Archives for category: Philosophy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Proof of God

Nov 26, 2013 //
5

Everyone loves debating the existence of God. It’s been around since the beginning of God. Since it was only recently that the general population started to actually care about whether or not you can actually prove God through some logic or science or non-voodoo-esque methodology, it kind of baffles the mind a little bit that those who were trying to do it were doing it during a time when the belief in God was pretty much on par with the belief in air. But anyway, all the proofs for God that I know of are from way back in those days, so apparently now that people want more and more proof, it’s becoming less and less necessary to give it. Go figure.

So let’s look at some of these proofs and see which ones we like. And by we, I of course mean I. You’re not contributing anything to this, slacker. Keep in mind I’m not talking about the Christian God, or any particular God, just the notion of a creator being. These would be proofs for theism.

I’m going to breeze through a couple first before I get into the more complex ones. First off, the watchmaker proof. Say you find a watch on the beach, and see all the crazy shit that makes up how a watch works. You look at that crazy watch and you think, “Wow, this shit is fancy. Somebody must have built this!” The watch is too complex to exist uncreated, so its existence implies a watchmaker. The universe and all the junk in it are the watch in this obvious metaphor, and God would be the watchmaker. So because stuff is complicated, there must be a God. This is dumb because science happened, and now we know how things became complex. It’s because of science. Thanks, science!

The next one is morality. There has to be a source for Goodness in this universe, God is that source, therefore God must exist. This is dumb because no there doesn’t. Wishful thinking is not proof.

Next up is personal experiences. Witnessing miracles, near death experiences, all the things where people have “seen” or “experienced” the divine prove the existence of it. These might be very personal and subjective reasons to believe in God, but objectively they prove nothing. Judging things you can’t explain by attributing them to God is the same as attributing them to aliens. Or mole people. It also creates the problem of the “God of the Gaps”, which means that as these things become explained, the status of God is lessened until everything is explained and there is no longer any use for God. Once lightning is explained away by electrons and whatever the fuck else makes lightning happen (I studied the arts, give me a break), we no longer have need for Zeus. If you want God to be relevant, find another way to justify Him (Yes I just gendered God. It just makes life easier. I’ll use “Her” next time if it’ll make you feel better).

This next one is a bit more complicated and harder to explain away. However, it’s even more dumb than the previous proofs I’ve mentioned. This one can be blamed on St. Anselm the Asshole, who asks us to imagine thusly, “think of the most absolute perfect being. Now, what would be more perfect: if this being existed, or if it didn’t exist? It would be more perfect if this being existed, therefore ergo and badda bing, this being is God and God exists.” Anselm then tells us to “Suck on that, hosers!” and does a little victory dance because as ludicrous as this argument is, it’s very difficult to counter. Allow me, your lovely narrator, to try.

Our good friend Immanuel Kant has two counters to this argument. The first is that this proof splits God into two: God and the idea of God, which is a fairly shoddy God indeed. It doesn’t really disprove the argument, just suggests that it’s super ambiguous and lame, and therefore not good enough to be considered concrete proof. Kant goes on further to say that perfection is not predicated upon existence. Existence doesn’t make something better or worse; it’s merely Being, and therefore does not actually add anything to that being (pay attention, this is a lot of beings.)

A couple counters to THAT argument are that even if existence doesn’t necessarily make something better or worse, it does vastly change the concept of that being. Does it make it more perfect? Who knows. The other is that necessary existence (not boring, regular-type existence) IS a predicate (such as, a four-side triangle necessarily must not exist), and that’s what Anselm was talking about. However, I disagree that necessary existence is a thing, since all the examples I’ve come across have been closer to necessary non-existence, which I would argue is a completely different notion. Also, this is still confusing even for me, so let’s just look at my idea next which totally refutes the thing to such a point that all of these counter and counter-counter arguments are superfluous.

My idea is that perfection as a concept is flawed. Since Anselm is asking us to do the imagining, he is relying on subjective analysis to create this perfect being. So the problem is, my idea of a perfect being would be one who makes it rain beer, whereas some other person’s idea of a perfect being might be one that really hates beer (looking at you, Mormons). Since there can be no objective definition of perfection, the proof is invalid. Suck on that, Anselm, you jag.

The last argument I’m going to dismiss outright is Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Or the First Cause. It has a few names. What this one boils down to is that each event was caused by a previous event. You exist because your parents conceived you, they came from your grandparents, so on back to the apes, back to the primordial ooze, back to the beginning of the universe. If each event has been caused, there has to be something that started the chain. The finger that pushed the first domino, so to speak. That finger… is God. This God has been the God of the philosophers for a long-ass time, since it’s super logical and reasonable and smart people tend to eat that shit up. However, it’s not very popular because Deism is super boring, and not at all relevant to the goings-on of every day life. People typically prefer a more personable deity that they can relate to. One that shares similar values, etc.

Also, I don’t think that it necessarily proves the existence of an Unmoved Mover either. The question that started this was, “what caused everything?” Well, I have to ask, “What caused God?” The answer is, “Nothing caused God; God just is” which is the point of the Unmoved Mover. But how come God just is? Why can’t the universe just is? If the causal chain has to stop, what difference does it make whether it stops at the universe, or at God? Look at this shoddy diagram I’m going to attempt here:

God causes universe causes x causes y causes z….

compared to

Universe causes x causes y causes z….

The argument for what just is seems to be arbitrary. If the universe has to have a beginning (which I don’t necessarily think that it does) then why does it have to be a being that causes it, when it could be just a simple event like the big bang or something with the word quantum in front of it.

Now I’m going to offer one argument that has a bit of clout to it. The universe is bound by mathematical laws. For example, gravity will always be defined by its mathematical formula. Because these laws are absolute (and even if our current laws are wrong, newer ones will still prove this theory), there must be a lawmaker. God is a mathematician.

This still runs into a few of the problems we’ve encountered before. Like with the watchmaker, why does a law imply a lawmaker? But these laws have been here since the beginning of time, have never changed, and continue to define the universe, unlike the complex entities that the watchmaker theory refers to.

The best counter-argument I can come up with is one similar to the First Cause counter-argument. Just as the universe could easily be just is, so too could the laws that define it be as such.

My final proof, however, does prove the existence of God beyond the shadow of a doubt. It all comes down to a sociological theory called the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” So for example, objectively speaking, race isn’t a real thing. There is no difference between white people and black people outside of the colour of their skin. However, if you’re a black person on trial in the American south during the Jim Crowe era, it really doesn’t matter that race isn’t a thing. You’re fucked. You know why? Because of your race. Same with being white-bread going into Harlem after dark. You can objectively state that race is real because the consequences of race are real.

So it is with God. People recover from addiction, they honestly repent their crimes, they find serenity and strength, they blow up buildings and drink suspicious kool-aid, all because of God. You tell any one of those people that God doesn’t exist, and they will show you the proof in the consequences. The addiction is gone, the criminal is reformed, the spirit is healed, the building is destroyed, and Jonestown is a graveyard. The consequences are measurably real, therefore the thing causing them must be real. So God is real. At least, sociologically speaking She is.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Philosophy, Religion

The Meaning of Life

Oct 12, 2013 //
5

Before I left for India, people asked me if I was looking for something, trying to find myself, or the answers to the universe, or whatever it is old Indian dudes with amazing beards are supposed to know about. Luckily, I already know all the answers, so I didn’t have to shell out the 700 rupees it would have taken to get some mystic to tell me that I need to exercise my loins more (this literally happened to someone in my group).

So, the meaning of life. I always used to think it was fairly simple: boning. Or to put it slightly less crassly, perpetuating our species. We are biological creatures, and our natural drives are telling us all at once that we need to go out and make sure that there are future generations. This line is a poor way to pick up women, by the way, and I would recommend flowers.

So what’s the problem with the meaning of our personal existence depending on the future of the species. Well, for one, our species might not actually last all that long. We might kill each other; there’s the whole asteroid thing and we might not have Bruce Willis around to save us; global warming could flood the planet; the sun is going to go out eventually if we’re even still around for that. Anyway, even if by some miracle we escape this death trap we call Earth, and the inevitable heat death of the universe turns out to be a myth, what kind of meaning is there if you don’t get to appreciate it? Has anyone ever even met their great-great-grandkids outside of hillbillies who are grandparents at 23? I say there is no meaning if we don’t actually get to experience it, or if we never know if it was fulfilled or not. Keep in mind, I’m talking about the species on the whole; having children and loving them and finding meaning there is possible, but that meaning isn’t coming from your desire to perpetuate the human race. I’ll get to that later.

There’s also the religious belief that we live to serve God. There is a problem with that beyond the question about God’s existence, and that is I absolutely reject the notion that the meaning of life is submission. I think even God would reject that belief, as He would have been the one to give us free will in the first place.

The last idea I’m going to reject before I give the correct answer (read: my answer) is the notion that the meaning of life is to do good works. Be nice to one another, and generous, and remember to hug your mom. All that hunky dory nonsense you might see on a poster with a picture of a sunrise on it. There is absolutely no logic to back this up, other than the fact that it gives hippies the warm fuzzies in their bowels. And the day I let hippies decide the meaning of life is the day my brain aneurysm finally kicks.

So, what’s the meaning of life? The answer came to me when I was feeling a smidgen down over one thing or another a while back. I couldn’t sleep, and so around 2am, after having deliberated over why I was upset, I actually wrote down a memo in my phone to commemorate my experience. I knew that this too would pass, and one day the inevitable heat death of the universe would make all my problems disappear, but even with all that, I still felt like shit. Why?

When things fail, when we feel hopeless, powerless, and alone, when we lose everything, when we feel as though we can’t go on, we search for meaning in our lives. We look for a purpose. Something that tells us that things will work out, that there is a reason for optimism in this life. We seek solace in God, in karma, in a just universe, in fate and destiny; where somehow our failings and our suffering mean something. That there is a plan. That despite all the terrible things that happen, they don’t matter because there is something greater at work.

What if none of that was true? What if there is no God, no justice, no great destiny? Our suffering would be meaningless. Our failures would be nothing; insignificant blips, invisible to the vastness of eternity. No comfort for our sins.

And yet, even within that meaninglessness, we still hurt. We still regret. We still hang on to things despite every instinct to let go. We choose to suffer in a universe that ignores it. Why?

Because that is where the meaning comes from. We hurt because the things that mean something to us hurt us. We lose them; it is inevitable, and without that hurt, without that loss, there is no meaning. The Truths of Buddhism state that life is suffering, and we must relinquish our attachments in order to relieve ourselves of that suffering. I disagree. Our lives are comprised of attachments and sometimes that suffering is all we’ve got.

What I was getting at with this depressing little blurb was that despite everything, despite any meaninglessness or valuelessness of our actions and experiences, we still feel. If there is nothing, why do I still feel? We absolutely cannot help it. So you know those silly, girly little things you get at the end of Hugh Grant movies? That’s what this is all about.

This made sense to me almost immediately, because whenever I talk to people about how meaningless this life is, how our actions have no value, and that we live in a universe devoid of hope and compassion, for some strange reason they always seem to find it supremely disheartening. They tell me I’m wrong, and naturally I get defensive and irritable, and demand to know why they would dare disagree with me. They tell me that it just doesn’t feel right. It feels like there should be something more to this life of ours. They can’t quite put their finger on it, but there’s definitely something. And it was those feelings all along that hit the nail on the head.

Camus has a theory that since no individual experience has any relative value, that in order to measure a life, you have to measure the quantity of experiences rather than the quality. And that’s all fine and good, but my problem with it is, you can have all the experiences in the world, but if none of them affect you emotionally, then it’s as if you haven’t experienced them at all. Camus’ character Meursault from L’Étranger experiences a wide variety of things, from a wedding engagement to a murder, but as he feels nothing during any of it, it’s all considered to be equally without meaning.

You might think that this is a fairly hippy-ish way of looking at it, that The Feels are what give our lives meaning, but I’m saying that the negative emotions offer just as much meaning to our lives as the positive ones. When you feel sad, it’s typically because you had something and lost it. Something that meant something to you. And that meaning is perpetuated through your sadness. I mean, you do traditionally let go, just as all joys leave us as well, but it’s better to let things run their proper course, rather than trying to force yourself to be in a state that you’re not.

So those children of yours I was discussing earlier, the ones that give meaning to your life. They give meaning through the love, the anxiety, the frustration, the hope, the disappointment, the excitement, the entire roller coaster of emotions that they put you through. Not just having kids, but the places you go, the people you meet, the drugs you take, all those things that affect your life in different ways. That’s what this is all about.

Don’t be stoic. Don’t rid yourselves of your attachments. You might as well be dead already if you shut yourself off from your emotions, because otherwise what’s the point? Love, lose, suffer, get angry, get happy. Be alive, and make it mean something.

Tags ,
Categories Philosophy

The God-Shaped Hole

Sep 2, 2013 //
0

As dirty as the title sounds, the God-shaped hole is actually a fairly common philosophical concept. What it boils down to is that ever since God died, humanity as a whole is missing a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Not even necessarily the moral compass that God typically is considered responsible for, but just the essence of having something above us, greater than us, something that is inherently right in the universe.

Even if you don’t agree that God is dead, you might be able to appreciate that God is certainly less prevalent than He used to be. The “civilized” world has all but abandoned God, by keeping it out of the majority of its establishments. Flip side are those who place their faith less-so on God, and more-so on the war for God. In every day life it seems that the intimate relationship with God has lessened from what it was even a hundred years ago. Some see this as a bad thing, others see it as a good thing. But for something like God (Higher Power, whatever) that has been around for pretty much the entirety of human existence, you’d think that having God disappear might leave something missing in our shared consciousness?

Within the last few months, I have spoken to two people (I have spoken to others as well, but they obviously weren’t memorable enough to make it into this blog post) who were in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Narcotics Anonymous. I realize that two people isn’t exactly an ideal statistical sample size, but shut up because this is hardly an academic paper. ANYwho, the person in AA is partially religious, to the extent that they believe that Christ is our saviour, but still does not adhere to traditional religious practices. The NA member is anti-religious. A burning-down-the-churches-and-laughing type of person. Not as totally polar opposite as I would like, and if anyone happens to know a super-Catholic, bible-thumping lush I’d be happy to talk to them, but we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. But these two almost-opposite people agree on one thing: they need their Higher Power to help them with their addiction. For the semi-religious person, the Higher Power is the obvious one. The anti-religious person relies on Love as their Higher Power, and focuses on NA’s stipulation of personal interpretation to exclude themselves from the otherwise religious tenets of the NA program. Keep in mind, this isn’t a romantic love that every day humans are capable of experiencing, as “romantic love is a bunch of bullshit and shouldn’t exist.” This is a Love with sentience, that produces a form of serenity and a sense that everything will be okay. This might sound almost identical to a definition of God, but from our conversation this Love seemed like more of an inner sense rather than an outer being. It is what this person needs, and they found it.

It might be argued that this is the Anonymous program brainwashing its members into its informal religious doctrine, but at the same time, it’s hard to say what it really takes when you’ve hit rock bottom, and you feel like nothing, and maybe humans as a species really do need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of the dark. I know I certainly haven’t come anywhere close to the lows that addiction can ravage us down to, so I choose not to offer an opinion on the matter, and prefer listening to the experiences of others.

There is also a song by Regina Spektor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqG1Dh36-6s) that discusses many other examples of points in our lives where we might reach out to something greater than ourselves. No one laughs at God in a hospital, when your mother is dying in front of you and all you can possibly do is wish for her to be at peace, happy, somewhere, anywhere. No one laughs at God when the last sight you’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes, and you cry out, hoping for any kind of justice to be done. No one laughs at God when it’s gotten really late, and your kid’s not home from the party yet, and all you can wish for is to have something take care of your child.

None of these examples actually prove the existence of God, or even a Higher Power, but as my old buddy Voltaire used to paraphrase, if there was no God, maybe, just maybe, we would need to create Him. The need for something more creates that something more, and to deny that something more is to ignore the necessity for it.

These are all low points in personal human experience. Maybe the God-shaped hole that people allude to is really, in our collective experience as a species, a low point in our humanity, and if we hope to escape it, we’ll need something greater than ourselves to pull us out of it. Maybe we are too obsessed with the distractions of modernity that we can’t unite to actively search for this Higher Power that will save us from ourselves. I’m not saying that it is some objective Higher Power that is doing any actual saving, but the belief in that Higher Power gives us the power to do it ourselves.

I’m going to offer some counter-arguments here, because this isn’t a post meant to convince you of anything, as even I am not fully convinced one way or the other. Feel free to make up your own mind regarding the God-shaped hole.

In regards to addiction, people give up cigarettes all the time without the help of a Higher Power. Cigarettes are equally deadly, but for some reason, there is no Anonymous program to help people escape it, and yet they do. Maybe since alcohol and narcotics destroy more than just your own life, but the lives of the people around you, and even change who you are as a person, do they require something more than just cold turkey and a patch. On the other hand, maybe since there is no secular option for the recovery of alcoholics and drug abusers, we have no other options with which to compare results. It is very difficult to say what it takes to save us when we need it most, and maybe only since we collectively have always reached out for something greater, do we continue to do it today.

There is also the Nietzschean belief that there may be a God-shaped hole, sure, but maybe instead of filling it with something that doesn’t exist, we ought to fill it with ourselves and our Selves. Believe that humanity is the greatest power, and should only aspire to be greater. We as individuals are capable of incredible things, and to ascribe those incredible things onto a non-existent being is an insult to that human capability.  This isn’t to say that what I said initially is invalid, as it is the belief that is necessary to help us escape our lows. It’s just instead of the belief in a Higher Power, it should be the belief in our own power.

Or ultimately maybe it’s not so much what we believe in, so long as we believe.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Philosophy, Religion
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »