Can We Prove The Existence of God?
We will never know for sure if there is a god or not. God is believed to
be a creator, and the ruler of the universe. People have been trying to prove
and disprove his existence for a very long time and though some arguments
may seem convincing, nothing is for sure. The qualities used to describe god
are: all loving, all knowing and all-powerful. God can never be more than two
at once though. A few names from the past that shall be mentioned in this
essay are: Anselm of Canterbury, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, St.Thomas
Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Carl Jung, and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Anselm of Canterbury was a monk and philosopher. His argument for
the existence of god was called the Ontological Argument. He said that god is
“that which nothing greater can be conceived”, as in if you can imagine
something so perfect then it must exist. He believed, that in order for god to
be so perfect then he must be complete, and he would not be complete if he
were not real. Anselm would say that since god is the greatest thing
imaginable, then if he was not real then something greater could be imagined.
On the other hand, against this argument a French monk called Gaunilo of
Marmoutiers believed that you could not just define something into existence
just like that. He believed that people could only understand what they have
experienced for themselves. Gaunilo used a similar concept as Anselm’s
Ontological argument but from his own opinions and views. Gaunilo said, that
if he were to imagine the perfect island, if it did not exist then it could not
possibly be perfect because for it to be perfect it would need to exist. A real
Isabella Forsberg
MYP4
29/1/12
island would be much better than an imaginary island and so therefore a
better one can be conceived that is actually real.
Saint Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher who wrote the Seven Deadly
Sins. He believed that the natural world provided enough evidence for the
existence of god. He had five arguments to prove his existence. The first three
were Cosmological arguments, the fourth was the Ontological argument, and
the last one was the Teleological argument. Aquinas believed that in order for
things to be moved they must be moved by something else and could not be
moved by themselves. Though he said that everything must be moved by
something, he said, that to start the chain of movement there must be an
unmoved mover, which started the motion in everything. That unmoved mover
is called god. Saint Thomas Aquinas also related god to an uncaused causer,
and self-sufficiently sustained.
In the world there are two types of evil. There is moral evil and natural
evil. A moral evil is an action done by a human that causes suffering, and a
natural evil is something that causes a suffering that has nothing to do with
humans. Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that god was great because he was
the start of everything. If god were the cause to everything great, he must also
be the cause to everything bad that happens as well. God has three
attributes, which are: all loving, all knowing and all-powerful. The reason there
is suffering in the world is because god can only be two of these attributes at
once and the third one is the cause of the bad. From the view of an atheist, if
god really existed, and if he were really perfect, he would be able to be all
three at once without having to make his creations suffer and go through
extreme amounts of trauma and pain. On the other hand from the view of a
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MYP4
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Christian, all the suffering is just god’s way of punishment for the sins people
have committed, or just because god has so many people and things to deal
with that he cannot make sure everything is perfect at every second of the
day. A quote from the Genesis, 1:1, “everything god made was good”, this
would say that since god is believed to be the creator of everything, then even
the things we see as bad are all good and for a reason.
A therapist called Sigmund Freud had diverse beliefs to what had been
believed before him. He believed that everything is done for sex. A horde is a
group of early, primitive human beings, and Freud believed that guilt was a
huge part in psyche which started all back to the times when people were in
hordes. The sense of guilt he spoke about caused younger males to idolise
the dominant male. This links to the Oedipus complex which is an idea saying
that all 4-year-old boys have the desire to kill their fathers and marry their
mothers. Oedipus Freud’s beliefs on the origin of religion are: our lack of
knowledge of the world causes anxiety and fear and man has created god as
a “coping tool” for protection. God is a neurosis; he is an illusion that keeps
humanity in a state of infantilism and people need him to have some sort of
dominant male to look up to. Ludwig Feuerbach was an anthropologist that
said, “god is made by man, not mad made by god”.
A man called Carl Jung was one of Sigmund Freud’s top students but
he was completely against Sigmund’s argument. His theory was that religion
had the power to heal people. This theory relates to a few after-life
experiences by people who have come in contact with god after having no
pulse and have come back to life miraculously.
Isabella Forsberg
MYP4
29/1/12
Karl Marx was a philosopher and economist who wrote two books; the
Communist Manifesto and Des Kapital. His theory was that the whole world
worked on money and that the money in the world is not shared equally. He
believed that 99% oh the people in the world are poor and that someday the
poor will create a revolution. Karl also believed that religion was the opium of
the people and it was keeping them from acting up.
My personal opinion on whether we can prove the existence of god or
whether we cannot, is that we never really will be able to prove the existence
of god. That is the biggest wonder that will remain unanswered possibly
forever. There are so many different stories as to how everything is how it is,
and so many different religions, so to prove one right and plenty wrong, it
would cause havoc because religion gives people hope, and something to
believe in when they have nothing left and it also keeps order in the world to a
certain extent. God doesn’t necessarily have to be an invisible man in the sky
that calls the shots on everything; god could be anything to anyone, like a
power, energy, a spirit or just a feeling. I think that the existence of god is not
possible to be proven and it should not be proven right or wrong even if there
was a way.
Isabella Forsberg
MYP4
29/1/12