It is said that atheists cannot prove God doesn’t exist, which is true. Therefore we ought to believe he does exist, as a precaution. If we treat this reasoning as valid, it follows that Christians likewise cannot disprove Super God, who resides within a realm beyond the one God inhabits.
This is because Super God possesses all the same qualities which make God unfalsifiable, such as intangibility, invisibility and undetectability, per Divine Hiddenness. You will find all or nearly all Christian apologetics for God also map neatly onto Super God, just as arguments against the existence of Super God also apply to regular God.
A Super God (the apex of Aquinas’ gradient of being, per the 4th out of his 5 ways of knowing) would stand in judgment of regular God, in much the same way God is said to stand in judgment of humanity. Since it’s a logical impossibility to be certain of one's own omniscience, as knowing everything you’re able to know is subjectively indistinguishable from knowing everything there is to know, God can never be sure there is no Super God watching him.
Therefore, per Pascal’s Wager, and allowing that the impossibility of disproving an unfalsifiable proposition is reason to believe it’s true, it follows that God ought to believe in Super God as a precaution. It also follows that if God, at any point, has behaved in a way which met with Super God’s disapproval, Super God would’ve annihilated God. Over an infinite timescale, the odds that God has displeased Super God closely approaches 100%.
Now, God is said to reside in a timeless realm outside our reality. Therefore if God were annihilated, he would then never have existed from our standpoint, disappearing simultaneously from our past, present & future.
We must then conclude one of three things: Option A, “you can’t disprove God” and Pascal’s Wager aren’t in fact logically sound arguments and Christians are wrong to find them compelling (which they must, as they frequently repeat both) Option B, that God has somehow, in infinite time, never once displeased Super God, despite not knowing what it expects of him. Option C, that God has displeased Super God at some point, was annihilated outside time, thus never existed from a human perspective and this is the reason for his apparent nonexistence and non-intervention outside of the Bible.
Which is it?
This is interesting. I'm not sure if I've come across the Super God scenario before. Maybe this is original work. Most apologists I've seen just define God as the ultimate in all ways, always having been around with no need for a creator. Nothing is superior to this God. But I like the idea that they say we need a creator more complex than us, so why doesn't God also require that? Good point!
my thoughts lately lean more towards, why do people feel their God is real, rather than proving that He is or isn't real. After seeing a video, I read a book by John C. Wathey and I like his idea that we feel like there is a God because we had a god, our parents. Mom showed us unconditional love (ideally) and dad taught us what society demands of us, as a superficial summary of Wathey's work. I think we are primed to think about heaven and hell and god and demons from the universal experience of being born, which is kind of being cast out of paradise, a kind of death of a previous life where God, our mom, gave us everything we needed without condition. Same kinds of things happen in our first 2 years. We don't always see them but we know they are there. We beseech and supplicate by reaching out and crying and hoping that they are near and come back to fulfil our needs. Kind of like how adults pray to God and sometimes feel God is with them and other times not.
Anyway, too long of a comment already, so I'll just drop in a video of Wathey if anyone is interested. I wonder if you've heard of him, or this type of naturalistic explanation of religion. I think he picks off where Pascal Boyer left off, in his book Religion Explained.
Thanks for the thought provoking post!
Thank you as well, for the thought provoking comment.