Does God exist or not, and why?
By Shivute Kaapanda [Think Tank Africa]
In his 2011 book titled “Sapiens; A brief history of humankind”, Israeli professor Yuval Noah Harari made a famous sweeping statement about humans’ social behavior as related to mythologies, that “the legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the cognitive revolution.”
He further stated that “…it’s relatively easy to agree that it’s only Homo sapiens that have evolved with the ability to speak about things that don’t really exist; one could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising it limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
As to the question whether God exists or not, to the unintelligent, this is a worrying question, but it’s not going to be a worrying question if it is to be located in the right context and directed to a conscious room activist philosopher of any age; for because the question does not fit the required standard of rationality, it is as though one is asking why humans exist or why mountains exist as though they were supposed to exist with an intended purpose.
The question whether God exist or not is relative, for in one way God means a lot of things to a lot and different people, for some God exists not just actually, for others only their God who exist and they do not have room to support the existence of other existing god, that is if there is any.
Given various world religions, there probably is believed to exist a god for every different religion; to an atheist, the existence of god should happen by evidence; faith is a blind trust and cannot be used to substitute truth in scientific evidence.
Whether God exists or not, for fair reasons we need to display reasons and do a comparative analysis of what faith means to different people as according to Dawkins.
[To be certain as to whether God exists or not] let us make use of Dawkins’ theory of Agnosticism by presenting the spectrum of probabilities as suggested by Dawkins in Chapter 2 of The God Hypothesis.
Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God or that of the supernatural is unknown or unknowable.
– Shivute Kaapanda is a critical pan African writer; this excerpt is lifted from his book ‘The Conscious Republic’.
