What is or who is "God"?
My relationship with Christianity is long and confused. It certainly didn't start early in my life because neither of my parents were believers. The first time that Christianity disturbed my life was at school where it was imposed with little discussion and therefore was perceived as an inconvenience. When I left the Army I visited a few churches local to our house in Oxford but that went nowhere.
My next experience with religion strangely enough was triggered by my daughter when one day she decided that she wanted to join the choir and of she trotted. I like to believe in “signs” and I took this as a sign that I should go to church as well. I don’t remember how long that lasted.
Eventually, in about 1970 I started studying with the Open University and spent a year or so taking a module on theology. My main thoughts on the course was that it was based on attempting to prove or disprove the existence of God by logic and beautiful as such arguments were I was not impressed because I thought that one cannot prove such matters by logic such as, “Someone or some being must have created this world”. One either believes or does not.
Arguments for the existence of God that I met studying at the Open University.
Ontological argument.
Anselm's ontological argument purports to be an a priori proof of God's existence. Anselm starts with premises that do not depend on experience for their justification and then proceeds by purely logical means to the conclusion that God exists.
Cosmological argument taken from Wikipedia.
In
natural theology and
philosophy, a cosmological argument is an
argument in which the existence of a unique being, generally seen as some kind of
god, is
deduced or
inferred from facts or alleged facts concerning causation, change, motion, contingency, or finitude in respect of the universe as a whole or processes within it.
The history of this argument goes back to
Aristotle or earlier, was developed in
Neoplatonism and
early Christianity and later in medieval
Islamic theology during the 9th to 12th centuries, and re-introduced to medieval Christian theology in the 13th century by
Thomas Aquinas. The cosmological argument is closely related to the
principle of sufficient reason as addressed by
Gottfried Leibniz and
Samuel Clarke, itself a modern exposition of the claim that "
nothing comes from nothing" attributed to
Parmenides.
Heaven, the afterlife, call it what you will.
I actually discussed this concept with my son and it covered what happens when one dies. We couldn’t accept that Heaven was up in the fluffy clouds where we would meet up with all our relatives and friends if we had behaved ourselves and we reached the provisional conclusion that Heaven was a collection of all that was good about those whom we had loved in some form of spirit but we knew that was a very loose description.
Why raise the question of God now?
I have been going to church again for the simple reason that I felt that I needed to so I waited until an Easter time a year or so ago and the question arose in my mind when a prayer was being made, “Just who or what am I attempting to communicate with?” Perhaps cynically, I thought that most of those in church may well pray to God but they had never given any thought to just who or what God was. So, there we are. I lay in bed or sit in my sofa and pose the same question to myself and I’m going nowhere with it. It would be so much simpler if I could have a C. S. Lewis experience where he wrote that he resisted the call from God and it was with reluctance that he eventually gave in.
