In Fear Is No Way To Live

We have so far assumed the law of causality and individual desire for happiness. Causality implies the consistency of reality, consistency of truth. The primacy of reality has been asserted in that everything that is real is bound by the natural laws of reality. It was shown that if a God were to exist he must abide within reality and be bound by reality.

It was just shown that since believing in a God will lead to a better life than not and since living by truth must always be followed by greater happiness than living by a falsehood (opposition to reality), a God does exist. Now we must begin to establish what this God is and what it is not.

The entire argument is based on a God that we are better off for having. The first defining attribute of God then must be that God is a being whose existence enriches our existence. This is the type of God that belief in will lead to a more happy life than not believing in.

A God being has two motivation potentials: fear and joy. These are completely opposite motivation styles and are not mutually compatible; a being that motivates by fear cannot also motivate by joy and vice versa. A God who motivates by fear would threaten things that are feared by people. Separation from loved ones, loneliness, destruction, abyss, the unknown are possible threats. All of these have been threatened by supposed Gods in history. A God who would will your misery is a bastard of the foulest kind. This God does not enrich your existence and cannot be God. In fear and misery is no way to live. These things can only be indicators of attempting to live in opposition to reality and the source must immediately be found and corrected.

A God who motivates by joy would do things that earn trust, that demonstrate to us how accomplishing his will accomplishes our goal of happiness. This God must be tried. Experiment is the only way to rationally build trust and what might be called faith. Faith in its true sense is believing something that is true, rationally and causally defined. It is possible to believe something is true without yet knowing how it's true; without knowing all the causal relationships that make it true. But those causal relationships must surely exist and an explanation that is wholly in harmony with natural law will be forthcoming for all true principles if sought. Those who seek the principles have faith; those who do not seek are blind and faithless regardless of the truthfulness of the principles. God must earn our trust, little by little, just like any other person. The God who will enrich our lives is different in that he will never let us down, never do anything to setback our trust like people would from time to time. This type of God surely does enrich our lives by providing an anchor to our character and establishing a perfectly happy being which we can emulate; he would want us to emulate him because his happiness is increased by our happiness.