Contents |
God
אהיה אשר אהיה—Exodus 3:14
This page is still largely in progress. For a while, this is just a place where I collect interesting material—mainly quotations—on the issue.
The best dialogue in literature comes with Moses asking his name to God, who replies: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (I Am that I Am)
Quotations
Travailler c'est prier.—French saying.
Toi, Toi, si t'étais l'Bon Dieu
Tu f'rais valser les vieux
Aux étoiles
I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual things and mysteries otherwise. And, I think, my life would be very incomplete.—Donald Knuth, Algorithms, Complexity, and The Art of Computer Programming
Proof
When asked for a proof of God, Muhammad split the moon, and people turned away scorning this as black magic. When Gödel formalized Saint Anselm's ontological argument and proved by cold logic that axioms on "positive properties" led to the conclusion that something had to fulfil all of them and be "godlike" in this respect, people turned away saying the axioms cannot be true or that their interpretation was not a scientific matter but rather a theological one. The miracle of Fatima also fails to convince despite its tens of thousands of witnesses including those who came to make fun of these that were expecting the announced revelation. What could convince, then? This is where "faith" comes into play. This is an intimate, personal conviction that makes you "believe". In absence of faith, you are left with the agony of doubt or, on the opposite of faith, in the unshakeable conviction that it is not true, despite Gödel and Fatima. In the book of Ezekiel, God reveals himself in a provocative if not comical fashion, in the form of a being with four faces, those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, as well as four wings and other extra details for special effects. God proving his existence to those most resolutely opposite to it must be one of the most refined and sophisticated types of entertainment. God meets Voltaire, God meets Dawkins, God meets Laplace and Spinoza, the ultimate comedy shows!
Disproofs
In Mathematics, one can prove that something is not true by finding an example that contradicts the statement. Proofs that God does not exist ("disproofs") similarly aim at finding an argument that shows that God's existence is not tenable.
The most famous one is the existence of evil. This indeed can be raised to a logical impossibility of a coexistence of a god and evil. This, however, can be refuted and even turned into an argument in favor of the existence of God. The basic point is that defining evil as the work of the devil, brings us to the point that the devil is not the opposite of God, in the sense that such an opposite is atheism or the non-existence of God. The existence of the devil (and thus of evil) is thus in itself a proof of the existence of God. A world with no evil is a world of passive matter, of rocks and gaseous formations orbiting stars. Remove all people, remove life, and there is no evil. In such a world, there can be no God. A subtler version is a parable with a hairdresser, who comments while cutting hairs that God does not exist because if he would, he would not allow evil, suffering and injustices to take place. The customer, after pondering the argument, later comes back with a long-hair fellow he found in the street, and exhibiting him to the hairdresser tells him that hairdressers do not exist, because if they would, they would not allow such people to neglect their grooming. The hairdresser objects: «hairdressers exist; I am one of them. The problem is that such people do not come to me.» The customer then concludes: it is the same with God.
Man meets God
Meeting God is the ultimate humane adventure. Of course, in the case there is no God (or "nothing" to meet), the adventure takes place only in our imagination of what it could be, which limits it severely since we are so crippled and sensitive only to what we are used to. That still makes it the supreme humane adventure.
The theme has of course be explored in arts, prominently with Michelangelo's creation of Adam, but also in literature and on the big screen. One could try to get a glimpse at how it would be through other experiences of "revelations", such as a baby hearing for the first time.
God and Science
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist,
but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you
There is a widespread belief that Science somehow excludes or precludes a belief in God. This is a modern stance that is all the more supported, the more ideological the proponent of such views. The most ardent supporter and emblematic figure of this approach is Richard Dawkins,[1] who fits the two criteria: modern or even post-modern thinker with a huge ideological bias. If looking further in time, though, one can see that people intelligent enough not to have been that influenced by the Zeitgeist of their time, in fact being much more involved in their relation to God as their cultural immersion would demand, provide spectacular evidence that something beyond pure rationalism was appealing to minds able to shape our worldview:
- James Clerk Maxwell
- Sir Neville Mott
- Isaac Newton
- Blaise Pascal (who even had a revelation (direct experience) and wrote Les Pensées as a result).
- Bernard Riemann
- ...
In fact, even many modern scientists did not shy away from expressing a preference against the growing consensus (in alphabetical order):
- Freeman Dyson
- Bernard d'Espagnat
- Robert Hanbury Brown (wrote several books on the question)
- Werner Heisenberg
- Edwin Jaynes
- Arno Penzias
- Abdus Salam
- Arthur Schawlow
- Charles Townes
- Eugene Wigner
- ...
Maybe less famous but who should also be in the latter list, one can add: John Eccles (Nobel for Medicine), Christian Anfinsen (Nobel for Chemistry who "think[s] that only an idiot can be an atheist!"), Werner Archer (Nobel for medicine), D.H.R. Barton (Nobel for Chemistry), Manfred Eigen (Nobel for chemistry), Francis Collins (geneticist), etc.
Testimonies
- Henri Guillemin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twYsGkQrq-k&t=21m47s
- Donald Knuth wrote a book on the topic: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
See also
Links
- God's twitter, insightful and funny (e.g., [1]).
- Numinous.
- List of atheists.