Core Assumptions and Principles #1: There Is No God

Ok, so I set myself an obvious task of taking my professed core assumptions and expanding and exploring them each one by one. This however is a huge task and one that will hopefully never be truly exhausted, or at least that is what I am going to tell myself to let myself off the hook of having to complete it... I am starting with what I listed as #1 though I assume in the future I will jump around on the list. Also in the future I will attempt not to pad the top of the post with this kind of reflection on the project itself though that is far from a promise. Obviously arguing against the existence of God is a massive task in and of itself given the number of centuries spent arguing the subject and mostly in the pro direction so I will not attempt to take on each argument and refute them all because I do not consider the burden of proof to be on me and mine. I cannot prove God doesn't exist nor do I really want to persuade believers to come to my perspective. It is my intention merely to establish the fact that the existence of God is not necessary to my broader philosophical project and that through the removal of this belief I have opened the door to a deeper and I maintain more accurate understanding of the world around us. I do not deny that faith in God or a higher power may serve a function in the human experience, though I do question its value and whether its negative effects do not outweigh whatever good it might be doing us. My arguments no doubt owe a deep debt to many who have come before me and it is one I hope to catalogue in the future but at least for the moment I will simply acknowledge that it exists and say that it is owed most deeply to the works of Nietzsche, Dawkins, and Hitchens, as well as no doubt to many others I will think of as I go.

One of the key arguments in favor of the existence of God is the necessity of a creator as nothing can come from nothing. This is a compelling logical assertion but it contains its own downfall. Where did God come from? If the universe could not have sprung spontaneously from a void how is it that God existed, what was before him? The answer commonly given to this is the mystical response that God, by the virtue of being God, does not need to be created because he has always been... But then why could not the Universe have always been? I do not necessarily consider this answer to the question of how the Universe came to be, that it simply has always been, satisfying but it certainly seems more appropriate than that there is a consciousness which has always been which brought the universe into being through powerful means which themselves are essentially unknown.

God is a creation of the human mind, but most importantly God is a weakness of the human mind, and for lack of a better term the human spirit. It is a fundamental aspect of humanity to desire knowledge and understanding, this is the well spring of the concept of God, as explanation for the unknown, but God is a poor explanation because it is no explanation at all. [Perhaps it is no weaker than my own existentialist explanation, that there is no why behind it all only the fact that it is as it is... but I would maintain that rather than closing the debate with the steel trap of God the contention that there is no essential why to it all leaves the course of wonder wide open encouraging the mind to explore further to understand all that there is which can be understood before the void of chance meets the limits of human capability.] In the early days of human intellectual investigation it might have seemed sufficient to say that the rain came from a man in the sky, but once people began to learn what really caused the rain we moved beyond this. Interestingly many of the earliest mythic systems contained a creation story about the Gods themselves coming into existence, or even had the earth and universe pre-existing the Gods, it was only as the need for the Gods to explain phenomena in the world did people begin to give the Gods eternal natures and make them the creators out of fear of eliminating any need for the existence in the first place.

I am publishing at this moment as I have promised to post once a day, but this is far from finished... I have noticed that I have promised to come back and rework many things in the past and have not really been doing it but I definitely will be back to this...

The Big Paper Topic Announcement

Yes it is finally here, after 3 days of radio silence, in which I would love to claim I was doing all sorts of important things which precluded me from keeping my promise to post at least once a day but instead I was just being lazy and avoiding even this minimum level of responsibility which I put onto myself in the first place..., I have decided on my topic. It should come as no surprise that I have chosen to go with the only thing I put forward as an option which had any actual content to it. I will be writing about the inherent value/valuelessness of human life in regards to Schopenhaurs essay On Suicide in terms of modern ethical questions surrounding end of life care and physician assisted suicide. I am going to look to keep the content contained and the work short. I will also however be looking to make the whole thing a well considered and constructed piece.