THE WORLD AS RELIC

forthcoming, Routledge

Recent psychological research suggests that contact with nature—walking in forests, sitting beside streams—offers profound benefits to our well-being. This is hardly surprising. As many of us will readily admit, we often find our engagements with nature to be not only rejuvenating but charged with a kind of spiritual significance. It seems plausible, however, that the depth and character of that significance will depend on what the world is actually like, metaphysically speaking. 

To illustrate, imagine finding out some old sketch hanging on your wall has been, all this time, a page from the notebooks of Leonardo Davinci. I presume finding this out would lead you to appreciate the sketch in a new and deeper way, and to value it to a far greater degree. An otherwise identical sketch, made by some random person, would not be nearly so valuable. It seems that just being made by Leonardo would add enormous value to the sketch.

With this example in mind, consider how theists understand the relation between God and the world. They think God made the world. And God would be incomparably greater than Davinci. All the more, the theist might think, God’s having made the world would add great value to it, and would give us a new and deeper way of appreciating the things around us, especially in the natural environment.

What’s more, the pantheist thinks the world is God, and the natural objects around us are parts of God. If true, this too would seem to change the significance of our engagement with nature. In touching an acorn, you are literally touching God, just as one touches a cat by touching a part of the cat.

On the other hand, many atheists dislike the idea of God’s existence because they think God would limit our autonomy in undesirable ways. For such atheists, being surrounded by things made by God, or by things that are parts of God, might not be such a good thing. It might reasonably be experienced as making God’s infringement on our autonomy all the more vexing. Thus, whether the world being made by God would add value to our lives is at least complicated. The World as Relic explores these complications, and maps the ways God’s existence would or would not make our lives go better by way of His relations to the natural world.