Does God exist?

 The question of God has troubled humanity for lifetimes. Whether it be Christians in Europe, Buddhists in India, or tribal religions through South America, faith in a higher being has been instilled in people around the world. 

This higher being guides us, looks out for us, cares for us, and is said to have created and holds power over everything around us. Whether you believe in Him/Her or not, God holds an important place in society. 

Now, I don’t think I’ll ever be confident in saying that God does or does not exist, simply due to the fact that the amount of unknown information about the world is limitless, and it seems naive to say with no hesitation that someone or something does or does not determine our fate. There’s the word you’ve been waiting for: fate. When I read literature like Oedipus, it’s easy to think that God controls us. How else would Oedipuius have fallen victim to his own prophecy? There must have been some unspoken force that led him to Laius, and even later Jocasta. 

But when you look at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that the entire presence of God through the play is a complete assumption. Jocasta, aware of the fact that Apollo has no credibility in creating a prophecy, states in lines 795-786 that “I won’t say from Apollo himself but his underlings, his priests”.  Insinuating that the prophecy must come from the priests undermines the supposedly unspoken belief that God is omniscient and can cause events to happen within the human world. Priests, which are clearly humans with a lack of spiritual powers, do not possess the power of God within themselves to prophesize and set forth the chain of events leading to Oedipuius’s downfall. 

Atheists, rather than theists, are said to be correct in their stance purely due to the fact that atheists make less assumptions. The assumption that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and good is often hard to believe. Morality, a tricky concept to grasp, becomes even more difficult as you look deeper at the root of humankind. How can God be a moral higher being, if the entire existence of morality is a set of rules with no rule book? Even Aristotle back in 340 B.C. said that in order for literature to make sense, “we accept it that the gods see everything”. Without these assumptions, many well-known plays and novels similar to Oedipus have no fundamental principle. I know what you may be thinking, probably the same thing my mother tells me every time I question her beliefs, that in order for God to exist, we must have faith that him/her will make the right decisions for us and that eventually, karma will persist. But as a seventeen-year-old in today’s world, it’s hard to believe that there is someone looking out for us as chaos ensues around us.

Looking at the other side, there seem to be no other explanations for certain things but God. Fast forward just about a hundred years and you’ll be taken to the setting of Orphan Train, a novel filled with flashbacks. Two girls, around 70 years apart, go through the same life stories in completely different settings. What else but God could bring them together? The elderly lady “orphaned at almost exactly the same age” (Kline 17), finally meets a child to express her maternal instincts. It must be fate. 

 

Only of my favorite TV shows, The Good Place is centered around the idea of heaven. God, rarely mentioned throughout the whole show, plays a minuscule role in the lives of the dead. The only overbearing character is a judge, the ending determinant of whether one goes to the “Good Place” or the “Bad Place”. Now somewhere around the fourth season, comes the game-changer. When overturning the entire system of where the dead may spend the rest of eternity, the main cast encounters many obstacles. God must have been the one to create the system, right? What other being has that much control over the lives of humans? 

Sometimes I end up staring at the world around me, amazed that it even exists, and the only reason for this beauty is that someone decided that in that moment, everything was meant to be. Fate is a tricky thing when you look at it, but sometimes I understand why having faith in those few moments holds true to how believing in God’s influence on us can truly change our lives.