god is dead. maybe.

there's a saying (which i cannot find online since i don't remember the wording) that "god needs us as much as we need him." another is that "without us, god wouldn't exist." i think they're both true. if god does exist, he wouldn't "physically" cease to if people stopped believing in him. but in a very real way, he would no longer exist. ...until he convinced people to believe again that he did.

it's a little like the old "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" yes, of course it makes a sound. it fell, so it would because that's how gravity, sound, and reality work. but no, it doesn't really make a sound because there is no "observer."

ha, mixing existentialism and god. it's practically meta!


sartre wrote in his Existentialism and Human Emotions that "Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism."