So, then, having described this god being, the question must arise whether such a being in fact exists. I suppose my answer is rather obviously going to be yes, but let me attempt to suggest some reason for believing that not only is this so, but that it is necessarily so; that is to say, it could not be otherwise. I should say that it is equally obvious, at least to me, that any such proofs as I may offer here are going to be woefully inadequate as tools for convincing the unbeliever to believe, but that’s fine. I can only set down what I find to be satisfying arguments for myself.
One simple perspective by which we might arrive at this god being needing to exist (not as an external need imposed upon its being, but as required by what we observe around us) is the simple fact that we could posit such an entity existing. The fact that we not only can, but perennially have supposed there to be such a being (with admitted exceptions) argues rather strongly, if not very convincingly, that there is in fact such a being in existence. We see, for example, that certain threads of idea run through the religious beliefs of humanity, however varied they become. The very fact, I would argue, that we have a sense of good and evil, right and wrong, indicates that there must necessarily be some higher authority who can rightly judge such things.
I would further argue that the nature of the created order around us requires us to find such a being at its origin. This, I recognize, is a fairly old argument, but it is old primarily because it is so basic, and I would say, so correct. It is fashionable in our age to see science and religion as polar opposites at war with one another in the realm of ideas, but it has not always been so, nor is there just cause for it to be so now. The early scientists found hope of being able to discern the rules of existence and of nature fundamentally because they acknowledged such a god-being as having established the created order.
I’ll take another step and say that the very fact that we find a created order and not an unconstrained chaotic state of entropy argues very strongly for a guiding, directing hand in the establishment of that order. As popular as it is to write everything off to chance these days, such a conclusion would require that every bit of scientific knowledge we have today is in fact so much rubbish. That in turn would require us to accept that the technologies upon which we depend daily do not in fact exist. That would seem to me a rather difficult position to hold successfully.
If all is chance then all is chaos, and not such chaos as we have come to understand, which is in fact no chaos at all, but simply order on a scale we find difficult (but, I note, not impossible) to describe. It is true chaos, such as will necessarily defy any and every attempt to describe the rules that govern it, for in this case, there are no rules. It is a wholly ungoverned process. Indeed, were this the case, we should quite likely find ourselves needing to declare chaos as god, given that it suffers no outside dependency. We should have to ascertain its eternality and the absolutes of its power, but even chaos, it turns out, would not deny the being of god. It would only declare itself a candidate.
But, to my point, if all is chaos, then mathematics and science necessarily fail. If all is chaos, we cannot launch a vehicle into space and have any expectation of it arriving at its desired destination. If all is chaos, we cannot leave the house of a morning and have any expectation of arriving at a place of employment. If all is chaos, we cannot plant with expectation of harvest. In short, if all is chaos, we cannot expect anything. Expectation requires order, and the fact that our wildest expectations, when built upon mathematically sound principles and scientifically established laws, actually succeed is in itself evidence that something established that order.
Here, I find some of the discussion around the recent, supposed success in reversing the flow of time interesting. The experiment which purports to demonstrate that reversal hinges upon the expected behavior of a drop of ink when it hits a glass of water. The Law of Entropy is demonstrated in this activity. The ink dissipates over time. At first it remains a relatively solid and coherent globule, but as time proceeds, the globule seemingly disintegrates, and the component molecules that made up the ink spread out into the glass of water until so evenly distributed as to be effectively invisible. The experiment proceeds to say that they have reversed this flow, and caused the globule to reassemble itself. This, they posit, is evidence of reversing the flow of time. On that last point, I am unconvinced, for it seems to me that they still experienced the event as a sequence of temporal events proceeding in the same forward direction. If time had been reversed, then said blob of ink ought somehow to have simply appeared at some past point, and its entropic particles have completely disappeared from the glass of water in the present. Bearing in mind that even in such a dissolute state, the molecules that made up the ink still remain, time reversal would require that at some juncture they don’t. What I would suggest this experiment has successfully done is counter the Law of Entropy, at least for some period of time. But, time, it seems to me, has continued flowing as it ever has.
I bring this up to say this. If we recognize that the natural flow of creation, as we find ourselves able to measure and describe it, tends towards entropy, towards everything effectively arriving at this equally distributed, room temperature state, we are going to be hard pressed to explain, I think, how it is that we have this thus far apparently unique planet, with its uniquely placed moon, at such a perfect place in the cosmic order to support life. We are going to find it difficult to explain how it is that something so complex and organized as life arises, as it were, in the face of entropy. If, as the scientific theories suggest, we began as an algaeic slime (I fear I’ve just made up a word, but it serves), then surely entropic order insists that we would, if anything, dissipate, not organize. If entropy rules the system, how is it that we suppose evolution would produce ever more complex levels of organization? I’m sure there are explanations on offer out there, but from my layman’s perspective, these seem to be wholly at odds.
It seems a far better fit to the evidence that we suggest order requires a controlling source. Order cannot arise from chaos, ergo the existence of order – even such order as we discover actually defines those things we construe as chaos – insists that some greater power established that order. To put it in briefest form, nature requires a god.
A. The Necessity of a Monotheistic View
[03/22/19]
While there have been any number of polytheistic religions in the history of mankind, I will argue that the sovereignty that is so necessarily a part of the definition of god-ness requires a monotheistic view. I would further argue that those polytheistic systems are actually monotheistic in some sense. To explain, if we look for example at the pantheon of Greek or Roman mythology, we see many who are called gods, but in reality there is one out of the many who is chief god, if you will. That is to say, in this pantheon there is only one of whom it can be said he or she answers to no one but self. That all these others are spoken of as gods or goddesses suggests to me not that there was in fact a multiplicity of gods, but rather that the concept of god had not as yet been very well thought out.
I think the same argument can be made in regard to the Hindu pantheon of the current age, and probably of the animist religions. When we see how the idea of god is applied in these religions, it really winds up meaning nothing much more than ‘more powerful than humans’. It may convey the idea of a less corporeal reality. So, we might (although I wouldn’t advise it really) find them more properly equated with what we would construe as angels or, more properly, demons. They may represent spirit-beings of some form, but not the self-existent, absolute sovereign God.
I say this monotheistic view is necessary because the fundamental qualities of god-ness insist upon such a view. It is not possible to have two such beings, two mutually independent super powers, if you will, who are both entirely self-sufficient, entirely unanswerable to each other, and each capable of acting upon their own will without any question as to that will being accomplished. If we have two such powers, then there will inevitably arise a case where those two powers will to opposite ends in the same situation and in the same timeframe. In such a situation, it is clear, at most one will can prevail. At most one can see his object attained, and the other must find himself stymied. That being the case, he is not independent, but dependent upon the other, supposedly co-equal’s accession to his plan. The only way we can keep these two entities truly equal is to demote them both from the position of utter independence, for they will have to be mutually dependent upon one another to retain equality. Otherwise, one must prevail and prove truly independent, and the other must fail and be found dependent.
This, I observe, puts paid to ideas of dualism, or those many belief systems that posit equal and opposed powers of good and evil. We cannot have two equal but opposite powers and still have one or both of them occupying the place of gods. We can have two equal and opposite powers, certainly, but they remain, as above, mutually inter-dependent. Each is free to do as they please only so long as the other agrees. As such, we must look higher to find that which is truly sovereign, and when we do, we should find that these two seemingly independent (apart from each other) entities were in fact subject to this higher being all along.
