n alter-ego of Manuel and he is not a fool in reality. In reality he can comprehend the truth of the two Valverdes de Lucerna, “the one at the bottom of the lake and the one reflected on its surface” (de Unamuno 176).
The history of the world is centered on the debate between faith and reason. While Manuel is constantly devoted to his reflection regarding God versus reality (faith versus truth), he does not, unlike the townspeople, view God as a mystical, unknowable, external force. He views religion for what it is-a social phenomenon produced to give comfort to those who cannot accept the existential reality and as a political tool to keep people repressed from critical thinking about the true nature of life. In fact, Nature is the God in Manuel Bueno’s reality. Just like the author who created him he understands man’s creation of the illusion of God to make life more bearable in the face of existential reality is secondary to the truth of nature’s power, “Although Unamuno is obsessed by the ideas of God and immortality in his poems and essays, religion plays only a minor role in his novels…Ideology has little importance in the face of the forces of race, maternity and Nature; religion is only part of one’s inherited culture, not something which can be subjected to reason or question” (Catholic Atheist 1).
Manuel and de Unamuno seem to understand Michael Alper’s contention in The God-part of the Brain that the internalized belief in God most people cling to is, in reality, only an elaborate physical/functional/organic/evolutionary/cognitive/scientific mechanism left over in modern consciousness because it was developed in us genetically in order to allow simple, uneducated beings to accept the mortal nature of reality and the unconscious nature of eternity. Alper contends that because of our sheer terror in confronting the existential dilemma when we had a primitive understanding of our own nature and ...