Does God exist? A philosophical debate

from conan - Wednesday, March 26, 2008
accessed 509 times

I thought about posting this under 'creative writing', but know that no one reads anything there anymore. I don't really care what any of you think about this as it was submitted to my professor of philosophy, and in this scenario, his is the only opinion that matters. However, feel free to post comments, thoughts, criticisms, etc...as I'm sure many of you will do. I've removed the footnotes, and citations from here, but rest assured that they existed when I turned this in.

Does God Exist?
A question that has been around for as long as people have followed religion or found reason to believe and claim that there was god, is ‘Does God exist?’ Clearly, there is no easy answer to this age-old query, but using the texts read throughout the semester to date, I will, in the proceeding pages, attempt to show the reasons behind the belief I hold that God does not exist.

Ignoring for a this paper, the notion of science and its role in proving or disproving religion, one must first realize the fundamental ideal that belief is required in any god, religion, dogma, philosophy, and how those relate to a specific set of morals or way of life. As a result of belief, arguing with ‘proof’ is often a misnomer and one that is redundant and cyclically irrelevant. One can concede the fact that no substantial proof to support their side of the claim exists, yet still cling zealously to the cause they champion due to the illusions of their belief.

For me, the reasons to believe there is a god require far more ‘faith’ in fantastic events and scenarios than not. The broad assumptions made by ‘believers’ to defend their faith make less and less sense the more one thinks about them logically. Their defenses often break down in the face of logical arguments and they are forced to rely on their faith and ‘personal experience’ as the sole means of clinging to their argument, as faith is something that cannot be argued away in their close-minded belief system. Many are trained to immediately dismiss questions regarding the authenticity of their faith as an ‘attack’ and immediately shut down any honest, open-minded listening approach as they perceive themselves immediately as being victimized and so must ‘stand-up for their faith’ and prove to the agnostic that their faith is unflappable, so much so that they refuse to engage them. The ability to disengage oneself and analyze logically the set of divine teachings and assume, even momentarily, that the writings may not in fact be divine is often severely lacking in those of faith.

Kai Nielsen, in his Reflections on Disbelief , argued against the existence of God by attempting to show the error in the Christian ideology that is often cited by its adherents as their ‘proof’ in God’s existence and benevolence, specifically the flaw in using ‘revelation’ as a reliable source of God’s actuality. As many philosophers and scholars have often maintained, including Descartes, the five senses can often trick the mind into believing sights, sounds, etc., which do not in fact exist in reality. These facts of chemical and or psychological fallibility alone are enough to dismiss revelation as ‘divine’, especially if the divinity has only manifested itself to an individual who in turn proclaims him or herself as the messenger of God(s).

Further, he attacks St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which argues in favor of God’s existence by showing that the existence (or lack thereof) of a God is not dependant on our ability to comprehend such a being. The ability to conceive of eternal beings does not validate their existence merely because we can conceptualize such notions . We see imaginations run wild every day in our modern lives, via film, television, and other forms of art. The fantastic creations we ‘see’ on screen are no more tangible to us or believable as being in existence unless we allow our minds to convince us that they are. This same delusional pattern can be attributed to the religious zealot that they have ‘seen salvation’ and follow blindly in their quest to adhere to the guidelines given them by deities and their angelic messengers. Meanwhile, the gullible are all to eager to have a cause to rally around and follow, as without such a cause, they would fall into melancholy dissatisfaction owing to the precept that they need to serve some purpose greater than their own to be deemed worthy of life.

Meanwhile, “cosmological” arguments such as that of St Thomas Aquinas’ are equally faulty when they attempt to ascertain God’s existence via claims of “(a) God must exist or (b) God is the best explanation” which seems to me to be not dissimilar to Anselm’s argument that God exists because we can conceive of him, or even Pascal’s ‘wager’ that there is little risk involved with believing in God and being found eventually to have been in error. This childish notion of ‘best available option’ or ‘safest bet’ has no standing except in the adherents’ minds. The thought process that enables this logic to materialize seems to me to have been derailed somewhere between logic and reality and drifted of its own accord into fantasy, delusion, and errant simplicity.

In the third part of Kai Nielsen’s Reflections on Disbelief he speaks of ‘entitlement and just deserts’ within the Christian faith and the “pie in the sky” underlying philosophy of that religion. He says: “the hope for a classless and truly human society, through an ideological conjuring trick, has been projected into some peculiar never-never land called Heaven. What we have here is a disguised ideologically distorted expression of genuinely human emancipatory interests and enduring human hopes. ” What is somehow lost in the debate over whether or not there is a God in existence is the human ideology of equality that somehow is only attainable in a post-mortal state. It is the result of humankind’s continued aggression against itself that lends these ideas any relevance whatsoever.

Religious leaders continue to ballyhoo about how one day, after we are all dead and have gone on to a secondary existence, we will all just get along at the behest of an almighty God. Yet these same religious speakers of divinity continue to rail against the ‘unbeliever’ and how they will ‘burn forever in hell lest they repent’, failing to see the irony of their own belief system of equality and justice after death, yet preaching hate, fear, and a caste system of piety whilst still in this existence. How the mind can logically follow this ideal, and still maintain the validity of their divine creator and its benevolence is almost tragically amusing. Nielsen concludes, that we should recognize this ‘heavenly swindle’ for what it is; “brilliant inspiration…effectively pacifies the masses, deflecting them from the struggle to achieve their actual liberation…as our concept of God is enriched, our concept of man is impoverished”

We must find a way to make these religious ideals a goal for our lifetime, and not worry so much about fulfilling the dream of a classless, egalitarian, postmortem existence. If we, as a society, cared about humanity as much as we claim to care about our religious interests, we could subject ourselves to a better coalescence and existence while setting our collective passions on solving more pressing concerns for the survival of our species physically, not in the metaphorical, hypothetical, religious, life-after-death sort of way many currently do.