Does God Exist?
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further”- Richard Dawkins.
The above quote is from one of my favourite evolutionary biologist and leader of the new atheist movement and he makes a very fair point if you are a staunch Christain, Jewish, Muslim or believe in any sort of religion whatsoever you most definitely don’t believe in any other god of the past and present other than the one/s you follow. But before the atheists start thinking this commentary is for them, I, would like to clarify no matter what belief you hold, you are wrong!
If you are a devot believer or an adamant atheist both would agree that they know what the word god means. Right? Now, I am not talking about religion I mean the word god, religion and god are two different things. Now let me repeat do you know what the word god means?
If, you said yes, you are right! And by right I mean your understanding about the word is right not the idea. Let me ask you another question what does the entity god mean to you? Master? Ruler? Divine Entity? Nothing?
Now, if you look above you will see Ares (God of War) now to 99% of my readers no matter theist, polytheist and atheists; agnostics don’t count you guys need to pick a side, will agree that Ares doesn’t exist. Now does he? You think the Greeks were stupid worshipping an imaginary god?
Now besides being the God of war Ares embodied something else: rage, anger, power. The Greeks understood that we people are slaves to one thing or another, if you are someone who is a slave to anger meaning that it overtakes you, it drives most or all of your behaviour and gives meaning to your life then in a way you serve Ares. Same goes for other gods for i.e. Athena embodies knowledge, Eros embodies love.
Even if the god Ares does not exist he still a very real god for you because your life goals, aspirations and direction is towards serving him, in fact in a way you are a slave to a god absent in presence but very real in his power to exert in your life. Even if you don’t believe in him you in a way are a slave to everything he represents.
I, hope by now you are not making an statue to perform the yearly sacrifice to Ares. My point isn’t to prove that Ares exist but to convey a different idea of the word and concept of god altogether. Meaning that even if you and I are to perish Ares and what he represents would still exist and have existed.
But, if I look at the traditional use of the word god, traditionally it is used to represent an entity meant to be worshipped and not looked as an idea itself as I have presented earlier. It is very real and has an existence besides human consciousness meaning if tomorrow all the people in earth are to forget the idea of god and the word god that entity would still exist. It is not like pain related to individual’s existence or experience in anyway for its existence.
Science follows a principle of falsifiability ( I probably spelled it wrong!) meaning that a scientific principle that exists now can be proven and disproven. However, the theory of god does not follow such a principle and another method scientists use to test a theory is the idea of likelihood to see if a theory is most likely, likely or least likley: idea of existence of god falls in the least likely spectrum and hence often rejected, reasonably so!
However, even these scientific principle of liklihood or better yet test of liklihood itself is subject to other tests for example the liklihood principle itself can be proven or disproven. So what exactly would a scientist need to prove and disprove god? Richard Dawkins says he has already done it through evolution but has he really undone god? Or is that what he thinks? Not to mention can science answer the question about God’s existence or non-existence?
