Why God needs to exist
Your Holiness,
Please accept my prostrated obeisances. All glories to your good self.
I am again writing to you after a very long time. I pray and hope that you are doing exceptionally well.
One argument that theists make is that there has to be an origin of everything which implies the existence of a Creator. Some reply with the question that if God has always existed then why can’t we just assume that matter has also always existed. I thought of replying in the following way:
If I say that a black box has travelled on its own, from Mumbai to Washington, most will question the veracity of this statement. But if I say that a human being has travelled like that, the statement will be less questionable. This is because a human being is more complex than a black box. Thus we can expect the human being to have greater properties or abilities than the black box, which is why the human being can be expected to travel on his own but the box can’t. Similarly God being more complex than matter has more versatility than the latter. Thus one can expect God to have always existed on His own whereas matter needs a Creator.
HpS - Very neat.
Another explanation could be that empirically we observe that every effect has a cause. If we take any object and observe its cause and then find out the cause of that cause and proceed like that then we end up with a regression which either ends or doesn’t. If the regression doesn’t end then we end up with an infinite regression, which becomes inexplicable. If we consider that the regression terminates then all matter has to have had an origin, which implies the existence of a self caused cause of all causes. This explanation was given by Thomas Aquinas, a Christian Theologian.
Maharaja, I will be very grateful, if you could kindly consider my reasonings and give your kind impression of them, and/or if you have anything additional to say.
Your servant
Jashodev
HpS - AGTSP. Thank you for your letters. I guess one thing is that all these arguments depend on a certain logical structure. We use Euclidean geometry to organize our thoughts, reality, but others make the obvious comment that even in the actual world there are cultures that use different logic. Why can't there be an infinite regression. At least beyond our ability to reason. Why do we assign one cause to things. Why not accept that many causes are interacting with many things to produce many results in a way that really does not reduce down to unique points and lines.
This is like Statistical Mechanics, no? At least it may be useful to consider these things with our intellectual, cultural tools, but in the end the honest mind comes to the conclusion that we need to be informed by a higher authority that knows.
O.K??
