Proof of God

[Hatshepsut]

Rene Descartes has explained this fact in his third Meditation roughly like this:

1. We have ideas of many things.
2. These ideas must arise either from ourselves or from things outside us.
3. One of the ideas we have is the idea of God—an infinite, all-perfect being.
4. This idea could not have been caused by ourselves, because we know ourselves to be limited and imperfect, and no effect can be greater than its cause.
5. Therefore, the idea must have been caused by something outside us, which has nothing less than the qualities contained in the idea of God.
6. But only God himself has those qualities.
7. Therefore, God himself must be the cause of the idea we have of him.
8. Therefore, God exists.

Trusting this is what Descartes argued, we can have at it beginning with premise (2), which introduces an artificial dichotomy. Why does the source of an idea have to be either inside or outside ourselves? Why can't it arise from a response we have to an outside thing, so that both inside and outside are involved? If we've passed on (2), then the conclusion in (4) itself adds a new premise, that no effect can be greater than its cause. Yet we have abundant examples of effects (Atlantic hurricanes) which are much greater than their initial causes (tropical waves over the Cape Verde Islands). We could add the sun heating ocean water as an additional cause and say that the energy dissipated by an effect cannot exceed the energy supplied by all its causes, to rescue (4). But once we get to (5), we must ask why the idea of God must have either the energy of God or some "greatness of qualities" he mentions there which God may have. The idea is not the thing idealized. I'm seeing a bit of Jello quaking here.

I'm pretty hip to God, but arguments along various lines-cosmological, ontological, first cause, and so on-have been running for centuries with no positive results. I don't believe the existence of God can be proved using any of the commonly accepted tools for reasoning. If things like quantum foams and inflationary epochs likewise are purely speculative, at least they can be analyzed within the rubrics of mathematical physics and some relation between them and the present state of the universe be derived and thus rendered plausible.

I propose that we accept God without proof. Perhaps based on the age-old prevalence of religious beliefs. I've heard the story that gods were invented to fill roles of agency for the frightening unknown, i.e. a god of storms to account for lightning, which we then conveniently know is caused by electrostatic discharges. I don't really buy that early peoples were so fearful as we suppose; they bravely confronted things much worse than summer thundershowers. In general, when humans coin a noun for something and begin talking about it, they are responding to some aspect of reality, not just to a mass delusion. So I accept that religious belief is a response to something real. However, I'm not foolish enough to think this constitutes an existence proof.