Is God necessary?
This might be more of a personal story than anything that tilts towards philosophy or psychology or anything intellectual or even anything coherent this is a piece perhaps for me trying to make sense of a question that chases me no matter where I go.
There is a quote which I am sure many people have come across from Rumi: “I searched for god and found only myself. I searched for myself and only found God.’’ This is beautiful for some, trash from a deluded mind to others, great display of our semantical abilities to the literate, a cover page for their facebook profile to the rest. For me and me alone this is something I cannot escape from so when I saw this it seemed it was something I could have penned had I been a better writer. I had to sit for a while staring at this quote for a while entertaining the idea through imagination that maybe this is a sign but then the rational part of me kicked in. This is not a sign this is you psychologically associating with a bunch of syntax and semantics because of your shared experience.
“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.”-Rumi
Think of it this way if you found another person who shared similar experiences and life choices as you did, it would be most possible you might resonate with them or even end up being their friend this was the same for me with that quote.
I tried to hide myself behind the best philosophical arguments, I hid behind the arguments of giants like Hume, Hobbes, Dennett, Russell, Searle, Freud and if that wasn’t enough I started learning as much as I can about physics and human behavior biology and I became a follower of Dawkins for surely he knew what he was talking about “The God Delusion” had certainly shaken my understanding of Aquinas, right?
And every time I managed to look away something made me turn. If Hume doubted causation so did Ghazali and the latter even proposed a solution. If Dawkins thinks he debunked Aquinas’s five proofs then you are committing the same folly as I had which is to not have understood Aquinas. After reading Aquinas it was clear to me that it is better for scientists not meddle in the realms of philosophy, for if they do a poor job of debunking then it reflects more on their narrow understanding than the person they are trying to debunk. If Dennett thinks Searle is major problem with his chinese room argument for consciousness being the same as a computer software then he surely has not come across Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
Now all of these arguments don’t prove if God exists or not or even anything remotely religious, I have not even begun to address the question. And yet I had to think for a long time in my life what exactly is the type of God I am willing to give my belief to? I can’t accept the God of JBP who I had to take eight hours just to describe nor the God of Spinoza who could have been an alien and so far away I might as well not have anything to do with it.
What about the Abrahamic Gods? Dawkins had to say “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” If you use so many adjectives surely it will raise an eyebrow.
The Euthyphro dilemma: “Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” I bring this in here since if the choice is latter then surely no matter what adjectives you use good is only good if gods say it is so. Dawkins could sit there piling up adjectives and I could simply shrug and say it is good because god chooses it to be so. But then it doesn’t make any sense to say that sadomasochism is good simply because god commands it to be. In another world our morality could be entirely different, a world where murdering and plundering is looked upon favourably simply because God deems it so. That doesn’t make a lot of sense but if you choose the former option it is loved by god because it is pious then you are reducing the omnipotence of that being simply by positing that morality can come from something other than god.
And what about omnipotence? There is no agreement about this by theists as to what it should that could be defined as omnipotence. Should it be the ability to do whatever you wish? Well, saints who go to heavens can do whatever they wish and they are not said to be omnipotent. Should it be that a being can do what is possible? Then what possibility are we willing to permit it is only things that are naturally possible or things that are supernaturally possible?
Also, can an omnipotent being create creatures that God himself cannot control? I like this question better than can God create an object that is both a square and circle, since creating an object that is both a square and a circle is an illogical fallacy and illogical things cannot by the nature of their being exist.
Finally what kind of necessity is having a being like God? Logical, mathematical, metaphysical, physical, aesthetic, or moral? Let me try to tackle the final question because it at least allows me some grounds to further this questioning in my head.
Some have held that god’s existence is logically necessary: minority opinion. However majority of people understand it as a metaphysical necessity: it is notoriously difficult to elucidate, could there have been any metaphysical necessity? If there are metaphysical necessity then we can say then there is unreasonable to say that there are none and if there were none then there are no metaphysical necessity would be a necessity. What sort of necessity are we using to say there are none? Well it would hardly be easy to say it is a conceptual necessity! Those who claim there are metaphysical necessity are not conceptually confused the same would be true for those who say there aren’t any.
It is not a physical necessity, nor moral or aesthetic necessity. But then this claim ‘there aren’t a metaphysical necessity’ or ‘there are metaphysical necessity’ are both metaphysical necessity.
In some sense the world could have not existed but God cannot not exist.
