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
—Jacques Brel, Le Bon Dieu

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!

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
—Werner Heisenberg

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.