What Is Real?

 

"Everything you can imagine is real”—Picasso

This quote appears on the cover of the latest issue of Verse Afire, a Canadian poetry journal.

The observation is self-evidently true. 

If you imagine a unicorn, for example, said unicorn is necessarily real, or you could not imagine it. The only question is whether it exists as a physical entity, or a spiritual entity: sensed, or imagined.

This is also the fastest and simplest proof of God: if he did not exist, you could not formulate the statement “Does God exist?” The question automatically answers itself.

You may object that by “exist,” you mean, does the thing exist independent of me thinking about it? Is its existence purely subjective?

Yes, God exists apart from your thinking about him, and unicorns exist apart from your thinking about them. Otherwise, when you say “God” or “unicorn,” your listeners would not know what you mean. Yet they immediately do. Moreover, you can stop thinking about unicorns, or God, and then, the next time you think of them, there they are again. It is just the same as with that chestnut tree down the street: you know that it exists objectively because others also see it, and because you can turn and look away, then look back, and it is still there. So too with unicorns.

In sum, the idea that things you imagine are not real is a primitive materialist superstition