Godddd

Everybody wonders at one point in their life, “why am I here?” This is not one of those questions that you ask yourself when you are at a wrong place, but more serious one, like Why am I existing? This question about the existence of one’s being is perhaps what characterizes human being from other living creatures. I can imagine probably other animals are too busy with surviving to think about all these things — or perhaps, they do not even have the brain capacity to put themselves under the light of skepticism or close introspection of self. Nonetheless, we humans ask ourselves sometimes the reason for our existence. But this question, we will soon realize after some contemplation, cannot be answered unless we have some understanding of higher being that might exist. Indeed, no matter how you try, this following fact would never change: we are in the end the resultant being that does not contain the reason for our existence. In other words, we are the contingent being seeking an answer for our existence in the higher being that started this chain of causality. So, who contains the reason for its existence, you might ask. Let us assume that everything in the world has its causes — and this is the first axiom. Then, it becomes clear that the chain of event happening right now and things that exist — atoms and particle, my existence, and other people, and everything — are merely a contingent entity. In other words, all of the things I mentioned have their causes once you track down the chain of causality. Let us know assume that everything is contingent entity. Then, it is clear that everything will have its causality prior to its existence, but notice that if you assume that everything has its causality prior to its existence, infinite loop of causality will have to be presumed. And our practical reason tells us that this infinite loop of causality is impossible since it assumes that there is no start in this loop of infinite causality. How can things even originate without a start? The chain of causality would not have even started unless there exist some entity that originated this process. One more time, if there is no origin, then the chain of causality would not even have started!!
But we see things causing another thing one after another at this present moment — things are happening now. But if you assume that there is no origin, things would not even have started, and we will not be seeing what is happening: this chain of causality. Hence, there is a contradiction, and this contradiction arises from the denial of original entity. Thus, it becomes logically necessary to assume the existence of original being that started this chain of event, and you cannot deny the original existence because in negation of this assumption, you will be led to a self-contradiction. It is as if you have no choice but to assume the existence of higher being, the original being.
So at this point, proof is complete. God does exist and it has to exist because of the logical necessity. And this argument is called Cosmological Argument for God.

However, this argument has faced numerous attacks from other philosophers, especially those who are critical about the sense information and our experience that constitutes the human knowledge. They cast doubts upon their experience: they would ask themselves questions such as, “is my experience real?” or “how much can I trust my sense information?” “Is this experience pure and objective?” What if my senses are deceptive and once we receive information from the world, my sense will turn the information into some thing drastically different from the actual world. One of the most critical people to raise this doubt was none other than this famous german philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He regarded that there exits two different world, phenomenal world and noumenal world. Phenomenal world is the world that is perceived by human being and noumenal world is the world that is independent of our existence, meaning the world that might transcend our experience. And the noumenal world is the pure objective form of the world and the phenomenal world is the world with sense bias and filter. Having distinguished the difference, he asserted that our sense information can distort the noumenal world into something that we can perceive and that the phenomenal world therefore is not pure.
His another belief was that for humans to experience the world, the world we can perceive must conform to space and time, and only through the lens of space and time can humans perceive the world. In other words, he believed that it is us who project this notion of space and time to the world and the noumenal world itself might not conform to space and time — in some cases it transcends space and time. Hence, he thought that space and time only exists a priori in our mind and does not exist outside of our sense information. This belief of Kant created this whole doctrine named Transcendental Idealism. The word “transcendental” can be used to refer to things that are necessary for our experience and thus necessarily presumed in any intuition. For instance, imagine a cube. You will notice that by imagining a cube, you necessarily have to imagine the space that contains it, and it works for any kind of intuition. Indeed, it turns out that it is impossible for humans to have the intuition of something contrary to space, let us call it anti-space, because when you try to picture nothingness, it necessarily presumes the existence of space a priori. So Kant thought that this notion of space is what allows our experience to be possible and that the phenomenal world — the world filtered by our senses — must necessarily conform to this notion of space. And, that is the doctrine of Kant, and upon that basis, he claimed that it is impossible to assert something about the noumenal world that transcend our experience because this idea of causality, space and time, and even logic, might all be “transcendental” — meaning it might not exist in the objective world, i.e., noumenal world, the world before it is perceived by human senses. With this line of reasoning, he asserted that, since causality might not exist and physical object might not be the same object that we see in phenomenal world, we cannot assert anything about the noumenal world. Hence, the proposition that says “Everything has causality” becomes invalid because it asserts something about the noumenal world which we cannot even perceive. And thus, the Cosmological argument of God becomes entirely invalid under Kant’s doctrine.

The problem of Kant, however, is that he regarded space and time, and causality as something that we project to the world; that is to say, he thought that it is just an inner human construct and that it is just a filter only through which we can perceive of the world. But our common sense tells us that there exists an actual correspondence between noumenal world and phenomenal world and the difference is not that huge. Okay, maybe color might not exist outside of our senses, but we have a good reason to believe that the physical object exists and that space and time also exist. Hence, I want to conclude that space and time is not just something that allows our experience possible but something that actually exists in the so called noumenal world. The reason why we cannot perceive of things that do not conform to space and time is not because human senses are limited but because the world is made that way. Noumenal world after all was designed to conform time and space!! No wonder it is impossible to perceive of the world that transcends it! Poor Kant for making such an elemental error!! And his whole book — Critique of Pure Reason — is based on this idea of space and time as pure a priori and the rest of the book tries to prove how this synthetical a priori — our experience and knowledge — is made possible, so there is no point in reading his book if you reject his first premise (i.e., axiom), which is space and time are transcendental and pure a priori.

Now that we resolved the issue, let us go back to the beginning and talk about the reason for our existence. We know that we do not contain ourselves the reason for our existence because we are contingent being, i.e., the resultant being. So, to know the purpose of our existence, we need to know something about this causal being, the being that started this chain of causality. And you might be wondering how can I know about something that we cannot even see or touch? This God that started the world. How can I know about him?? Well, the answer is quite simple. If the world is his creation, by looking at the creation we can make some inference regarding the original being!! As you observe that world, you notice some coherence and laws necessarily, and that tells something about the original being God.

You might be wondering, “What are the characteristic of God, then??”

To that question, I have to say you are asking too many questions at this point. And I have to recommend a book for a curious person like you. It is called Divine Principle written by Rev. Sun Myong Moon!! And it is available for everyone across the world if you ask for it!! Thanks for reading! Please do reach out to me if you are curious ;)

So I wrote this entire passage just to kill my free time in the airplane… But I hope you found this interesting!