I call “casting out of nines” a series of arguments that some authors consider truly conclusive proofs of the existence of God and, on the other hand, others, equally competent, consider not to be demonstrative because they implicitly or previously assume what one intends to prove, that God exists. Let us suppose that they are not conclusive. It seems to me that, in any case, some of these arguments are like a “casting out of nines”, by means of which one verifies that rigorous demonstrations are indeed such. In the article “If God Did Not Exist”, I have made some suggestions in this regard.
No small argument is the list that could be made of things and events that would prove inexplicable, contradictory or distressing if God did not exist. And in this, it seems to me, lies the force of the arguments referred to: in that, starting from the existence of God, the most pressing questions of thought and of human life in general are explained. The famous phrase “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” is an irony with a background of truth. Karl Marx, for example, thought that God is an invention of man, an alienating idea, a projection of what man wants to be: the true sun for himself (Feuerbach). He did not realize that it is not a matter of an invention but of a discovery, which can be reached by a multitude of paths. For many are those that man must walk, and they cannot be understood if God is excluded from the explanation.
Such “proofs” require, like all of them, certain presuppositions, some premises, because one can never begin from zero. In Philosophy one must always go back to some pre-philosophical certainty, even though it is frequently necessary to subject it to a certain critical analysis so as not to fail at the starting point. The premises that we can now establish in order to move forward can be reduced to a few:
-The human capacity to know truths with certainty
-The fundamental intelligibility of reality; in other words: the disqualification of the absurd as an explanation of the real.
It may be objected that with such premises many philosophies are disqualified. And that is true. But I think that, strictly speaking, it is not too much to begin with. To say, like Sartre, that “man is a useless passion” does not seem acceptable to me. To spend hours and hours, pages and pages to arrive at such a conclusion has only one advantage, which perhaps is not small: to verify that the argument is false from its beginning. Which, by the way, is, in Sartre’s work, practically a dogma: that God does not exist.
If man is a useless passion, useless will be any search for meaning in living; useless will be both defending the existence and the nonexistence of God; useless to live and useless to die, useless to love or to hate, to beget or to clone human beings, to respect the person or to strangle him. It cannot be, it cannot be admitted that we are “so” useless beings. But Sartrean existentialism is a “casting out of nines”: it verifies that a coherent atheism, such as Sartre’s claims to be, begins with the negation of God and concludes in the negation of man. It starts with a claim to absolute freedom for man and culminates in the interpretation of freedom as a condemnation. -That is what I wanted to prove, Sartre would tell us. Indeed, he has achieved a “logic of atheism” by which one concludes the uselessness of that “passion” which is man. Now then, that logic, with its peculiar premises, explains nothing; strictly speaking it is not rational, because through it nothing is understood of the fundamental questions, about the origin and the meaning of existence. If the conclusion is the absurd, logic itself manifests as a non-logic, that is, as a contradiction that runs through the whole argument and falsifies it from beginning to end. More than rational discourse, it seems an enormous paralogism, that is, a sophism worthy of the greatest pre-Socratic sophists.
Author: Fr. Dr. Antonio Orozco Delclós
Source: Encuentra.com
