The Existence of God

I am almost entirely convinced that god does not exist. Almost. I am an atheist and have been for a year, so this may seem a belated statement to some...

But god was not a part of my decision to break from Catholicism, and by extension - religion. I thought quite a bit about the matter once I became old enough to seriously consider it. After years of casual pondering, a short while before my confirmation, I came to the conclusion that 1.) I don't 'believe' in god (i.e. I have no faith in him, no trust), and 2.) the metaphysical existence of god was beyond my comprehension and concern. But I believed in morality, right and wrong; so despite my abandonment of the concept of 'god', I still wanted religion.

I went through my confirmation with every intention of treating religion like a philosophy with lots of fairy tales. It was my job to sort through Catholicism and pull out the morals from the fairy tales, to find the essence of what is good. Religion was my ethics. I turned to science for everything else; the scientific method was epistemology, which was used to discover the metaphysics of the universe. That was about as sophisticated as I got at age 16 and I was happy with it. I wasn't entirely satisfied with my catholic ethics, but was content to settle down and unravel the whole thing.

The more I read the more critical I became of certain religious doctrines. But it wasn't until I read Ayn Rand that I questioned the innate goodness of religion, and by that time the only thing holding up my faith in religious ethics was my own rationalizations. These I promptly discarded after an emotional and somewhat dramatic experience, which I won't go into.

I have hesitated to call myself atheist, except out of expedience, because I still did not have any opinion or concern over the existence of god. After an argument with a friend about the nature of atheism (which I generally considered to be a form of idiocy) I decided to revisit 'god' and figure out the second part of the mystery.

The problem with this is the definition of god. There are two fundamentally differing ideas of what god actually is. First was the pagans, to them gods were metaphysical facts; literally super-humans. They existed in the same way the stars exist; obvious, but still incomprehensible to the technologically deficient humans.

Then there was a revolution and many pagan gods became one True God (Plato style). Many historians consider this revolution in terms of the number of god (i.e. gods vs. God, plural vs. singular). I think this misses the very key change in the definition of what god is. Suddenly god became something not of this world, literally super-natural, above or beyond the natural universe. Nowadays, god isn't described as something that humans don't understand, it is something humans can't understand. Any modern priest will balk when you ask him to point to god, because you can't point to god. God literally doesn't exist as we know existence; he is of a 'higher' existence.

Well, it's obvious that the latter 'god' doesn't exist; it is built into his definition. There is no other plane, realm, or universe; higher or otherwise. The universe is everything that exists. Everything. If you define god as not a part of the universe; as something that you can't, by its very nature, identify then it doesn't exist.

And that's all very well and good, but what if you define god as something that is in the universe, that does exist, that you can point to and identify and say "yep, that right there is god alright" as the pagans did. Then he could exist and we simply haven't yet devised a way to find him.

Now 'could' does not mean 'does', it means 'could'. That's what makes the former so easy to deal with and the latter so hard. With the former god, by definition, does not exist, but the latter is too open-ended for my comfort.

The only thing that I see resolving the issue is the idea that what exists must be proven to exist. In other words, (and I hate to divert a philosophical discussion towards the imaginary, but it demonstrates the point) just because one can't actually prove that pink unicorns don't exist doesn't mean that they do. The old cliché, "just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there" is wrong and misleading. We can't see air, but we can detect it; I haven't ever seen a million dollars at once, but I could; I have never seen nor detected god in any manner, but could I? That begs, how would I? I don't know. My gut reaction is to say that it's impossible and therefore god can't exist. But how it is impossible, I can't say.

Any ideas, I'm kind of stumped.