A Realization and Meditation

After a deep chat deep into the night with a good friend, a realization dawned on me. At this point in my life, my religious affiliation has teetered between my traditional Baptist upbringing and my scientific and philosophical reasoning. On one side is the traditional American religion, which surrounded me my entire life. I have since rejected that concept of God. The Bible, Christianity, Christians, and the message of the purported son of God do not rationalize and are not compatible with each other. My life has been directed and steered down a path of rationalism and the love of truth, none of which can be found among the pages of the Bible or in the words of Christians.

My religious views have since fallen into a system of doubt and disbelief, shunning the traditional conceptualization of a god. If anyone were to ask me today what my religious beliefs are, I should say to the mass populous I am an atheist, as I do not believe in any humanly conceived notion of a god, but to the educated and reasoning people of the world, I should say I am an agnostic. I will not rule out, in the end, the existence of a god. As of right now, no "proof" offered to me for the existence of a god figure has been a sufficient amount of empirical evidence to say conclusively "God exists." Adding to that, however, from a purely philosophical argument, I should also say that I see insufficient evidence to claim "God does not exist."

If one is to claim that the God of Christianity exists, with what evidence can one cast down the gods of the other religions of the world? If one has evidence to refute Allah, Shiva, or any other god, why should that evidence not be turned on the god of the questioners religion? When people speak of the classical gods, they now laugh at the pantheon of incestual, bickering gods of Homer. Zeus cannot possibly exist in the mind of the common Christian today. Christians are atheists in respect to the Homeric, classical gods. But if Zeus cannot possibly exist, and is therefore an invalid theory, why is the Christian concept of God any more valid? Following this mode of thought is how I come to say that I am an atheist in relation to the god of Christianity.

Philosophy and the Existence of God

The reading of Meditations on First Philosophy presented our philosophy class with an interesting proof of the existence of a god as given by Rene Descartes. A few definitions are needed first. Ideas have objective reality, while objects, things, have formal reality. Objective reality, the reality of ideas, comes in degrees, based on the how much formal reality it is based on. The example is this: the idea that unicorns exists has little objective reality, because unicorns do not have much formal reality. The proof follows as thus

Proof of God (Descartes)

• (Causal Effect) There must be as much (blank) in a cause as the (blank) in the effect (Cause is greater than or equal to effect)
• The Causal Principle (P1) holds true for things with formal reality an for things with objective reality
• If any idea has so much objective reality that Descartes cannot be the cause of it, then something other than Descartes exists
• Descartes has an idea of God
• The divine idea “tops out” the scale of objective reality
• Passivity Principle (I’m not the cause of all my ideas) (perception comes to one without willing it)
• The only thing that could cause the divine idea is a formally real god

The conclusion to this argument being that a god exists. Descartes prudently steers away from claiming the characteristics of god or claiming which god is the correct god (Descartes was a devout Roman Catholic). Descartes does however claim some properties of any divine being so as to ward of those who would doubt his theory. 1) God cannot be a thought created by man, because by the Causal Principle, an imperfect being cannot create a perfect god. 2) God cannot be the sum of culture, family influence, ones own ideas, etc., because a divine being is the perfect one-ness. The list goes on.

Personally. I have a hard time reconciling premise #5 and the idea of objective reality. If the idea of god tops out the scale of objective reality, how is one able to imagine it? Anything that is comprehendible, or thinkable as it were, by humans, cannot tip the scale of objective reality, or one would not be able to think it by my reasoning. Another problem I have is that Descartes has an idea of god. Does not his idea of god represent an imperfect idea, by the Causal Principle? An interesting theory that I believe takes too many "well if this..." moments to be plausible, while also not applying some of his own logic to his argument.

Just because the new site I will be using to expand my blog reach said so, I will paste this goofy little sentence for them. "a bug is the biggest lie we know!"