Back to index

1:25

(In »Everything is religion«)

But let us now return to our initial question: does God exist? We are talking here about the God of Christianity that Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced dead as early as the 19^th century. The atheist Dennett answers both yes and no to this question. What does not exist is the supernatural, omniscient and all-seeing God of which the Bible speaks, the God that created our world and everything else, and who sent his only son to our Earth for him to die a sacrificial death on the cross and thereby, in a transaction which in many ways is utterly unclear, purchase our liberation from our dreadful sins (that God himself thus takes no responsibility for despite the fact that he apparently created us as the wretched sinners that we are). At least this is what Dennett says, with reference to, among other things, the worthlessness of the “evidence” for God. Take for example Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, according to which God quite simply has to exist by logical necessity since God by definition is above all else, which means that God cannot lack existence, since this unthinkable scenario would make God incomplete and in at least one important respect inferior to all that indisputably does own existence, such as that saucepan on the stove containing the stew. And according to our accepted idea of God, God must then be above all else, in particular saucepans.