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The Existence of God - Real or Otherwise
By God-Musings.com | July 19, 2008
Some atheists not only do not believe in God, they also do not like people who believe in God.
Some go as far as to refuse to ‘allow’ believers to believe in the existence of God, based on the premise that they are deluded and need waking up, and attempt to convince them otherwise.
The truth is - and this fact can never be denied nor disproven - believing in God brings a tremendous amount of relief, meaning and peace to many. It often does wonders. It ‘works’.
My question is, what’s the point?
Let me try and draw an analogy.
I remember remarkably little of what I learnt in my formal civil engineering training. But I vaguely recall that in soil mechanics, or foundation engineering, or something like that, there is this assumption that is used in calculating soil stability and the like.
Basically - I have no idea how it was arrived at - but there is a certain coefficient which we use in all our calculations. Some smart guy probably derived it decades or centuries ago.
Okay, so it’s a coefficient, what’s the big deal?
The thing is, if I recall correctly, we were told that the figure is just some arbitrary assignation - therefore, it does not ‘exist’ per se.
Exist? How can a number ‘exist’?
Well, pi ‘exists’. If we take take the circumference of any circle, and divided that figure by its diameter, presto! We get pi.
The coefficient supposedly does not exist. It’s not real. It’s arbitrary. It’s assigned. An assumption. A presumption. Delusion. Whatever.
But you know what? It has worked for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, in the construction of structures and buildings. Should we then say that the belief and use of that coefficient is sheer delusion, harmful (by virtue of the fact that only deluded people use it), and therefore stop using it altogether?
Worse - should we tear down all buildings which have been built using that coefficient?
Another example, current - the electrical kind. We use current in calculating electricity. When we draw diagrams, we point the arrow from the positive end to the negative end.
Yet, apparently, current doesn’t exist either. Yup. Electrons run from the negative end to the positive end. Current is just some imagined thing. But heck, we use it in all our computations anyway.
I’m not saying that the existence of God is untrue. Nor am I saying that I don’t believe in it.
All I’m saying is, there is sometimes, or maybe often, a thin line between ‘existence’ and non-existence. And that’s certainly the case for the existence of God.
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