Is God's Existence an Existential Claim?

It seems obvious that a claim of the existence of something would be an existential claim.  That seems to be the contention of this blogger.  However, this is not necessarily the case.  For instance, the existence of a universal law would be a universal claim.

The problem is that in order for God to exist, it must be the case that certain other beings do not.  God is taken to be the supreme being.  What this means is that God is more powerful than any other being.  In fact God is so powerful that the combined might of any other set of beings would be less than that of God.  For example, if a being could be overpowered by a faction of angels then this would not be the god of a monotheistic religion.

Thus the statement that God exists is in a sense universal, since the existence of any set of beings that could overpower the most powerful being that exists would contradict the claim.  However, it is not strictly universal either.  If you find a being that is very powerful and then find two or more beings whose combined power would exceed that of the first being, you have not come up with a disproof of God's existence.  For all you know there could be a being more powerful than any you have seen.

For this reason the existence of God would be what Karl Popper called a metaphysical assertion.  There is no observation that you could make that would contradict it, nor is there any observation that you could make that would justify it.

The assertion seems implausible, since it goes against a pattern we have seen in those beings that we have observed.  For instance, each animal is part of a species.  There will always be a number of such animals whose combined power will exceed that of any one such animal.  In fact, all beings that we have observed seem to be the destructible products of evolution.

What can we say about the statement that all beings are the destructible products of evolution?  Most of the evidence for evolution depends on looking at a large number of different organisms to determine that they are related.  Evidence of path dependence could be taken as evidence for evolution.  This is the only evidence that we could find in an individual organism.  One example is the nerve that carries signals from the brain to the larynx.  It branches off of a larger nerve cord a little above the heart and then continues down and loops around an artery and goes back up to the larynx.  Obviously this is not the optimal path.  It would be much easier for it to branch off much higher and then go directly to the larynx.  However, since in its evolutionary development it cannot sever itself and then re-connect on the other side of the artery there is no incremental set of steps that it could undergo in order to reach that superior design.

I suppose if we were to find one being that didn't appear to be related to any others that we had seen, had many complex features and showed no evidence of path dependence in any of them, we could take that as evidence that that particular being was not a product of evolution.  This would depend on the probability that a feature that evolved would exhibit path dependence of this sort.  If we had enough complex features the probability that none of them would exhibit path dependence could become quite improbable.  However, if you were to look at enough different beings then you might find one that fit this description by chance.  If you look at enough things you are likely to find something unusual or improbable.

Finding such a being wouldn't be evidence of God's existence.  It would only imply that it would be likely that there was some intelligent design in the formation of such a being.  For example, if some species of extra-terrestrial intelligent life were to remove defects of the type described above, and one such being made its way to Earth.  Indeed humans might one day decide to remove the defect mentioned above along with our blind spots for all of our descendants.  This wouldn't make any of them God.  Intelligent robots wouldn't be God.

We would have to weaken our conjecture to state that all intelligent beings were either products of either evolution, the products of evolution, the products of those products, or so on ad infintum.  That is that wherever intelligence comes into existence where it hadn't existed before, it is as a result of evolution along with the assertion that all such beings come into existence.  This would be a metaphysical assertion.  There is no evidence that would refute it or confirm it, since we would have no general way of telling whether or not a being was constructed by beings that evolved, although this might seem like a reasonable assumption in a given instance.  Moreover, we would need to have some way of telling whether a being had come into existence or always have existed.

In general when we see something that could have been formed by processes that we can see or infer from what we see or otherwise sense, then we are not justified in making up some other cause that we don't know about.  In any case we are not justified in making up a cause to explain anything.  I don't think that we know enough to assert that some being created the universe, nor do I see how such an assertion would help us.

Religion will always go further than this.  The popular ones have assertions about what the creator wants from us: the commandments that He allegedly gave to us through scripture.  But humans can write books and issue commands, so the burden would be on the person asserting that these books and commandments couldn't have come from humans.  We have a known and observed method whereby they can come into existence.  In my opinion, the religious have failed to meet that burden.