Philosophy - A Dialogue Twixt Fiction and Faction

“Do you believe in God?”

“ . . . ”

“Well, do you?”

“The frame of your question, it is . . . loaded.”

“ . . . What?”

“Have you ever said the word ‘white’, ten times fast?”

“Mm . . . no.”

“Give it a swing.”

“White-white-white-white-white-white-white-white-white-white.”

“Now, what does a cow drink?”

“Milk . . . wait, what - ”

“That would be disgusting. 
A cow drinks water like any other sane animal.”

“That was mean, setting me up like that.”

“I could say the same to you,
if I felt set-ups were inherently malicious, as you seem to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The question you asked me, whether I 'believe in God', that was a set-up.  Where else do you hear that word conjunction ‘believe in’ . . . what was the moral of that train story again, what’s it called, the little engine that could?”

“ . . . Believe in yourself?”

“Right.  And when our best friend is depressed or down on their luck, we’ll put our hand on their shoulder and say something to the effect of ‘Don’t worry man, I believe in you.’  When we do this, are we expressing our conviction that our friend exists before us?  That they are not an illusion?”

“No.”

“Of course not!  Our hand on their shoulder is enough to assure us of that, if all our experience preceding these moments weren’t.  We are expressing our conviction that we believe in our friend’s ability to accomplish their goals, our concurrence with the aims of their will as they would express it.”

“But that’s not what I’m asking you now,
what I’m asking you is whether you think God exists.”

“Why should that matter to you?”

“I'm just making conversation . . . 
but you keep answering my questions with questions!  That’s annoying, and not in the least a bit rude, you know!”

“Annoying to those who loathe speculative thinking, perhaps.  Perchance, do you think Jazulets exist?”

“ . . . ”

“Go on, answer the question, yes, no, or maybe.”

“Maybe, depends on what a Jazulet is.”

“That is my answer to your question, nearly verbatim,
substituting ‘God’ in the place of ‘Jazulet’.”

“Well, God is the creator of the universe and everything in it,
the designer of life, and is all-powerful and perfectly good in all ways.”

“Do you think that he exists?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that is well enough for you then, I suppose. 
Again, I’m curious as to why you care if I share your opinion.”

“Because I care about what you think, the rightness or wrongness of it.  If you didn’t think that other existent things existed, I would be just as worried.  Just imagine thinking that your parents didn’t exist, or that trees didn’t exist!”

“Okay.”

" . . . "

" . . . "

“That was rhetorical, you don’t have to actually imagine that.”

“No, I'm wanting to, you’ve posed an interesting question to me at last.  Trees I’ve sensed before, I spent half my youth in the canopy of one or another tree.  But I can’t say the same of my parents, being as I’ve never met them.  I was adopted.”

“Oh.  Well, you know you had to have parents, even if you don’t know who they are, there’s no other alternative explanation for you being here.”

“You mean besides the possibility of my being genetically designed by bio-engineers and grown in-vitro to their blueprint’s specification, then sold on the black market to the highest bidder as an advertised super-baby with a bigger brain, quadrochromatic vision, and a whole list of other improvements?”

“Well, I guess that’s a possibility . . . but, no offense, we both know you’re no genius.  Arrogance does not become you.”

“Neither does chastisement become you, my friend, I was speaking purely hypothetically.   Now, ruling out our ability to rule out my parentlessness from my lack of designer genius, how can I rule out parentlessness from my being artificially engineered to my current admittedly lackluster specifications?”

“Well, we can’t do that.  Science hasn’t made it possible yet, if it’s possible at all.”

“And what if science is not the homogenous commune of information-sharing we might have presumed it out to be?  What if, like other avenues of play, it is prone to greed and secrecy and conspiracy, and progresses at different rates in different places?  Perhaps the science that made my parentlessness possible is not yet known to either of us.”

“Okay then, doctor speculation, you’ve got no parents.  You’re a freak of nature, a veritable abomination.  I don’t see what any of this has got to do with your belief or lack of belief in God... Sorry, the EXISTENCE of God.  Don’t want to confuse you with insufficient specification.”

“Well, you implied you cared about my beliefs in regard to God to approximately the same degree as you cared about my beliefs in regard to my parents, or trees.  I was just trying to work out the truth of my own lineage.  See, I know trees exist inasmuch as we can sense them in whatever way, and I can sense people as well, I can sense both of these things.  But I cannot sense the allegation of my being born from my mother’s womb in the way most men are observed to enter this mess of a world.  I don’t remember it happening!  Couldn’t you say the same?”

“Yes, but I can look at those other men being born, note the similarities between us, and conclude that I was born in a similar fashion to some similar mother.  There is no sense in supposing that I alone was deliberately designed by some unknown mad scientist somewhere, when I’ve been given no evidence for that!  It’s a bunch of egoistically grandiose sophistry!”

“Well, then how can you believe that all of us together were deliberately designed by this God you seem to want to talk about so desperately?”

“Well, the mad scientist is just a human, God is . . . much more than that.”

“More than human?  You mean he is one of those designer-babies?”

“No, I mean, he was the beginning, the designer of the very first humans.”

“And these first humans, to clarify, we are supposing to have been designed by the same birth-from-the-womb process as we’re supposing designed you and I?  The entirely non-deliberate process we’ve been presuming as true in both our cases?  I don’t suppose you have much say in which of your genes combine with which of your wife’s genes, when you come together to procreate . . . or recreate, as the motive may be.”

“I’m not married, but no...”

“Well then if God is that designer of life,
that esoteric reproductive principle that ensures the prolificacy of life upon this planet, sure, I believe he exists.”

“You know what, nevermind.”

“Why would you say that now?  Now that I’ve answered your question, there would nothing more for me to mind, in regard to your knowledge of my answer!  Take consolation in and appreciation of our agreement, for it is a rare and sacred thing, by my understanding.”