A Simple Proof

Being locked down and underemployed, I was at a loose end.

I therefore decided that, as all the existing proofs of God’s existence I had up until then read were hopeless, to attempt to formulate a new one.

Herein follows a preliminary draft of that which occurred to me.

I have no idea if these thoughts are very good or even original, but they are the ones that came out some days after I put the problem to myself:

A proof of God’s existence.

We can categorise things as good or bad. However, most of the things we categorise as good or bad are only aspects of a whole thing with a good side and a bad side. To accept the good bit means also to accept the bad.

By far, most things in the world fall into this category. For example: Death. Death is bad, but it is impossible to live in a world with birth and children, unless, eventually, we die. Death can be seen as a necessary bad aspect of living in a universe where you can have children, bring them up, teach them and be part of a long cycle with endless narrative complexity. One would prefer the meaning endowed by being a small link in a beautiful chain, than to be something bigger and fixed in a limited world.

The alternative to mortality would be stasis: a world of immortals would be static, dull and meaningless.

When considered deeply, most good things by necessity have a bad side. A beautiful whole divided into good and bad aspects.

So consider all things and their broad categories in terms of that which is required to build a functioning universe: There is the beautiful divided into good and bad in roughly equal parts. But outside of these, there is also evil.

Evil being along the same axis as good and bad, but by it’s nature not being just a extreme of ‘bad” but something altogether different.

What is evil if it isn’t just another bad required to pair with a good to make a beautiful whole? It is instead something entirely different and separate from the bad. It is a spirit of malevolence that gleefully inverts the values of good and bad in order to create pain and suffering solely for the sake of pain and suffering. It is a nihilistic spirit of destruction that celebrates death and hates life.

So we have a universe that consists of good, bad and evil. As the good and bad bits balance each other out, therefore, there must be another force, a force of super good, otherwise the evil would overwhelm everything and our world would rapidly spiral into a permanent state of unmitigated evil.