OrangePhilosophy

Everyone has his own conviction about whether God pre-exists to humankind (and has probably created it) or is a creation of human minds. Everyone has his own conviction and it is something personal to embrace the one or the other alternative.

Nevertheless, when this issue is brought from the mere personal level to an academic discussion I have certain doubts about where it can yield a result. Do you think it is a question that can be answered philosophically or scientifically?

Methinks that the status of God transcends the scope of Philosophy and Science.

If you ask someone (1):

(1) Do you believe in ??

Someone can ask in return:

(2) Please, define ?.

This is sort of correct in Science and in Philosophy. If you substitute Quantum Biology for ? the dialogue may go on in a really academic way. Now, if you substitute God for ? in (1) and (2), the result is odd. Most people can get angry with (2), or do not feel the necessity of making it. Some could argue that If you believe in God, you won't need definitions, a statement that in the case of Quantum Biology would be odd to say the least.

And may God bless us all for this limitation.

The question of God's existence not only transcends the scope of philosophy and science, it is ridiculous to ask. This is because the himan brain has not evolved to the point that it can affirm the existence of anything that is not perceivable by any of our senses nor deducible from something that is perceivable by one of our senses. So why ask the question? Why not ask instead about the existence of invisible hippopatami flying around over our heads? Only because some people would like God to exist and few care whether invisible hippopatami fly around over our heads.

Where you see a ? it was supposed to be an alpha. I do not know what went wrong.

Anyhow. Invisible hippotamai could in theory be brought to a lab and undergo some experiments. But how can you pick an omnipotent being and submit it to some experiment? I do not see how.

But the case is more complicate. It is not only because some People like the idea that God exists independently from human conceptual creations, or that others want to prove that God is just a conceptualisation or a product of human minds. The problem is also that People usually want to bring certain issues to certain arenas of public discussions, as if such arenas were the appropriate fora for such debates.

Well, we get a paradox in the case of submitting the existence of God to scientific inquiry, if God is defined as:

(*) The almighty One.

For science to be able to study an omnipotent being, Science would have to be an omnipotent entity. Then, it turns out that Science satisfies (*), i.e., Science becomes God accordingly to (*) and to study God simply consists of Science studying itself. But that is not the idea. Neither is it common sense to substitute Science for the traditional notion of God.