The Opinion Pages
Does It Matter Whether God Exists?
By GARY GUTTING
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
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Even if God is powerful enough to save the souls of the devout, and loving enough to want to, he still might not.
If our hope is for salvation in this sense — and for many that is the main point of religion—then this hope depends on certain religious beliefs’ being true. In particular, for the main theistic religions, it depends on there being a God who is good enough to desire our salvation and powerful enough to achieve it.
But here we come to a point that is generally overlooked in debates about theism, which center on whether there is reason to believe in God, understood as all-good and all-powerful. Suppose that the existence of such a God could be decisively established. Suppose, for example, we were to be entirely convinced that a version of the ontological argument, which claims to show that the very idea of an all-perfect being requires that such a being exist, is sound. We would then be entirely certain that there is a being of supreme power and goodness. But what would this imply about our chances for eternal salvation?
On reflection, very little. Granted, we would know that our salvation was possible: an all-powerful being could bring it about. But would we have any reason to think that God would in fact do this? Well, how could an all-good being not desire our salvation? The problem is that an all-good being needs to take account of the entire universe, not just us.
Here, discussions of the problem of evil become crucial. An all-good being, even with maximal power, may have to allow considerable local evils for the sake of the overall good of the universe; some evils may be necessary for the sake of avoiding even worse evils. We have no way of knowing whether we humans might be the victims of this necessity.
Of course, an all-good God would do everything possible to minimize the evil we suffer, but for all we know that minimum might have to include our annihilation or eternal suffering. We might hope that any evil we endure will at least be offset by an equal or greater amount of good for us, but there can be no guarantee. As defenders of theism often point out, the freedom of moral agents may be an immense good, worth God’s tolerating horrendous wrongdoing. Perhaps God in his omniscience knows that the good of allowing some higher type of beings to destroy our eternal happiness outweighs the good of that happiness. Perhaps, for example, their destroying our happiness is an unavoidable step in the moral drama leading to their salvation and eternal happiness.
My point here reflects the two-edged character of religious responses to the problem of evil. The only plausible answer to the question, “How could an all-good and all-powerful God allow immense evils?” is that such a God may well have knowledge beyond our understanding. As David Hume suggested in his “Dialogues on Natural Religion,” the problem of evil is solved only by an appeal to our own ignorance. (There are powerful formulations of this approach by philosophers called “skeptical theists.”)
Such an appeal may save us from the apparent contradiction of evil in a world created by an all-good God. But it also severely limits our judgments about what an all-good God would do. It may seem to us that if we live as we should, God will ensure our salvation. But it also seems, from our limited viewpoint, that God would not permit things like the Holocaust or the death of innocent children from painful diseases. Once we appeal to the gap between our limited knowledge and God’s omniscience, we cannot move from what we think God will do to what he will in fact do. So the fact that we think an all-good God would ensure our salvation does not support the conclusion that, all things considered, he will in fact do so.
It follows, then, that even a decisive proof that there is an all-good, all-powerful God cannot assure us that we are ultimately safe. Even if we insist on a religion that goes beyond John Gray’s beliefless way of living, belief that there is a God leaves us far short of what we hope for from religion.
Many believers will agree. Their confidence in salvation, they say, comes not from philosophical arguments but from their personal contact with God, either through individual experience or a religious tradition. But what can such contact provide concretely? At best, certainty that there is a very powerful being who promises to save us. But there may well be — and many religions insist that there are — very powerful beings (demons or devils) intent on leading us away from salvation. How could we possibly know that the power we are in contact with is not deceiving us?
The inevitable response is that an all-good God would not permit such a thing. But that takes us back to the previous difficulty: there is no reason to think that we are good judges of what God is likely to permit. God may have to allow us to be deceived to prevent even greater evils.
We can, of course, simply will to believe that we are not being deceived. But that amounts to blind faith, not assured hope. If that doesn’t satisfy us, we need to find a better response to the problem of evil than an appeal to our ignorance. Failing that, we may need to reconsider John Gray’s idea of religion with little or no belief. end quote from:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/does-it-matter-whether-god-exists/
At one point in my life (from ages 5 to 25) it was very important to me that God existed to the point where if I didn't find God that Suicide was my response. However, as time has gone on I find that God is much more than I ever believed God was when I was under 25. So, I am constantly overwhelmed with feelings like "Oh God. You are so magnificent!" at this point in my life. So, what changed? God didn't change at all. My understanding of God changed! And that is really the point.
I look at even agnostics and atheists as a stage in the life of a particular soul in order to learn something that maybe they couldn't any other way. I now look at religions just like I used to look at languages like French and English and German and Hindi and Tibetan and Spanish etc. etc. However, God isn't any one religion, God is beyond all religions. I think if God actually talked to you about any religions or religion he would mostly just laugh at just how limited and close minded religions really are in actuality. For me to truly discover God I had to go beyond all religions direct to God himself and get to the point where I could actually laugh at my own existence before God fully showed himself to me. I had to give up being attached to even existing at all before God took me seriously. What do you think about that? For me, God is the most overwhelming amazing ongoing experience that anyone possibly could ever have all the time. But God cannot be canned into any one religion because that would only be a really good joke. Think about this: God is the whole universe and all universes and all time and space and beyond and you want to put him into a can or a genie's lamp of any one religion on earth. If you aren't laughing now you should be.
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