Friday, May 04, 2007

Something - Nothing

I was just wondering if god exists. Or rather, whatever was the train of thought that followed can be related to a very simple question 'Does god exist?'. I mean it is one of the questions which can have the train of thought that I had to find a solution. There can be many, but I haven't thought of others.

There are two things that one would say when asked a question 'Does god exist?

  1. Yes he does
  2. No he does not
Let us consider the first case which is kind of trivial. The triviality can be addressed by people who are reading this post themselves. If I see so many things on this planet and there exists certain relation between these 'many' things. Effectively we see things here. As said before, there is some relation between these things, which I am not able to define satisfactorily. But then, as there exists a relation between things, and by our understanding of time and other dimensions alone, there must have been things before these which lead to the things that exist now. Hence, there have been things before the ones that we are seeing now.

Now for those things to exist, there must have been things before them, so on and so forth. This is an infinite loop, and when we want to see the limit. There must have been 'something' that sprang up everything. That something itself is god.

There by the first case stands true.

Now coming to second case, we say 'God does not exist'. In which case, there must be 'nothing'. So if there exists nothing we can say god does not exist. But for that 'nothing' to exist, there must be 'something' that defines that 'nothing'.

Again we have two train of thoughts:

  • I mean, for there to be nothing inside you, you need to be there. Similarly 'nothing' to exist beyond you, your existence is essential. Hence you are that something which exists.
  • Similarly, for 'nothing' to exist, there has to be 'something' previous in line with it which was 'nothing'. This again ends up as an infinite loop.
Here the first case we considered an individual and proved that something always exists, and in the second case we considered the infinite loop. Hence we proved that 'something' has to always exist. But the result of the thought process is a contradiction with respect to the assumption. Hence, the assumption is wrong. In which case, god does not 'not exist'. Hence we come to a conclusion that god exists even in the second train of thought.

Hence god does exist.

P.S.: There can be flaws in the theory proposed above. I do not say that it is flawless. I hope that with better realization of things around me, I will some day be able to tell whether god exists or not, and if I am able to do that it would clearly mean that god does exist. Hence, god exists.

8 comments:

Mohan K.V said...

Interesting ! I came across this thing called the Ontological Argument for the existence of God when reading the wiki page on Bertrand Russel, and I think it is on similar lines of thought as yours. Do give it a look
sometime:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

Kini said...

In your own words...

"Lite tisko mamaa"

Unknown said...

I guess this will always remain as one of those questions without an answer...

amrit said...

Dude, you proved that God "existed". I still ask: does He "exist"?

Anonymous said...

Hare Hare Mahadeva Shambu!

Your argument for the existence of 'God' is a synthesis of what are commonly known as the Teleological and Cosmological arguments. The basic flaw in these arguments, in my opinion, is that the term 'God' is loosely defined, if at all.

The Ontological argument is rather different - using the definition of God as a 'perfect being', the idea argues that existence is a necessary attribute of perfection. The idea is obviously gibberish, since existence is not a predicate. When any object forms the 'subject' of a proposition, it must exist, for you to be able to talk about it. What is unclear however is the meaning of existence - the existence of an idea of God is different from the existence of an entity labelled 'God'.

I guess everyone has their own set of conscious or sub-conscious notions about God. I'll quote two lines from from the post that seem to reflect yours (these are the two responses to the question of God's existence) : "Yes he does" and "No he does not." You've already attributed a gender to an entity the existence of which is in question...

Cheers

BlakeJustBlake said...

I guess now you just have to figure out which one. I don't really like it when people like anonymous play semantics with a subject like the existence of God, then it just turns into who can make the cleverest twist of grammar, which is kind of the basis of the Ontological argument. Belief in a God often times just comes down to a faithful decision that reason can't trump.

(sorry, random stumbleupon person.)

Anonymous said...

Hello, I'm just another random Stumbler from SU myself. Nothing attracts hits to a blog like SU!

In defense of anonymous... Of COURSE anonymous argued semantics: the original article was based entirely on semantics in the first place! There was nothing in there that supported God's existence. Nothing that would convince an objective observer, anyway.

Then we get the whole "faith" thing again. You need some kind of standard to decide if something is true or not. With faith, you have no way to tell if your beliefs are true or false. I can have faith in anything I want, independent of whether-or-not the faith leads me to believing in things that do not exist. Many religions make contradicting claims. They cannot all be correct: but they all have "faith" that they are the "one true religion." Heck, internal consistency is a problem WITHIN religions as much as it is BETWEEN religions. Just look at the long list of contradictions in the Bible.

wolverine said...

interesting line of thoughts//

though i do have some points to make

1. According to your logic, all that you have proved is that "something" always existed. That being accepted,it in no way proves that , that "something" is actually God. Probably it was just a cluster of atomic particles.

2. The logic that you put forward stems from the assumption that "something" cannot be created out of "nothing". Now, this seems quite logical from our human perception of "something" and "nothing".

But, what exatly is "nothing"? If by nothing we mean something that we cannot percieve like energy, then the whole thing breaks down, coz matter and energy are interchangeable. Anyways a accurate description of "nothing" is far beyond our understanding. I rest my case there. :)