by Darrin A Yarbrough

Created on: January 08, 2011

In the philosophy of religion this question is posed, “is God delusory or veritic?” Delusory meaning, is God an internal construct within the human mind, or is God a substance “in” and “of” itself formed from an external source. This argument very quickly deteriorates into a circular form of tautological reasoning. The reason stems from the fact that we are always prisoners within our own perceptions. What this means is we cannot experimentally verify either side of the question because we can never get outside our “self” to look at the problem (curiously, the same problem applies to numbers being real). Since this is the case, this author proposes that there is no reason to examine the validity of the question since there is no basis for differentiation. In the absence of a basis for differentiation, there is no real way to develop a logically congruent explanation useful for either side of the debate, why then, choose the invention side?

Because God is an anthropocentric concept (anthropocentric-being of and/or about humans for the use of humans) that serves only to satisfy certain intellectual parameters human beings seem to require but do not necessarily need to support the remainder of  the Universe. Immanuel Kant is noted for observing that human beings have an enormous capacity for reason but we do not use it correctly. “We already have all of the answers we just need to ask the right questions.” What then can we assert is the right question in this case? This author does not think posing God as a delusory or veritic character in this context is a coherent question. Instead, we can imagine a world or dimension where souls, spirits and our creator transcend concepts like internal and external and rather travel together as one.

By reinventing the circumstances as we have just done, concepts like an “invention of the mind” or “true” become irrelevant. Another concept in the philosophy of religion known as the “ontological argument,” holds that if a God can be conceived and believed then it follows he (or she) must exist. This is the most internally consistent argument for the existence of a God. The second philosophical argument is known as the “cosmological argument.” The study of cosmology as it is now known holds that Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the most consistent theory of what is actually observed in the Universe. Taking

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