What is your opinion on existence of God?

Home - Quora Link

That God is like Roko’s Basilisk, an idea that doesn’t need to actually exist in order to have effects on people. God can exist without existing. He can be real without being real.

I make no bones about it, it was not possible to believe in the same God that believers believe in today, and atheists do their best to say they don’t believe in, before 1–2 thousand years ago. God, the magical non-physical all-loving superman at the heart of monotheistic religion, had to evolve as an idea in the minds of humans before He could actually take the stage he dominates today.

Deities used to be very physical, imbued into a physical artifact that people believed in was literally God. Didn’t make sense for them to consider an abstract, wholly non-physical God. Judaism showed them the way, Christians gave the idea the personification it needed with Jesus. Islam added total submission, that was a new one.

As someone that’s just on the cusp of calling himself a Christian after 20 years of running away from it, the very fact that atheists pick God, a singularly weird and strange idea that only a few of the extant religions of the world believe in, to be so thoroughly and utterly against, is only more evidence of His reality.

Note that I still didn’t say that God ‘exists’. I said God was real. We don’t have a good word in the English language to describe what God does. I’m happy saying that God doesn’t exist. He doesn’t need to exist, he’s bigger than that.

What does it mean to exist? Existence simply means that something is present and interacts with other things. God has no physical presence and does His best to hide despite people’s desperate attempts to find Him. God does His absolute best to convince people that He doesn’t really exist.

But to those that believe in Him anyway, God makes absolute sure that He is absolutely real to those people. What reality means is different than what existence means. Things that are real don’t go away. They stick around, despite your best attempts to get rid of them. God may not exist to atheists, but He’s certainly real to them. Otherwise they’d just ignore Him.

But atheists don’t want to ignore God. They want to take the society that the people that believe in God built, and just forget about all of the silly sky-fairy bits.