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If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Voltaire

Voltaire was a diest but a harsh critic of the Church (and religion broadly). Since Church authoritarianism is on the wane, I do not maintain such a visceral reaction to it. Today Voltaire and I might agree; God is helpful for the human capacity to reason; religion, not so much.

We need rationality. God helps.

So, why is God necessary?

Many reasons. But on the whole, I believe that enabling our human capacity to reason is the most important.

If God is real, reason becomes a true and remarkable gift from God since it alone has empowered humans, through derivative acts of their own creation, to construct all of civilization (and science).

Specifically, I have come to believe that, without reason, civilization’s development is beyond human reach. For example, Neanderthals, lacking reason yet surviving 300 thousand years across Eurasia through the ice age and numerous interglacials, did not produce a single civilization. They remained primitive hunter-gatherers living in caves until homo sapiens eventually drove them to extinction. Whereas over just a few thousand years, homo sapiens have produced many truly remarkable civilizations. Unfortunately, and this is the disconcerting but affirming part, homo sapien societies inevitably collapse when their citizens lose their capacity to reason. Moreover, with great civilizational success, the collapse in reason seems to accelerate. This is why civilizations have risen and fallen with predictable and destructive regularity since Sumar and Mesopotamia, and likely before.

The Four Truth Scenarios:

Above, there are two axes:

1. The horizontal is for absolute truth:
   1. Absolute truth exists;
   2. Absolute truth doesn’t exist;
2. The vertical for whether absolute truth can be ascertained:
   1. Yes;
   2. No;

That’s it. With regard to truth, there are no other scenarios.

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Applying philosophical first principles, truth is achieved when a hypothesis meets both the necessary and sufficient conditions. This is reason, and it is depicted by the truth requirements of quadrant 3 above (and explicitly no other quadrant). Reason is also outlined here in greater detail if you are interested.

In quadrant three, there is absolute truth, but in reason, an individual can never claim to know it –

A reasonable person might even conclude that quadrant 3 appears just like a framework for creation as produced by a divine creator. I perceive it this way. Or maybe, if you are an atheist, you might conclude that there is no creator. Nevertheless, creation itself exists. That much is guaranteed. It is undeniable. First, it is in the definition for reason, but without creation, i.e., absolute truth, the development of civilization is quite impossible. In addition, it is not a radical leap for me to hypothesize that a creator also produced creation, but that’s just me. Others can hypothesize an alternative explanation for creation. But, creation is a given. Otherwise, humanity would never have exited either quadrant 1 where narcissists operate, or quadrant 2 where tyrants (Kings and kingdoms) thrive. Nevertheless, it takes a person firmly planted in the subjective reality of quadrant 1 or the authoritarianism of quadrant 2 not to see creation. Presently, many don’t: postmodernists, Marxists, etc.

For the religious –

Verifying that a divine creator exists using human reason is not possible. While a creator is a compelling hypothesis, testing this theory with reason is impossible because a creator is divine, and the divine is beyond testing. See again the requirements of quadrant 3 above. Reason requires hypotheses to be disprovable, and the divine is not disprovable. But I am not alone in this conclusion. See St. Thomas Aquinas. He couldn’t prove the existence of God for the same reason—divinity. Fortunately, to receive reason (or Grace) from the creator, you need only accept that absolute proof of God or anything else is impossible. Nevertheless, a belief in God, because creation likely needs a creator, is readily accessible through faith.

Whereas in irrationality, i.e., God spoke to you, this may be possible, but the human mind is easily misled. This is why God or a creator is best accepted as a matter of faith. But that’s fine too. Faith is how other “divine” truths are established, making intergenerational morality possible. This enables different cultures to adopt and sustain culturally specific moral foundations.

A belief in God is best discovered in reason, not acquired through imposition –

God is discovered in quadrant 3 (Q3). Remember, for reason, creation is an absolute truth. It is not, therefore, irrational to ask or hypothesize who or what is the creator of creation.

Also, a humble recognition of a creator reminds the person that creation is not usually what they think it is. In other words, humans are not the star of the show. Instead, they are participants in it.

Whereas the alternative for God is not as constructive. When God is imposed (quadrant 2 / Q2), society inevitably reacts, eventually rejects, and necessarily retreats back to quadrant 1 (Q1) when an individual’s imposed truths are not affirmed with other beliefs already held by them. Crucially, also in imposition, a capacity to reason is undone. Eventually, even absolute truth is rejected. Humanity presently calls this belief system postmodernism:

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the “grand narratives” of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, the postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the “universal validity” of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

And so begins the end of civilization.

For some, the suffering and social isolation of Q1 potentially produces self-medication (alcohol and drug abuse) and a further retreat into quadrant 0 (Q0) or truth dissolution.