Does God Exist?

For these next couple of posts, I'd like to wax philosophical. I've developed my own little proof as to the existence of God. Note that my personal beliefs are not present in this argument and are in no way reflected by. I thought the creation of this was an interesting exercise in philosophy. Also, I had just read a bunch of Thomas Aquinas, so please excuse all the references to him.

Does God Exist?

Immediately, upon having been asked this question, one is given to answer simply; yes or no. I, however, would like to justify myself in my beliefs much the same way Saint Thomas Aquinas has.

First, I would like to display my disappointment at Saint Thomas Aquinas’s argument that God exists. He begins by addressing two well thought out objections as to the existence of God, yet not once does he truly refute these objections in his argument. The first objection is simply that if God is infinite goodness, how can there be any bad; and the second objection, since we can deduce that all things may be reduced to having a singular purpose –to be “natural”- then there is no need to “suppose the existence of God.” I will later show Saint Thomas Aquinas’s argument more concretely, but let me first address these two objections. It is not safe to assume God is by definition infinitely good. If He were, it is fairly safe to assume that everything would be perfect, yet reality is not so. Also, were this definition biblically based, we may clearly see that hundreds of times throughout the bible God does perform acts that are not wholly good. The bible’s definition of god is contradicting even there, so the definition of God as “infinitely good” cannot be agreed upon, and is therefore moot as an assumption on which to base an argument. Even were God to be infinitely good, Augustine’s refutation of the argument that god doesn’t exist holds: God may be infinitely good and still exist because, being good as He is, He leaves evil to better creation.

The second objection may more easily be refuted by improving upon Saint Thomas Aquinas’s proof of God’s existence. Aquinas’s point was that, if all origins were traced to the VERY beginning, there must be some first causal point. The earliest of all of these can now be defined as the “Big Bang,” or the rapid expansion of the known universe and all matter from a tiny point. However, this draws the question, what started that? Surely, this must be the origin of all that we know, and according to Aquinas, that would be God. If the stipulated definition of God is that God is the thing which is the original cause for all that was to come later, we may therefore define God as the thing which caused the Big Bang (which in turn created everything that we know today from a string of events around 14 billion years long). At this point, one may be saying in argument that the assumption that the Big Bang is in fact a reality begs the question. However, I point to recent scientific progress that supports the existence of the Big Bang (see also last week’s response for further elaboration on this point). If the Big Bang exists, and God is the thing which created the Big Bang, then God, by definition, exists.