Issues on the Existence of God - Essay Example

Your full December 20, Theology God’s existence or non-existence has been a hot topic of theological debate since ages. Scientists have always been thinking how universe came into existence in the first place- whether there is a God up there who created all the things in the universe, or was it only a Big Bang that became the cause of the evolution of the universe. The debate is never-ending and will continue to hover over the minds of people until they are convinced to believe that there is someone super-natural and omnipotent who is mighty enough to create the world, the mountains, the rivers and oceans, the animals, and most of all, the human. This paper intends to discuss why would an intelligent mind believe or not believe in the existence of God, and what my opinion about the nature and existence of God is. A 90 minute debate was held in Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 03, 2007 between two Oxford University colleagues; an atheist and secular humanist, Professor Richard Dawkins, and a Christian apologist, Professor John Lennox. The topic of the debate was the existence of God based upon the atheistic views that Dawkins presented in his book, The God Delusion. In the debate, Dawkins explains his theses regarding the rejection of God’s existence saying that science is based on evidence-based grounds whereas faith is blind and is based merely on satisfactory beliefs and thus it drags humans to believe what is told in religion without the need of understanding and exploring. This makes us say that an intelligent mind believes that science does not support religion; rather, it supports rationalism or atheism. Marx conception of God’s existence is purely atheistic. He affirms that an intelligent mind must argue that the designer God, if there is one, must need another designer to design him. Freud does not believe in God and asserts that “the sooner one accepts that God does not exist, the better” (qtd. in McFaul 9) if one wants to step into mature adulthood. Christianity poses dangers to the existence of humans as all wars and destructions come as a result of the religious beliefs and difference in faiths. Dawkins explains an argument from his book, that is, faith is blind whereas science is evidence-based (92) in which he argues that faith is by no reasons strengthening its grounds in the 21st century when it has nothing to do with evidence. On the other hand, according to Dawkins, “science uses evidence to discover the truth about the universe” and scientific discoveries are based on research and investigation. Thus it is based on clear evidences and proofs and has “grown out of religious traditions”. The beauty and the complexity of the world make us want to worship something and thus we relate it to a creator, but “it is a supreme achievement of human intellect to realize that there is a better explanation” for the existence of universe- an explanation which blind faith is not able to give. Another argument that Dawkins explains from his book is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, that is, the designer is dead; otherwise, one must explain who designed the designer (113). An intelligent mind, like that of Freud’s, may explain this argument by saying that the creator of this universe and everything in it has to be as complicated as his creation, and if a complicated entity needs a designer to come into being, then the designer being complicated also needs a designer, and this process should go on to infinite times back. So, the question remains that- who made God? What is his origin? An intelligent mind argues that the existence of life on this earth has been designed by natural selection and evolution and, thus, the designer must have evolved through the same mechanism. Darwin explains life by elaborating the whole process of evolution of the mankind, and thus a creator designer cannot be a fulfilling clarification for the complex designing of the universe we live in. Now we analyze why an intelligent mind must believe in God. Feuerbach thinks of God as “the realized desire of the heart, lifted up to the certainty of its fulfillment and validity” (qtd. in Stockton 1990). Lennox supported this by his counter-arguments in the afore-mentioned debate about faith being blind and science being evidence-based. An intelligent mind argues that science is not able to answer the questions that come in a human being’s mind- Who am I? What is the purpose of my creation? Where am I going? Answers to these questions are taught by religion and faith in God. Science is not able to answer any of these questions. John Haught, like Feuerbach, asserts that faith develops religion, and theology puts forth logical arguments for everything happening around us and this is what atheists tend to ignore, and the faith of the existence of God cannot be related to science at all (91). Thus, an intelligent mind like that of Anselm’s and Thomas Aquina’s argues about the necessary existence of God and believes that the designer of the universe has not been created by anyone and is eternal. According to Anselm, the non-existence of God is impossible. Thomas Aquina argues that God created everything and is not created by anything. How can we negate God to be eternal? According to Haught, belief in the existence of God "claims that the story of life, even in its neo-Darwinian presentation, provides essential concepts for thinking about God and Gods relation to nature and humanity” and theology tends to show that “our new awareness of cosmic and biological evolution can enhance and enrich traditional teachings about God and Gods way of acting in the world" (36). Pascal developed his water argument to prove the existence of God, in which he claimed that reason cannot decide whether God exists or not. He says that one must choose with his own will whether or not to believe in God. So according to Pascal, “man must test truth with his heart, not with his mind” (qtd. in Fernandes 23). According to the ontological argument, as proposed by St. Anselm, it is self-contradictory for a person to believe that God does not exist. Believing in God’s non-existence is just about contradicting one’s own existence. The non-empirical nature of the ontological arguments gives us a clue that God exists. Just like when we talk about mother, we know that mother is a female; likewise, according to ontological arguments, when we argue about the concept of God, this means, implicitly and not explicitly, that God is there. Hence, ontological arguments reveal the fact that we can know about the existence of God from the very definition of God. According to the cosmological argument, we can attempt to prove that God exists by first proving that it is not possible that the existence of things in the universe have an infinite number of regressions of causes. In other words, there is an uncaused source that causes all things to exist. This uncaused source is, no doubt, God. Hence, the cosmological argument claims that: things exist; things have the possibility to not exist; those things that have the possibility to not exist and yet exist, exist because of some source; it is impossible that there are an infinite number of causes for the existence of a thing; there is an uncaused source for the existence of all things; and, that uncaused source is God. Now, according to the teleological argument, as the word teleo (meaning purpose) itself suggests, there must be a purpose for all purposes, that is wherever we see that something is serving a purpose, we must believe that something greater caused it to exist to fulfill that purpose. Hence, all designs come from a designer God. My personal opinion is that atheism suggests that it is not wise to blindly follow what religion teaches without evidence. But I think religion is based on faith that we have been created by a creator who is himself complex enough to create a complex universe, but He is not created. He is eternal and has not been designed. Science, though is based on evidences and research, but has its own limitations and many scholars have proven this fact that science and religion have a very deep relation. Religion is not to be blamed for all the destruction that is happening on the globe. Had there been no religion, the world would have been facing even more havoc because all religions after all teach humanity and morality. We are not born moral, God has taught us in His revelations and Books that we should be moral to live peacefully. Of course, there is a designer up there who has designed our intelligent minds. The mechanism of cloning humans has been in research and experimentation in which scientists create a living being from a basic cell. But can they create a cell too? Anyway, how one relates to God and his existence merely depends upon how one relates to his life’s experiences and to his own researched work. The ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments make us believe that there is a designer God up there. My personal opinion is that there is a designer God who has all the omnipotence and power to create a very complicated universe. God does not need any explanation because God is more complex than anything we can explain. Works Cited Dawkins, Richard. “Ultimate boeing 747”, The God Delusion. NY, USA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Fernandes, Phil. No Other Gods. USA: Xulon Press, 2002. Haught, John. God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Haught, John. God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. Westminster: John Knox Press, 2007.  McFaul, Thomas R. The Future of God in the Global Village: Spirituality in an Age of Terrorism and Beyond. USA: AuthorHouse, 2011. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. God between Their Lips. USA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Read More