Monday, October 17, 2005

Does God exist?

(Note : To all who believe in GOD, please do not get offended I respect your belief, the following post is a citation from an article by Davide Andrea, so please no hard feelings, you always have the option of leaving this page anytime - thankyou.)

Does God exist? Yes! No!
Of course, it depends on the definition of God.

Here I use 2 definitions:
1) The "Biological God", as a phenomenon of the human brain.
2) The "Cultural God", as a creation of human society.

Yes, the Biological God exists.
No, the Cultural God doesn't exist per se.

A person isolated from society from birth may still experience the Biological God, but would either not have a Cultural God, or would create his/her own version of it from scratch.

Now I will outline a theory that could explain our experiences of God, and yet allow for its non-existence. This theory is (yet) unprovable, but so is the existence of God. Of course, many more theories have been and will be proposed.

My wish is to give Agnostics an alternative to the views presented by religions, and let him/her apply Occam's razor ("the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected").

The Biological God.
Love, anguish, serenity, hate, intuition, conscious, self, and many other phenomena of the human brain are accepted as just that. Yet Humans aren't able to accept God as simply one more phenomenon of the human brain: the experience of God, and the need for a ultimate figure who gives meaning to our lives, are just that strong.

Why does the Biological God exist?
The Biological God developed in the human brain at the same time as Reason did.
Mutations resulted in both phenomena. In a very simplistic view, assume that these resulted in beings will all 4 permutations of these mutations.



The beings that gained reasoning invented the concept of "meaning" and started to ask "Why are we here? What's the meaning of life?" (these are two of the so called "existential questions"). Of those, the ones who realized that there is no "meaning" to life, lacked the motivation to live and procreate. On the other side, those who also developed the concept of God, created answers to the existential questions, and, satisfied, proceed to live and procreate. Their progeny retained both mutations, and today's humans are both smart and experience God.

Another way of looking at this is that God led to religion and morality; and that those led to social order; and that social order gave humans the stability they needed to survive and procreate. That social order balanced the individualism and freedom that reason gave humans. A tribe that evolved with too much reason and not enough religion would have self-destructed and become extinct.

The point is not "why do humans experience God". That is, don't ask why humans both have reasoning and believe in God, while other Primates don't (we assume).



Instead, understand that if there hadn't been a mutation in certain humans to counteract the logical consequence of reasoning alone, there would be no humans today to ask the question "is there a God?". It is just by chance that those mutations occurred, and that they occurred in such a way to make humans what they are now. There were far many more Primates that didn't develop reasoning (to the extent that Humans have), and some of them still remain today. And there were far many more mutations that did result in reasoning, but not the biological God, and those beings became extinct because they didn't have reason to exist and procreate.



The chance of humans developing both reasoning and the biological God are vanishingly small, so this appears very unlikely (let's say, a 0.0000000001 % probability). But look at it the other way: if those mutations hadn't occurred, and in exactly that way, we wouldn't be here today asking those questions!

Those mutations did occur (that's a 100 % probability), and here we are, asking these questions.
Had there been other sets of mutations, such that other, quite different sentient beings had resulted (also with a vanishingly small probability), they might now be asking what the chances would be for evolution to result in beings exactly like them. But those mutations would have occurred (that's a 100 % probability), and here they would be, wandering what the chances were that they would have developed.

The Cultural God.
Humans created the Cultural God because of their experience of the Biological God, and due to their need to provide default answers when reason can't.

We already explored the Biological God. Let's explore the "Default God".
As Reason answers more and more questions, people need God less and less as a default explanation of the unexplained. This would imply that the portion of questions answered by Reason (science) is asymptotically approaching 100 %. Form this, one could predict that one day the Default God will no longer be needed.



However, the unexplained questions increase as more questions are answered, so it is not clear that Reason will one day explain everything that is presently attributed to God.

So, we said that the experiential God is a biological phenomenon, and that we may predict that the external God as a default explanation for the unexplainable may one day become unnecessary. All this could be stretched into a proof of the nonexistence of the Cultural God.

Even if Humans disproved the existence of the Cultural God, culture has such a momentum that eradicating God purely on rational grounds will be nearly impossible.

Next post - "The history of GOD"
P.S Read this blog too...

4 comments:

the transient twilight said...

Agreed - may be my own views are not exactly similar to yours but still everything is a matter of opinion and you (as I) are allowed to have your own. You can't exactly prove your point, but then I can't exactly disprove your point either. Perhaps, you will find my blog"destiny...." interesting- it basically is non-opinionated for I would like others opinions.

imfreenow.blogspot.com said...

Wow! If God doesnt exist I am screwed, because He is my best friend and many times I am sure - my only friend.

Interesting the comment: "Humans aren't able to accept God as simply one more phenomenon of the human brain: the experience of God and the need for the ultimate figure who gives us meaning for life.

Wow! So God does give us meaning for life then? So, there is an "experience" of God? Think about what you are saying. You are denying yourself the joy that these things are true.

The ultimate experience: the love of God.

See, satan, the deceiver of mankind, has seduced you into thinking that the human brain exceeds all else.

What about this? Just think of the universe. Can you comprehend it? doe3sn't it terrify you? Isn't the universe - goin on and on forever infinitely more powerful a factor in our understanding of what stands out as that which governs, that which decides truth?

God is greater than that universe- more infinite even. Yet we who know God know that he would osnsider man- flesh and blood made of the dust of the earth - man, who cannot exist, would die without water in a short time - important.

There is a book that talks about the meaning of out lives, a best seller in America (an anywhere else I don't know) called "The Purpose Driven Life."

I stand on this one thing - your beliefs are driven by emotion. You question and are angry at God for the things that have caused you sorrow.

There is the devil - the god of this world. He is the destroyer, the liar, the stealer, the killer. He causes all that is not good. He can even cause weather.

We who have run to God found Him when seeking reguge from the wicked devil.

Just A Human said...

Eden,

read my next post - again pls don't misunderstand me, I am just looking at another persepective, I have not concluded. Infact nobody can... on such a subject.

sofia said...

“As Reason answers more and more questions, people need God less and less as a default explanation of the unexplained. This would imply that the portion of questions answered by Reason (science) is asymptotically approaching 100 %. Form this, one could predict that one day the Default God will no longer be needed.”

--how would you reconcile this with the fact that many people in the field of science, or scientists at that, still “believe” in the existence of God? Like Albert Einstein, just to name one.

The answers to the questions opens more questions, making more intelligible that which usually deemed a mystery.
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and oh, by the way, You’ve got screwed arguments…If I may just tell you, Gabrielle Eden. Close-minded, fundamentalists.

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