Monday, October 15, 2012

The Everything Of Everything

A logical proof of what many claim cannot be proven


What's sillier than dogmatically believing something exists that you've never seen, heard, or touched? One thing is for sure, insisting the neighbor's dog, who he named 'Red', isn't named 'Red'. It gets even sillier when one labels their neighbor silly for disagreeing.

What is this I'm talking about? Well the question of the existence of God of course, and no, I'm not with the “blind leap of faith” crowd on this. The existence of any god is a self answering question. It takes little to no effort to prove it. In contrast it takes a bit of semantics analogous to some scenes from a particularly cruel game of Simon Says to make the proof challenging.

What is a god? It is something or someone to which we ultimately defer and/or honor above most, if not all other things or people. This is the practical definition of a god. Therefore if anyone ultimately defers to and/or honors something or someone above most, if not all other things or people, that something or someone is a god. Q.E.D. The god's existence is proven by definition. The only thing left to argue is if the god in question merits the status, not if he, she, or it exists.

I could leave it at that and tell myself how smart and clever I've been, but I haven't really addressed the question of God's existence, you know, the big 'G' god. That one is not all that much more difficult really though. Let me set up the proof and show you.

All proofs start with definitions and what we call givens, assumptions we ask others to accept that we then use as the foundation and other building blocks to our proof. There is nothing that has been proven in the world that doesn't start with granted assumptions. Our own existence, the existence of others, and the reliability of human perception are some assumptions fundamental to all science for example. Ideally the nature of one's assumptions should be such that if someone doesn't accept them they present themselves with a heavy burden to prove why not accepting the assumption is reasonable.

For my proof of God's existence I start with the following definitions and givens.
  1. Definition, a god: something or someone to which we ultimately defer and/or honor above most, if not all other things or people.
  2. Definition, God: the god above all other gods.
  3. Given, human reasoning and perception is flawed.
  4. Given, there is a such a thing as right and wrong.

If anyone wishes to argue against 3 and 4 I'm done, but I wouldn’t mind being so, since if any of those are wrong then we all must be terribly confused about our state of beings. So, baring any hyper-humanist extremism I will proceed with my proof.

  • Since human reasoning is flawed and yet there is such a thing as right and wrong, it is possible for human perception of what is right and what is wrong to be wrong.
  • Therefore what is right and what is wrong is determined by something independent of flawed human perception.

e.g. If everyone in the world suddenly decided it was okay and even right to kill everyone with red hair just because they have red hair, it would still be wrong.

  • Whatever that is that is independent of flawed human perception that determines what is right and what is wrong is ultimately deferred to and honored, thus making it fit the definition of a god.
  • If a conflict between the god that ultimately determines right and wrong and another god occurs, moral humans will always defer to the god of right and wrong. This makes this god the god above all others.

i.e. Civilized human beings are deferential to morality and ethics and since the source of these things transcends humanity, that is a god, and since we will defer to our best understanding of right more often than not, given any conflict, that god is the god of all gods, hence God.

Now perhaps you see what I meant about the dog named 'Red'. For someone to suggest the belief in God is silly because of a lack of tangibility, is itself the most silly. My theological studies lead me to conclude that God exists precisely because He exists, but even if He didn't exist for that reason, God exists at the very least because we need Him to. We need Him to save us from our faultiness that makes it possible for us to destroy ourselves.

1 comment:

  1. With that last sentence you seem to almost bring us all the way from the most hypothetical of gods to Jesus Christ, the one who came to save us from sin.

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