571. We are a game God plays.

 I do not believe in God, at most as a prime mover setting one or more universes going. He had his Big Bang, or several of them. I have been trying to read Schelling, 1775-1854, who tried to reconcile freedom with God. I could not understand him, and the following. phantasy is the best I can make of it. It sounds crazy, but philosophy is always phantasy claiming reality.

 A theory of God as making the world as it is leaves no freedom. Everything is predestined. Spinoza’s God of a principle from which everything follows, so that He is in everything, also makes us robots, which Spinoza presented as inevitable as logical deduction.

 If Man is free, next to good there is also bad, Schelling argued. Here follows the way I can imagine of combining God with freedom. He wanted to set the world going to see what comes out of it. Creation is an experiment. With the laws of nature and the potential and evolution of Man and nature interaction between them yielded something unpredictable, at times impressive and beautiful, but on the whole we made a mess of it.

 Man made systems, technical and social, which need rules, but those limit freedom, and so humanity strangles the world, destroying nature and itself. Is there a universe where the two can be reconciled? We are continually trying to do that, with a minimum of rules, allowing for some individual freedom. In a capitalist society, however, a paucity of rules yields economic inequality, which we try to limit. But as society becomes more complex, it needs more rules. I hope that in some universe this is avoided, but I fear this can only be done in an authoritarian system, with little freedom, or chaos, where the strongest win, in a society as predicted by Hobbes, which ended up in control by an authoritarian leader, called ‘Leviathan’ by Hobbes.

 Another view is that of Kierkegaard, who distinguished a general ethic, in a form that applies to everyone, in morality, and a personal ethic of conviction, if necessary against morality, which finds its inspiration in God.

 Levinas rejected the existence of God after his family was killed by the Nazis. But he saw ‘the face of God’ in the ‘face of the other’ human being. Religion turns into relation But demanding unconditional dedication to the single other, Levinas ran into the problem of recognising justice for all.

  

Schelling, F.W.J. 2022, Philosofische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhȁngingen Gegenstande, Dutch translation Amsterdam: Boom.