Can We Prove the Existence of
God?
People have been around for about 200,000 years and the idea of a god has
been around for the majority of that time, but it has not been proven. There
have been several attempts to prove the existence of a being that is,
according to the bible, all-powerful, all knowing and all loving. As long as
there have been believers there have also been disbelievers and to this day
the question still remains: will it ever be possible to prove the existence of
god?
The Abrahamic god is believed to be omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent,
omnipresent and transcendent. Anselm of Canterbury defined god to be “that
which nothing greater can be conceived”. These definitions of god imply that
human beings may not be worthy of knowing such a being, seeing as we are
simply one race of his creations and he is so powerful, so knowledgeable and
so kind. From this, comes the ontological argument to proving god’s
existence: god must exist because he is the greatest thing and therefore he
must exist because existence is the quality that makes him greater. This
means that you can always imagine a perfect being in your mind, a being that
is complete in every way, except it won’t be. It will never be perfect as long
as it only exists in your head; existence is the only predicate that it’s missing
to be completely flawless. Because god is presumably the greatest being, he
must exist or else he would be missing the predicate of existence and
wouldn’t be the greatest. Gaunilo, a French monk, was one of the many to
argue against the ontological argument. He argued that you couldn’t simply
define things into existence or decide that something is perfect. However, he
misunderstood the ontological argument and he demonstrated this by
claiming that you could use the same argument to prove the existence of a
perfect island. Plantinga shot down the perfect island analogy, explaining you
can always add something more to an island to make it more perfect, but god
is set perfection that is greater than anything and everything else.
St Thomas Aquinas discovered five ideas that he thought proved the existence
of god. He wrote a Summa Theologica explaining them all in depth. The first is
the argument of motion: nothing can move by itself, an unmoved mover must
move everything. The second is very similar, the argument of causation:
nothing is caused by itself; something must cause the very first cause that
causes everything else. The third is the cosmological argument: nothing
wished itself into existence; therefore there must be something that brought
everything into existence. The fourth is the argument of degree: everything
has levels of goodness and it is all relative to the maximum perfection, god.
Maria C Huapaya
MYP 4
Humanities
The fifth argument is the teleological argument or the argument of design:
there is evidence of patterns and design in the world, especially in nature.
Someone must have designed everything. Richard Dawkins argued all five
arguments from an atheist point of view in his book The God Delusion. He
states that the first three “rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to
terminate it’ and that people assume that there is a terminator, god. Assuming
there is a terminator, there is no reason for it to have the qualities of god
(omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence). Dawkins’ response to the
argument of degree is a spoof of the actual argument: “…people vary in
smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect
maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a preeminently peerless stinker, and we call him God.” He also states that you
could replace the quality being compared to anything you wish and come to a
similar conclusion. The teleological argument has withstood the test of time
and is the argument that is used the most today. Dawkins referred back to
Charles Darwin, who believed that the existence of patterns does not mean
that someone or something purposefully created them: the patterns could
simply be a coincidence.
An attempt to disprove the existence of god is the argument of suffering and
evil. There are two types of evil: natural and moral. Moral evil is immoral
actions made by people and natural evil is occurrences that cause suffering
but are not caused by human beings. If god is omniscient, benevolent and
omnipotent, then why do people suffer? The logical explanation is that he
cannot have those three qualities and because those qualities are what define
god, he must not exist. God should know about all evil and have the power to
vanquish all of it and if he loved us, he would. Therefore, he must either not
know about evil, not love us enough to help or not be powerful enough. The
Christian response is that god gave man free will and it is man who corrupted
the world.
There was also Sigmund Freud’s theory: religion is a result of guilt leading
people to someone who forgives. Freud attempted to disprove the existence
of god by referring back to his theory that every child wants to have sex with
its mother, the Oedipus complex. He claimed that the guilt caused by the
Oedipus complex was what created religion. Freud believed that religion was
harmful and that it leaves people in childlike states, unable to mature. This is
understandable because god can be compared to an invisible friend. The
impulse to keep living may also be a cause for believing in god because if
there is god, then there is life after death. Freud may have a point but the
Oedipus complex has been shot down by several and is hardly used in the
professional field of psychology today.
I believe that we will never be able to prove the existence of god because no
evidence or argument will ever be enough. For every argument for his
Maria C Huapaya
MYP 4
Humanities
existence, there is an argument against it. As long as there is one side of the
debate, there will be another. People will always be able to twist and/or use
facts to fit their own point of view. For now, there are no concrete facts saying
that it does or does not exist and yet there are people who don’t need it so if
there should ever be a time when it becomes a fact that god doesn’t exist or
that he does, who’s to say that people would believe it.
Maria C Huapaya
MYP 4
Humanities