Sex and God

Sex and God

There has always been the feeling that there is some sort of tension between sex and God, as if sex were not quite his thing. He turns a blind eye to it, even though he is supposed to have created it. You definitely don’t have sex in church—that would be sinful. It is just about OK in marriage. I want to make a philosophical point, focused on Berkeley’s idealism. According to that view, so-called material objects are ideas in the mind of God—that’s what you see and feel when you deploy your senses. It is also what you act upon when (say) you kick a ball. But that means that when you have sex with someone you are really having sex with an idea in God’s mind; not with God himself, strictly speaking, because God is an infinite spirit not a collection of ideas, but definitely with the contents of his mind. These ideas are his, what constitutes his mental world; presumably, he allows them to be in there. He is complicit in the sex—he consents to it, engages in it. So, we all, animals included, have sex with a part of God. And his ideas also have sex with us: it goes both ways. Isn’t this group sex on a grand scale? Isn’t God amazingly promiscuous? But God can’t be promiscuous; therefore, Berkeley’s idealism must be false. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to claim that God and his ideas are separate things—as if they are just his body distinct from his spirit. But this is crazy. Sex refutes Berkeleyan idealism. The world must exist outside of God.