PHI 208 Ethnics and Moral Reasoning
Instructor Mark Cohn
January 21, 2013
We don’t need proof of God existence.
Growing up in a Baptist family I was always told that we are protected by a higher power. The higher power to some is known as God. It has been many debates on whether God really exist. I ask my parent’s one day how do we really know if it is a God when we cannot see him? I was told in order to believe in God we have to have faith. According to Collins English Dictionary the definition of faith is describe as “faith confidence or trust in a person or thing, belief that is not based on proof, belief in God or in doctrines or teaching of religion, a system of religious belief”. People have to have faith in their heart to actually believe God who is unseen really do exist. It is easy to just believe that he do not exist because one cannot physically see or touch him. For people who believe we don’t need to see him or touch him to know that God is real. We do not need proof of god existence. At some point in our life we may question the existence of God. This type of questioning could happen for a numerous reasons. For example we hear about all the bad things that have occurred around the world we may lose our faith or wonder why does God allow these terrible things to happen? As humans we all have a natural instinct to try to find the answers to the things that we ourselves cannot understand. Many Philosophers have spent a great amount of their life time trying to prove or disapprove the existence of god, but do we really need proof that God exist?
This question may be tough for some to answer do to the fact that there are people that would say yes and then there are the other people that would say no. I myself have at one time in my life questioned the existence of God due to the fact that I have had my share of hurt in my life. With everything that has happened to me and others I can say that I have never lost my faith. I don’t need physical proof that God do exist. I pray whenever I feel the need to because I believe. When you ask someone why they believe in something most are likely to say it is because they have facts or some type of evidence as to why they believe. With this type of thinking the same thoughts can be applied to the way some people believe or do not believe in God. Many people believe because they have faith in the holy bible and that something more powerful than any other force had to create all the living things on earth. Others may believe that everything that is on earth could have evolved through science and therefore none of the creations on earth are proof that God exist, these people are often referred to as atheist or non-believers. When people think about an atheist they usually think that they worship the devil or are into some type of evil stuff but this is not the truth. A simple way to explain it is atheists just do not believe in God and they believe that science played a part in the creation of the world and the things on it and they have a right to believe just that.
Whether God exists or not depends on faith of a person. Believers will always be convinced that God exists and will always abide by the doctrines of their religions (Holley, 2011, p. 750). On the other hand, atheists will always argue that God does not exist and as such there is no need for religion. Faith is therefore the major aspect that determines the stand of an individual person on whether God exists or not. For example in 1943, Sartre in the analysis of Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure known as, that even for Sartre, Bataille and many others “God is dead” (Hoven, 2010, p. 75). Sartre further asserts that people have not become atheists despite this. Sartre also says that it is not simple to become an atheist since it took him a lot of time to leave Christianity. This happens to many other people and therefore they are held up by the doctrines of their religion. If the