Serialised book (with a progressively updated >>dashboard/ToC<< page). Part II: Philosophy of the Life Instinct.

Book: Philosophy of Life Instinct: Chapter 10: God

Who, what and why

We might as well begin our journey into humanity’s features with God. Our primary concerns will be — What God is, whether God exists, and the Life Instinct and God.

The Dimensions of God

Let us begin with a basic understanding of the concept of God. It will give us the context for our explorations about God’s absolute and relative existence.

The powers of God

We usually take God’s attributes to be omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence and oneness. There is wide variation among religious philosophies on the meaning of these features, but we can put them down as below:

Omnipotence is the power of God to do absolutely anything other than what a God will not do, e.g., lie or sin, logically impossible things and perhaps changing the past.

Omniscience is the ability of God to know everything at once without limit. (Although God would know everything in the past and present, potentially this excludes foreknowledge of the future. The reason for this limitation is that if God knew what we are going to do, we would have to do exactly those things and would then not have the freedom of choice. Although this may indeed be the case, most conceptions of God include God’s expectation that we will be good out of our Free Will, which would make foreknowledge rationally difficult to accommodate in God’s omniscience.)

Benevolence or omnibenevolence is God’s complete desire for good, including perfect moral goodness. We conceive God as inherently good, faultless. God is both good and sets the standard for excellence.

Oneness is the concept that God is not separate from time, space, matter, and attributes. God is everything, and everything is God. In this view, even other beings conceived through God are considered part of God, whether supernatural beings or life forms.

The Personal God

One may believe in a god privately, which may or may not correspond to the God of one’s religious belief. And one may not be a part of a religion and yet believe in God.

This personal relationship can come about gradually as one grows up immersed in a religious system. We come to take a conception of God for granted as a personal witness, interceder, comforter and guide superior to mere humans. Alternatively, one may realise a personal God through independent thought and emotion.

If one also follows a religion, one can align the private God to the dogmatic God, to a larger or smaller extent. One may dimly or distinctly realise this.

The Institutional God

This is the practical God of human societies. It is a God of many uses, from social bonding to political control. Proto-humans and our species have conceptualised and gradually defined God more and more rigidly and formulated religious systems around them. Several of these Gods have had human forms, messiahs and prophets to convey their essence to humans. Many people may reject the religious institution but retain its God for personal grace. Others may set aside the institutional God and substitute it with their private God.

The cosmic God, independent of humans

Lay and theological believers in God have long considered the question: Was there a God before life forms, animals, and humans? It is a straightforward extension to ask — does God operate everywhere, including the distant stars, galaxies and unseen reaches of the cosmos? The most common answer is yes to such questions about God’s relation to universal space and time. The broadest notion of God includes the creation of the entire cosmos, including possibly multiple universes, and God’s omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent and unseparated presence throughout and beyond its extents. God is taken to exist transcendentally, in time and outside the passage of time.

Does God exist?

Did God create humans, or did humans create God?

The believer’s case

There are both rational believers in God and those for whom God is not a question of rationality but an almost inherent faith. (I say almost because infants and children may be in God’s mind, but God is not in their minds as a formed concept for all practical purposes. We separate God as a particular entity after adolescence, except in the rare religious prodigies.)

Most rational believers probably come to believe in God by noticing the apparent order and fantastic complexity of nature, life and our bodies, which must have been designed and set in motion by someone. Other self-professed believers may come to believe in God out of the experience of events, pains and sorrows, relieved either by the strength of their prayer or subsequent events, both of which they associate as ultimately caused by a prime cause for everything. They may also observe the good experiences of life such as beauty and morality and conclude that the most perfect of such things must exist. Even such practical and rational thinkers as Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein believed in God, probably for the above reasons. It could be called the deduction of God.

Then there are the believers steeped in the concept from youth. They don’t question the power and origin of God. They come to faith in the same way they come to believe one should respect elders, defend their country, protect their family, and so on. The positives and negatives they observe in the world, and their lives are channelled into the structure of their religious experience and belief, with God as its nucleus. It could be called the induction of God.

Believers who have attempted to prove God’s existence

Great thinkers in theology and philosophy have attempted proofs of God’s existence, for example, Plato, Anselm, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes. The reader can explore their arguments further. In essence, they offered the following ‘proofs’, summarised here.

1. Design — The order, beauty and complexity of existence must have a designer of exceeding intelligence, skill and power, i.e. a God.
2. Uncaused Cause — Everything that comes into being has an external cause, as it cannot cause itself by existing before itself. What caused it had to have a cause too. To avoid an infinite regress requires a first, uncaused cause, i.e. God. To this, we may add the argument that any object’s motion needs to be started by an external mover, which in turn required a mover, and so on. To avoid this infinite regress also requires a first unmoved mover, i.e. God.
3. Self-evidence— We can only think of things that exist and give rise to the idea of the considered thing. As we can think of God, it can only be because God exists. It is also called the Ontological Argument.
4. Consciousness— We cannot explain our consciousness by any physical mechanism or science and is a creation and proof of God.
5. Perfection — There can be something better for anything good, but what cannot be bettered must be the maximum good, perfect, i.e. God.
6. Subjective proofs — Our witnessing of miracles, receiving a revelation, or direct experience of God, are proofs of God’s existence.

The atheist’s case

Then we come to the world of atheists. If one thinks carefully, there are two varieties — the first says emphatically, ‘there is no God’; the second says, ‘there is no need for the concept of God’.

Either way, their case for disbelieving in God is usually predicated on these critical arguments.

1. Lack of evidence — Why doesn’t God appear to us? Why the reticence? Why don’t miracles occur more frequently? Why does God not intervene to prevent evil, disasters and untimely deaths? Reward and punishment in the afterlife seem like a convenient cover-up for a non-existent deity.
2. Existence of pain, sorrow and sin— If God is benevolent and hence taken as a god, and if God is omnipotent, why does God allow pain, suffering and sin to exist at all? (Believers and theologians may reply that it is to test humans, for defining good by contrasting it with evil, and so on. But these seem artificial and feeble defences of their faith, better not attempted.)
3. Exclusivity to humans — If God is not only a creator but also a source of solace and guidance, why don’t we see any signs that at least some animals, if not plants, have deities they worship? It is only humans, with their unique self-awareness and abstract thought, who have Gods. It is because only humans need a God that only they conceptualise God. They practically benefit from the idea, as a device, with no existence beyond their minds. (Believers may argue that even if humans did not exist, God was the only one who could have created the universe and lesser life forms. It is a stronger argument than the one above, but it does take away some of God’s characteristics beyond being the creator. In that sense, it reduces God to the level of chance, in a metaphysical sense.)

There are more and more atheists as time passes. There are happy or at least contented atheists and reluctant ones. The latter feel the need for something to look up to that explains the world, comforts in distress and guides behaviour. But their rational mind does not admit the notion of God to supply these.

Then there is a large number of what we can call happy or at least contented atheists. There is no significant evidence they suffer in life or after they die, emotionally or physically. Perhaps this shows the concept of God is not essential for everyone. A believer may aver that these atheists ‘know not what they do’ and will either be forgiven by a benevolent God or suffer in their after-life. But it is surely an argument that is unlikely to disconcert this variety of atheists.

The agnostic’s case

We can look at agnostics in a positive or negative light. In the latter view, we could dismiss them as either too lazy to think about, dismally uninterested, or hypocritically hedging their bets.

But there would be many agnostics who genuinely reflect a well-analysed quandary. The conflict is between their rational self wanting to believe in something other than God and the absence of a compelling alternative.

They see that rational and secular thought, i.e. science, can explain a lot about the world we know, experience, and manipulate. Still, there are three fundamental cosmic mysteries that it has not solved and perhaps never will.

The first mystery is the existence of a material universe (assuming it is not an illusion, in which case the mystery only transmutes into the illusion’s presence). Where did the cosmos come from, why does it exist? Science can increasingly explain its properties, but not its ultimate origin. There was a Big Bang, but why? Did something cause it or not? Even if science speculates on the cause, it does not yet explain the source that gave rise to it or if it came from energy, matter or nothingness.

The second surprise is life’s existence, such an unusual and strange form of matter. We have seen its utterly unique characteristics in Part I of this book. Science could postulate it is an accident and just a particular combination of matter. But it is an unsatisfying answer.

The biggest enigma within life is certain life forms' apparent ability to choose their thoughts and actions freely. Science cannot explain this either.

Science may be sceptical about a supernatural source and its power, but it considers that perhaps things exist and began. They had an origin. It can rightfully ask the believer, ‘Who created God?’, but the believer would declare God always existed.

Science could challenge this by asking, ‘How do we know God existed before humans came into being and came to know about God?’ The believer would answer that God does not care whether we or anything knows God, and we are simply one of God’s many creations.

If science tried the tack of asking why God did these things, the believer would sanguinely retort that it was God’s will and not something we can understand or question. God just decided, at some time in eternity, to create the universe, life and us. And here we are.

So the agnostics mind fluctuates between dismissing the notion of God and admitting it. In any debate between an agnostic and a believer, the latter would say each of the above three mysteries is not a mystery at all but simply God’s doing. Science cannot disprove this as it has no evidence that it isn’t.

So, let us not mock the agnostic, for her problem is real.

The Life Instinct and God

The Life Instinct gave rise to the idea of God in our minds. The capacity for consciousness, self-awareness and abstract thought came about in our evolution, as we saw in chapter 5. Our mind improved to work better with our environment and increase our chances of survival by defining objects, detecting patterns and causes beyond our direct experience and sense. We can imagine, define, and use large numbers that we cannot experience, atoms we cannot see, concepts such as love and goodness, and the idea of God.

At some point in evolution, when we became conscious of our separation from other objects and individuals, we perceived the forces at work on us. We started linking what happens to us to possible causes, which helped us survive better. Pain, hunger and death were prominent in the infancy of our self-awareness. At first, we would associate the pain with direct information—a thorn in the foot, a scrape on a rock, the birth of a child. But we would soon ask ourselves why there were thorns, why we weren’t tougher skinned and why childbirth had to be painful. We would have found it is because thorns helped the plant, a thin skin sensed and perspired better, and the foetus was larger than the birth canal. We could then ask why again. And so on, until the answers were beyond our learning and understanding. That is when the idea of an ultimate deity that causes everything arose in our minds. Now, either this powerful deity was bad or good, giving us the proto-god and proto-devil. The former gave rise to everything life-giving and protected us, and the latter was the opposite.

And how could one appease and gain from the proto-God? Naturally, we had cast God in our image, so he would want what we prize. We must offer him the two things of great value for us: useful objects and loyalty. The former comprised food, jewels, sacrifices, etc. The second was a visible ritualistic faith that should not waver despite the proto-devil's worst efforts.

From then onwards, one can understand the persisting need for a God in our minds, despite the expanding boundaries of what we explain and control through our intellect. The concept may have developed somewhat due to the needs of mass religion, rational thought and philosophy. Still, it has essentially been the same for millions of years since we evolved from apes.

The idea of God is neither wrong nor right, good nor bad, in an absolute sense. It is a utility, like our capabilities for living in social groups or scientific thought. Collecting ourselves into cities or nations has helped us, but taking it too far has resulted in terrible territorial wars. Science has empowered us greatly, but its excesses have led to ecological and genetic damage. Similarly, faith in God can make a beneficial contribution to the human species. But it should not grow so much it affects other positive traits. It should not take harmful directions that lead to bigotry, hatred, pogroms, crusades and other violent religious movements. Fortunately, most of the ill effects of belief in God are associated with religion and not the personal faith in an Almighty. (We will examine the uses and abuses of religion in the next chapter.)

So how will we make the best use of this fixture of our minds? With our intellect. As we examined in chapter 8, we are a work in progress, but we have the powers of self-observation and self-management. Some intelligence needs gods, but a bit more realises its utilitarian nature. With understanding comes detachment, and with detachment comes understanding. With understanding and detachment comes measured use of a facility.

The Philosophy of Life Instinct versus the proofs for God

Each argument for the existence of God we saw earlier is summarised below followed in italics by the viewpoint of the Philosophy of Lift Instinct.

1. Design — The order, beauty and complexity of existence must have a designer of exceeding intelligence, skill and power, i.e. a God. PoLI view: We perceive it as a design because we are part of it and need to. There is nothing of absolute value or beauty inherent in the form of nature, including us.
2. Uncaused Cause — Everything that comes into being has an external cause, as it cannot cause itself by existing before itself. What caused it had to have a cause too. To avoid an infinite regress, there had to be a first uncaused cause, i.e. God. To this may be added the argument that any object’s motion needs to have been started by an external mover, which in turn requires a mover and so on. And to avoid an infinite regress here too, there had to be a first, unmoved mover, i.e. God. PoLI view: Everything need not have a cause. Some things can happen spontaneously, e.g., particle pairs' appearance from energy, particle decay and perhaps the Big Bang itself. Also, nothing is logically or naturally wrong with an infinite regression. We can overcome our discomfort with it. Finally, parts of a whole may be caused without requiring the whole to have a cause.
3. Self-evidence — We can only think of things that exist and give rise to the idea of the thing. As we can think of God, it can only be because God exists. It is also called the Ontological Argument. PoLI view: We can also think of things that we will never directly know, for example, a parallel universe or a quadrillion dollars, so our imagining God does not necessitate God’s pre-existence.
4. Consciousness — We cannot explain our consciousness by any physical mechanism or science and is a creation and proof of God. PoLI view: Consciousness is remarkable and could indicate something beyond our knowledge and science, but it does not require an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. It could be just as much a matter of simple chance as the existence of matter and life itself.
5. Perfection — There can be something better for anything good, but what cannot be bettered must be the maximum good, perfect, i.e. God. PoLI view: There may just be a few things that could have better versions. The concept of perfection need not be universal.
6. Subjective proofs — Our witnessing of miracles, or receiving a revelation, or direct experience of God, are proofs of God’s existence. PoLI view: If that forms the foundation of belief in God’s presence for someone, it is accepted by the philosophy of Life Instinct as it is a product of the Life Instinct.

The future of God

God will not disappear any time soon, for the simple reason that the universe has many mysteries, not least its very existence and what it gives rise to, whether stars or living things. We will never know and explain everything. Until we are God, we will need a god. And we are never going to become God.

As our education, scientific understanding and control over nature increases, our self-confidence grows, and reliance on deities shrinks. The number of disbelievers will grow in the foreseeable future, but many of us will still have God in our minds, openly or privately.

Conclusion

The Life Instinct is paramount for us, and we need to respect it as its subjects and students. It works in us individually and for the species. If it develops personal gods, that’s fine. If it leads to atheism, so be it. We cannot sit in judgement on the process and state of Life Instinct. But it would be remiss of us not to apply what the Life Instinct has equipped us with — intellect. If our highest reflection guides us to oppose the excesses of faith, we should. If it encourages us to appreciate the beautiful things wrought by faith, from art to architecture to music, we must.

Beyond this pragmatism, we recognise something more — rationality, logic and science are ultimately also forms of faith. For this reason, lay and scientific atheists need to acknowledge the limits of their position and respect logical and subjective beliefs in God. They must admit that the faithful are not blind, and whether they state their ideas by rote or argue them through reason, they deserve respect.

As long as believers, atheists and agnostics live peaceably, using their beliefs within themselves without harming others, they are all doing fine by the Life Instinct. If they can also apply the philosophical mind to their beliefs, it will move us further on the arc of wisdom.

© 2020 Shashidhar Sastry. All rights reserved.

(As each chapter of the book is published, its entry is linked in the ToC below.)

Table of Contents

Part I Metaphysics of The Life Instinct

Part II Philosophy of The Life Instinct

Part III The Life Instinct and The Future

Published By Shashidhar Sastry

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