About Life, Universe and Everything-II:What about God? Does he exist?

What about God? Does he exist?

Man has always believed that he has an immortal ‘Soul’

Plato believed in it any case, as already mentioned.  The Soul is the seat of the intellect and it predates the human body that we assume in this life.

Plato had a nice theory to describe the restlessness we all feel:

He said the immortal soul, when it enters the body and awakens in this world, is struck by the imperfections of the ‘beings’ that he comes across. And has a vague recollection of the perfect state of all beings.

The soul then experiences a yearning or a ‘restlessness’ to return to its true state and move away from this shadowy world. The soul yearns to be free and returns to its perfect state.

Aristotle also believed in an immortal soul. He had a more complex definition for ‘Soul’.

But not as complex as his definition of God.

Aristotle’ God was not a  simple human God.

God was a being incorporeal, invisible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, changeless, perfect and eternal.

I will not even attempt to decipher what he means by that.

But there are certain things that God is not, as per Aristotle.

God is not the creator. The Universe of ‘matter’ is eternal.

Then what is he?

God is the ‘Prime mover’, the ‘source’/beginner of motion.

Not just a mechanical mover, but he is the total motive of all operations in the world.

God is the final cause of nature.

The divine cause and purpose of things.

He is pure energy.

But that’s not all. God is also a ‘self conscious spirit’

He has no desires, no will, no purpose;

He is activity so pure, he never acts.

He is absolutely perfect, therefore he cannot desire anything; hence does nothing.

His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and he himself is the essence of all things; the form of all forms; his sole employment is the ‘contemplation of himself ’.

And what about the immortal soul of Aristotle?

He qualified the immortal soul as ‘pure thought’ undefiled by reality just as God is pure activity undefiled with action.

Another interesting view of God was by Plotinus(204–270 AD ).

He said that world is a span between two ‘poles’.

At one end is the divine light, which is God or what he calls as ‘the one’

At the other end is absolute darkness, which does not receive light from ‘the One’.

This ‘darkness’ has no existence. It is simply the absence of light.

The soul is illuminated by light from ‘the One’. While ‘matter’ i.e earth and stone, is darkness  that has no real existence

For Plotinus – Everything is one- for everything is God.

The Stoics(4^th century B.C), in their understanding of the world stated that:

“ The innermost essence of the world is harmony and order, both true and beautiful”- and they named it as ‘Cosmos’.

And this Cosmos is ‘Divine’. And we are all parts of this ‘Divine infinity’.

There is no death. Merely rites of passage.

When we leave the body , we merely merge with the divine Cosmos. And achieve salvation.

This ‘salvation’ promised by the Stoics was nothing personal. Because  when you achieve this form of immortality,  you lose your identity when you die.

We just become one with the Universe, and merge with the Cosmos.

In summary:

Cosmos is divine. We are parts of the Divinity. We achieve an impersonal Salvation when we leave our body.

This is where ‘Semitic’ religions gain ascendancy.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam promised a ‘Personal Salvation’.

One only had to follow the commandments laid down in their holy scriptures and a personal salvation was guaranteed.

There was no concept of an ‘Ultimate reality’ as in Oriental religions.

The period upto the 1500s are considered the dark ages. The world plunged into superstition, bigotry and religion was distorted by the powers that be, to keep society in a vice like grip.

The father of modern philosophy, Descartes, revived theological discussions.

Descartes derived that ‘God’ exists by his powers of ‘reason’.

The reasoning is slightly weird:

Descartes had proclaimed : ‘Cogito ergo sum’.

And hence had proved that ‘He was Real’ as he was a ‘thinking being’.

He further said that there was one more ‘thing’ that one could be certain of.

And that was that everyone had  an idea of a ‘perfect entity‘.

Descartes said that  if we have an idea of a  ‘perfect entity’, then it cannot  come from an ‘imperfect entity’.

Hence a ‘perfect entity’ exists. So there is God.

How’s that for logic?

Spinoza as already mentioned considered the ‘substance’ as the sub-strata of existence of this entire Universe.

And this ‘Substance’ was ‘Nature’ was ‘God’.

God is the inherent in all things.

All is in God; all lives and moves in God.

God is the casual chain or process, the underlying conditions of all things, the laws and structure of the world.

A bridge which has been built owes its existence to its design, its structure and laws of mathematics and mechanics.

This is what God is to the world. The world itself is sustained by its structure and its laws; it is upheld in the hand of God.

God is not human in any sense. If a triangle could speak, then it would say God is eminently triangular, A Circle would say that God is eminently circular and so on.

The ‘Will of God’ – is the sum of all causes and laws.

The ‘Intellect of God’ – is the sum of all mind. The mind of God is all mentality scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.

Spinoza  said that all is god and god is all. There is nothing in this world that is not god. So when one gets inside the toilet to pooh, even the pooh is god.
Question: So if the pooh is god, then we should worship it because gods are supposed to be worshiped?
Answer: No way! Why worship a fellow god?!!

Berkeley, who had said ‘there is no matter only mind’ had  a different take on God, which is similar to Advaitic theories.

The ‘material world’ is an illusion according to Berkeley.

He said the existence of God is far more clearly perceived than the existence of man.

God is “intimately present in our consciousness, causing to exist for us in the profusion of ideas and perceptions that we are constantly subject to.”

The whole world around us and our whole life exist in God. He is the one cause of everything that exists. We exist only in the mind of God.

Advaita proclaims something similar- that the world is simply an illusion.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.-Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Hume like Buddha rejected the idea of an immortal soul.

Hume said that the ‘Ego’ is in reality a long chain of simple impressions.

We have no ‘underlying personal identity’ or soul  beneath these perceptions and feelings which come and go.

Mind is “a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, slide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”

We have no underlying “personal identity” beneath or behind these perceptions and feelings which come and go.

Again it was ‘Voltaire’ who did some plain talking on the concept of God. Below are a few quotes:

 “It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will.”

“The ‘first divine’ was the ‘first rogue’ who met the ‘first fool’.”

“Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.”           

Voltaire’s  story  of  “The Good Brahmin” is interesting.

The good Brahmin says  “I wish I had never been born!”

‘Why so?”

“Because,” the Brahmin says, “I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost…. I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hand … I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.”

In a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor, the lady was asked if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made?

The Lady did not even comprehend the question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed from the bottom of her heart in the metamorphosis of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women.

Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, the philosopher  was asked:

“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automation who thinks of nothing and lives contented?”

“You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.”

Voltaire also stoutly denied miracles and the supernatural efficiency of prayer. Here’s another of his stories:

“I was at the gate the convent when Sister Fessue said to Sister Confite: “Providence takes a visible care of me; you know how I love my sparrow; he would have been dead if I had not said nine Ave-Marias to obtain his cure.”

 … A metaphysician said to her: “Sister, there is nothing so good as Ave-Marias, especially when a girl pronounces them in Latin in the suburbs of Paris; but I cannot believe that God has occupied himself so much with your sparrow, pretty as it is; I pray you to believe that he has other things to attend to…”

Sister Fessue: “Sir, this discourse savors of heresy. My confessor… will infer that you do not believe in Providence.”

Metaphysician: “I believe in a general Providence, dear Sister, which has laid down from all eternity the law which governs all things, like light from the sun; but I believe not that a particular Providence changes the economy of the world for your sparrow.”

It was left to Kant, once again to bring about some moderation.

Kant said that any attempt, by either science or religion, to say just what the ultimate reality is, will fall back into mere hypothesis.

So such queries like:

Is the world finite or infinite?

Was there a beginning of time?

Was there a first cause? etc cannot be answered as ‘ time and space’ and ‘the law of causality’ are our modes of our perception and conception.

The answers to these require us to go beyond these modes of perception and conception. That is not possible and hence answers to these queries are unknowable.

These queries cannot be answered as we can never have any experience which we cannot interpret in terms of space and time and cause.

Thus even religion cannot be proved by theoretical reason. Religion cannot be based on science and theology. It is a matter of faith.

Hence all religions should be based, not on science and theology , but on faith and morals.

Logic and God

“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful(as a Babel fish) could have evolved purely by chance, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.

“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

            “ ‘But.’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it?  It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED’

            “ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

            “ ‘Oh that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

 -Douglas Adams,Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It was Nietzsche(1844–1900) who bought a fresh perspective on the speculations on God and the immortal soul.

Nietzsche’s questioned as to why all ideals, whether explicitly religious or not, presumes an afterlife that is better than the ‘here and now’.

In Nietzsche’s eyes, such a fabrication negates us from seeing the beauty of  life on Earth.

He condemned attempts to deny actual truth in the name of false realities, instead of accepting the real as it is.

While Kant strove to find a coherence, an order in the world, by attempting to inject it with rationality, for Nietzsche such an enterprise was an utter waste of time and effort.

Nietzsche accuses all the grand scientific, metaphysical and religious systems, of having systematically ‘despised’ the body and the senses in the interests of reason and rationality.

Hence Nietzsche says:  “I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes.”

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?- Douglas Adams

Nietzsche's  formula for greatness in a human being was  ‘Amor fati’.

That is “ to want nothing to be other than as it is, neither in the future, nor in the past, nor in all eternity. Not merely to endure what happens of necessity, still less to hide it from oneself – but to love it…“

Sartre (1905–1980) also talked of the futility of trying to discover what God or human nature is.

He veered towards existentialism. He said:  “Existence takes priority over essence.”

Man has no soul or any ‘innate nature.’

Man must therefore create himself. He must create his own nature or “essence,” because it is not fixed in advance.

Santayana, (1863 -1952) even though a skeptic when it came to belief in God was wise enough to understand that a world quite divested of deity is a cold and uncomfortable home.

Santayana however says bluntly: “I believe there is nothing immortal…. No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.”

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”         -Saint Augustine