends it as a viable “spiritual” worldview.
Berkeley saw an opening for theism in empiricism since empiricists say knowledge is built up from sense experience. We may hypothesize that matter exists, but all we know directly are our sense impressions, and those are conscious states. So why not propose a competing, simpler hypothesis, namely mystical monotheism? According to that view, God is the ultimate reality, not matter. God’s magic then takes care of everything else.
