Question of the Month
Is There A God?
The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. The harvest was abundant, unsurprisingly; just sorry we couldn’t fit you all in. The votes were, loosely, Yes: 52%, No: 31%, and Don’t Know: 17%.
Michael Williams, Bolton, UK
No, the answer to the question will hinge on someone actually being able to demonstrate that a God, the God, my God does in fact exist.
But of course to the best of my current knowledge no one has. And as for the meaning of God…?
You tell me.
After all, it is just a word-sound the English speaking world invented to encompass what is thought to exist. There are even word-sounds for things that do not exist like unicorns and fire-spewing dragons.
So, in regard to love, does this coincide with your own meaning of God? Through faith in God [leaving aside proof of His actual existence] how would you encompass pure love? A love “beyond restriction”? And who is able to pin down given all of vast and varied human contexts one might imagine, where instinct and calculation end and a purer, more spiritual love begins?
Also, does hate exist “necessarily”? Doesn’t love that trips and stumbles over into any number of sets of convoluted existential variables often reconfigure into hate? And whose moral sense in regard to what set of conflicting goods?
In fact, how is this assessment not just one more “general description spiritual contraption” that simply shrugs off all of the conflicting ways in which each of us as individuals might come to embody his or her own subjective interpretation of love and morality?
Got that? No, of course not. But isn’t that really the whole point? God becomes a “necessary impossible” in much the same way that anything might be possible that you find it necessary to believe in. Possible because no one can prove He does not exist and necessary because who else are you going to turn to for a moral scripture on this side of the grave and immortality on the other side? And who wouldn’t want to go “beyond themselves” any number of times in this world?
And don’t we have any number of members here at ILP who have thought up spiritual tautologies to infer God into existence. And haven’t I acknowledged this need be as far as they go to make it true? For them, God does in fact exist “in their head.” And nothing those like me argue here is likely to change that.