The Idea Of God

Did God create human beings, or did human beings create God? Is God an actual being (indeed, the ground of existence itself), as Catholicism asserts, or is He simply an idea in the mind of some?

How one answers those questions has profound significance on matters of morality, truth, and ultimate meaning. In the following essay, I will explore each of these positions.

The Need For God

It should come as no surprise that the history of theology and most of philosophy have supported the claim that God is necessary. Necessary ontologically (He cannot not exist) and necessary for matters such as morality and meaning.

What may be surprising, however, is that until recently, most atheists recognized the need for God, if only as a hypothesis. The reason lies in the difference between philosophy and psychology. For atheists taking a philosophical approach, God provides a model for developing a moral system and testing truth claims.

The French philosopher and writer François-Marie Arouet (more widely known as Voltaire) was an ardent critic of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Nevertheless, Voltaire thought, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” It should be admitted that Voltaire was more of a deist than an atheist.

Nevertheless, Voltaire accurately observed that God is necessary to provide an objective moral framework for humans to abide by. Interestingly, Fyodor Dostoevsky appears to follow Voltaire when he writes that all things are permissible in the absence of God. Indeed, Misha Rakitin, a character in Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov, paraphrases Voltaire.

A contemporary of Voltaire, John Paul Sartre pointed out that if there is no God, there is no immortality. Unlike the modern atheist, Sartre followed this premise to its logical conclusion. A godless universe means that life has no objective meaning, there is no objective morality, and humans have no intrinsic value. Under such conditions, Sartre observed, life is absurd.

For atheists in favor of a psychological approach, God is little more than a figment of the imagination. In our psychological age, this view is widely held among atheists.

God As Only An Idea

The guilty go unpunished, the innocent suffer, and everyone experiences the pain of being alive. In an effort to make sense of this broken world, human beings have invented the idea of God and a world where guilt is punished, the innocent are safe, and there is no pain.

So goes the psychological critique of religion endorsed by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

While such a position seems reasonable, it is not without its problems. First, one can turn the argument back on atheists. That is, one can argue that atheism is a psychological response to the existence of a God who imposes an objective moral order on them, imbues the world with objective meaning (and not one of their own devices), and will ultimately judge all of us.

The second problem with arguing that God is only an idea is that the position assumes subjectively what is claimed objectively. A proposition’s objective truth or falsity is independent of subjective thoughts or feelings. Whether God exists or not is independent of what people think or feel.

Since the psychological approach focuses on why people believe or not, it is useless in addressing the objective existence (or not) of God.

The Ontological Reality

Things exist independently of the mind that conceives them. Whether one believes in God or not does not affect whether God exists.

The human mind cannot imagine something ex nihilo, that is, something that is beyond the realm of possibility. We can, however, combine concepts of existing things to create a concept of something that does not exist. For example, human beings can conceptually combine a horse and a goat and thereby create (again, conceptually) a unicorn.

Human beings can even conceive of a cosmic father figure and call such a conception God. However, this capacity to create concepts in the mind does not affect ontological reality. Like belief in a unicorn, the ontological existence (or, in the case of a unicorn, the non-existence) of a thing is not dependent on what one believes. All of this goes to what logic calls existential import.

Finally, one can view the issue from a cosmic perspective. Every piece of scientific evidence available indicates that the universe came into existence at a particular time (approximately 14 billion years ago) and will pass out of existence at some point in the future (approximately 22 billion years from now). It follows that the universe does not exist necessarily. Whatever does not exist necessarily is caused, and whatever is caused is caused for a purpose. And this purpose, whatever it may be, is independent of what human beings think or believe.

Conclusion

The significance of the question of God as an idea is profound.

Suppose atheism is correct and God is a construct of the human mind. In that case, there are no objective criteria for right and wrong, life is a result of a random series of events, human beings are of no particular value, and life has no ultimate meaning. One is left with Sartre’s conclusion that life is absurd.

On the other hand, if Catholicism is correct, if God created human beings (and everything else), then God is the criteria for moral judgments, life is a product of a divine plan, human beings are of infinite value, and life has ultimate and eternal meaning.