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Thank you so much for your post and your questions!

What are we to understand when you say reality is an illusion? What is the subject reality, and what do you mean when you it is illusion? Do you don't mean that it (whatever it is) deceives? How does it compare to Kant who thinks space is a category of rational intelligence and doesn't belong in empirical phenomena. Are we fair to say that whatever is not in our mind is illusory?

When Einstein said “reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” he was speaking of local realism. In his view, behavior at the quantum level should be like it is at the classical level. It is not however the same.

Non-locality (quantum entanglement) has been tested at 10 kilometers: measuring the quantum state of one of two or more entangled photons instantly determines the other regardless of spatial separation.

Superposition (Schrodinger’s cat) is another example of reality being an illusion. The cat is both alive and dead until a selection is made. But as Everett and others have suggested, both states (or all superimposed states) may actually exist in parallel universes (multi-world theories). You are reading the post. But another you who chose not to read the post also exists.

Another example – and, IMHO, what should be the most unsettling to all metaphysical naturalists – is that matter itself has never been created or directly observed. Matter consists of the ordinary (5%, Higgs field/boson required by the standard model), dark matter (25%, suggested by galaxy rotation) and dark energy (70%, dispersed through space/time causing acceleration of the universe). Physics has turned to geometry for new theories – including the possibility that the particles we observe in 4 dimensions are massless – and what we think is mass is actually a shadow of momentum in extra-dimensions. Further, the particles in 4 dimensions may be multiply imaged from as little as a single particle in an extra dimension.

Time is yet another issue. If we add one temporal dimension to the four dimensions then what is sensed as a line – or arrow of time – in four dimensions is actually a plane. Thus, physical causality and past/present/future can be moot from the aspect of a second temporal dimension.

These are some of the reasons physical reality may be a persistent illusion.

But the question you ask is much deeper and one which, IMHO, ought to be explored by everyone: what is reality?

The answer is no doubt very personal just like the question of how do you know what you know and how sure are you that you know it?

The two questions are related.

Certain knowledge to me is that which has been Spiritually revealed to me, personally. It doesn’t originate from within me or by sensory experience. Such Spiritual revelation is self-authenticating. Therefore, to me, reality is God’s will, which is unknowable in its fullness – and all other knowledge, including knowledge of reality itself, is relatively uncertain.

In Christianity, important thinkers have said sin is the inclination to non-being, and that idolatry occurs in the embrace of an illusion. This means illusion is instrinsic to thought, not reality.

The Spiritual revelation of which I speak comes from God alone – either by His direct revelation (Jesus Christ is Lord) or by His indwelling Spirit or by His bringing Scripture alive within or by His authenticating observations of the Creation. I personally eschew all of the doctrines and traditions of men - whether the Pope, Billy Graham, Calvin, Arminius, Joseph Smith, etc. The mortal scribes of Scripture do not belong to this category since the indwelling Spirit brings the words alive within as my eyes pass over the text, thus authenticating the Spirit as the true author.

Therefore, though the musings of important Christian thinkers, philosophers such as Kant, physicists such Einstein and Vafa, you and other posters on this forum - are all quite interesting to me – they are not Spiritual revelation. My own musings have the same uncertainty.

None of these mortal sources can be certain because the observer is part of that which is being observed.

Thus to me only God can reveal Truth and His will, which is reality (albeit unknowable in its fulness).

I really doubt that this is understanding is recognized every time you use the term illusion. Certainly we can't continue to call illusion the realization that our view of reality is partial. Or more generally, that our supposed unity implied in discreet knowledge (intentional it-reality) fails to adequate the character of the phenomena.

Perhaps it would be an illusion if the one perspective annuls the previous one. Kind of like an Hegelian aufhebung. But that is not the case. Newtonian physics holds--has not been demoted to illusion--even with the advent of quantum physics.

At the same time we see that between It and Thing we have reality, and to call reality illusion without making this distinction, we run into a muck. If we proceed to equate God's will with reality, we are liable to be careless in speaking of reality as illusion. It fails to take into account new knowledge.

Some care is really needed here.

With constant Hope,

Christianity is a revealed religion. It is not deduced from science, philosophy, theology or any other study. It is made know by a personal act of God to the knower. We can not find Christianity. We can not discover it. Any salient Christian truths come to us by spiritual enlightenment - the light of God shining in our spirits - and not by any effort, including reading scripture, attending church, being good or praying.
The knowledge derived from God's revelation must, of necessity, be incontrevertable truth. It can not be disputed since disputation is a function of intellectual discipline and spiritual revelation does not come by intellectual discipline.
For the scientist this is meaningless since the tools of science are not based in spiritual revelation. Or are they? Paul Tillich claimed that we must make a leap of faith into the unknown if we are to gain knowledge. The leap is made not in a spirit of chaos but of harmony. We leap because we have faith that we will land somewhere that is stable and sensible.
The scientist does precisely this. He leaps across a chasm of ignorance in the expectation that his actions (research) will drive ignorance furthur away. This act of faith is only possible because the scientist has been informed in spirit that reality will conform to his methodology.
There is no basis in science for proving the scientific method. It stands as a given, based on apriori assumptions about the nature of reality. These assumptions can only be subsumed under the category of spiritual enlightenment.
That spiritual truth is knowable is similarly coherent with a unity of the parts of creation and the creator. Principles, rules, reason and logic all comprise the noumena, and are an expression of that which is behind the nature of things.Kant differentiates between phenomenon, the thing itself, and noumena, the thought of the thing. the thing itself is unknowable except as noumena, the thought object.
Thinking is not phenomenological. Its derivation is in a realm of existence that we refer to as spiritual. The process of thought is not questioned in the scientific method. Thinking is assumed. This is the problem of the observer. The scientist's thought process is an unexamined given, a revelation. Science must be based on revelation else it is not in the universe.
Again and again, scientific materialism and humanist atheism are forced to come full circle to a starting point that only exists by virtue of God-consciousness. To deny the existence of God or to fail to consider God in the process of learning about the universe precludes the possibility of knowledge.