Does God Exist?

Abstract

The various models of God that we have considered do not exclude one another and we will draw elements from them in understanding what God is like in our final chapter. But they do agree that God exists not as another object in the world but as the ground of all. He is an objective Being who manifests himself in the world yet is transcendent. The scriptures assume his existence and it was left to the various philosophers and theologians of each faith to argue for it. We will consider some of these arguments in this chapter. Philosophers, sociologists and psychologists have seen God as a projection of man (Feuerbach), the opium of the people (Marx), the illusion of those who have remained infantile (Freud), and the symbol of society (Durkheim). Such scepticism is not a particular symptom of modernity for Gibbon pointed out that the various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

If from the indubitable fact that the world exists, someone wants to infer a cause of this existence, his inference does not contradict our scientific knowledge at any point. No scientist has at his disposal even a single argument or any kind of fact with which he could oppose such an assumption. This is true, even if the cause — and how could it be otherwise — obviously has to be sought outside this three-dimensional world of ours.

Heisenberg