Does God really exist?
By Max Belyantsev
This question has intrigued—or plagued, depending on your outlook—humanity for millennia. In the pre-scientific era, early civilizations looked up to deities to preserve the cosmos, ward off evil spirits, and accelerate processes believed to be supernatural, like rainfall during a dry season. By and large, one might generalize that the role of deities in early societies was to explain what empirical knowledge or reasoning could not yet explain.
Of course, the role and presence of religion differ across cultures and eras of human civilization. Even now, though scientific inquiry has progressed rapidly over the past 500 years, there are so many questions that we, as humans, cannot definitively answer. The question of whether or not a God exists is one of them.
In this essay, I hope to make my argument for my perspective on this topic. In broader terms, I am agnostic, meaning that I do not believe that there is a way to verify the existence of a God. I am skeptical of even the concept of a God—a divine being that is both omniscient and omnipresent—because we humans struggle to understand anything beyond the scope of what we can see, feel, touch, or reason to be true based on our experience of the world.
Even if a God did exist, I would argue that there is very little evidence of his existence, if any, within the material universe where humans reside and claim some control. The existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God cannot be reconciled readily with the imperfect, fleeting nature of the material universe we have found ourselves in.
And yet, despite this belief, I find myself stuck in a contradiction. Although I cannot reason or prove that God exists, I find myself looking up to a God at times and believing in one. What I have just described is essentially agnostic theism. Even though it is impossible to prove the existence of a God, and there is no grounded basis for my belief that a God exists, I still believe in some higher power, materialized in the form of a “God,” that might be influencing my life, or at the very least, exists. I believe in something unbelievable and illogical in the context of the human scope of understanding. Perhaps this is because I realize my relative powerlessness to grand external forces like nature and the rest of the universe. The opposing theory, agnostic atheism, makes the opposite claim but on the same basis: the impossibility of verifying a God’s existence using a well-founded scientific method or line of reasoning.
Emmanuel Kant discusses these ideas regarding the existence or non-existence of God very thoroughly. Kant presents an interesting critique of the typical approach to this question. When we approach the question of God, we tend to use overly theoretical reasoning to answer a question that is ultimately a matter of faith. So ought one to “believe” in a God for the sake of the impact of the belief on our lives? In response to this question, Kant would echo one of his inspirations, Crusius, that “we are necessitated to believe something if its denial would undermine or render impossible the pursuit of an end towards which we have a duty (Crusius 1751: §339), the most important of which is our obligation to God (Crusius 1751: §345). Crusius essentially sets forth that our belief in God’s existence is justified by our obligation to God. However, the connection between an obligation to God and a belief in God is not immediately obvious.
More broadly speaking, however, we have arrived at a central question in this inquiry: would denying the existence of God undermine or render impossible the pursuit of an end toward which we have a duty? Several subsequent questions follow: toward which end do we have a duty? Do we have an undeniable duty to anything at all, in the most fundamental sense? Who imposes this duty? Is it imposed on us by others or do we impose it on ourselves? What is our obligation to God?
Religious theists might argue that we have a duty to submit ourselves, our ideas, and our actions to the impositions of a God or related figures as described in religious texts. In theory, if everyone were to behave in a certain way and embody certain principles, then, to put it simply, the world would be a better place. This may lack religious nuance, but I digress. Then, under Kantian/Crusian thought, denying the existence of God would undermine the duty to make the world a better place. But on what principles is this duty founded? Do we really have a duty to make the world a better place? If it is not already established, ought we to establish it?
Such questions ultimately highlight the complicated and personal nature of the argument for God’s existence. To my knowledge, I have not yet found sufficient evidence to conclude or believe in God’s material existence in any area of the universe. At the same time, I sometimes find comfort in the unfounded belief that God exists and is watching, listening, and so on. Ultimately, it comes down to one’s experiences, and the answer to this question may be rooted more in faith than the rational reasoning processes we are accustomed to in our everyday lives. If any of you have seen or met with God before, though, please reach out, I’d love to meet the guy.
Sources: Kant’s Philosophy of Religion, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
