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Monday Morning Greetings 2022 #15 – An Original Argument for the Existence of God

April 11th, 2022

Please excuse me again for a reprint. I was working on a post about a difficult doctrinal issue and it has been taking be an inordinate amount of time to finish. I’ll be back next week with a fresh post.

 

An Original Argument for the Existence of God

June 13, 2016

I am fascinated by apologetics, the discipline of defending the existence of God through reason. I have listened to and read the best apologetics, from William Lane Craig to Alvin Plantinga, and I have studied their arguments carefully. I even devised a public seminar called “Can God Be Blue? A Study of Krishna” based on apologetics, including arguments for God being a person and for that person being Krishna.

 

I coined what I thought was an original argument for the existence of God. I call the argument “The Argument by Coincidence.”

 

Basically, I argued that if a person carefully studies his own life, he will find a synchronicity between certain events, or “meaningful coincidences,” as Carl Jung termed them, whose probability of occurrence is so small that it is far more likely that the cause of those events rests beyond any random occurrence under the laws of nature. What makes the events even more improbable is the link between those external events and our inner life, as if the events were personally directed toward helping us grow. An example from Jung’s practice illustrates this phenomenon:

 

A classic illustration of synchronicity presented by Jung involved one of his patients, a woman with a highly developed rational mind—a fact that made her psychoanalytic treatment difficult. One day she was telling Jung about a dream she had had in which she received a golden scarab, a beetle with significance in Egyptian mythology. Just at that moment, Jung reported, he heard a noise “like a gentle tapping” on his window. When he opened the window, a scarablike beetle flew in. Jung caught the beetle and presented it to his patient, saying, “Here’s your scarab.” The stunning impact of this synchronicity overwhelmed the defenses of her rational mind and led to a breakthrough in her treatment.[1]

 

Here is a similar example from my own life:

 

I met the devotees in 1970 while visiting California during the summer break after my second year in college. While we were in Los Angeles, my friend received an invitation card from the devotees chanting on Hollywood Boulevard for a Sunday Feast at their new temple on Watseka Avenue. Four of us went and very much enjoyed the feast and chanting. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that we decided to chant nonstop on our drive the next day up Highway 1 to visit San Francisco. In San Francisco we specifically wanted to eat at one famous Chinese restaurant. When we finished, to our surprise, we saw the devotees chanting on the street right outside the restaurant. I immediately joined in, as I was already familiar with the chanting from our visit to the temple the Sunday before. When the chanting ended, we proceeded to find a place to stay by calling the various references and leads we had collected in our travels to the West Coast. The only person who was even the least bit accommodating was a young man who offered that we could sleep in our car in the parking lot of Kezar Stadium on the southeastern side of Golden Gate Park, smack in the middle of the city, and use the bathroom in his apartment across the street. When we drove into the empty parking lot, which we discovered was used only on Sundays for football games, we noticed that the back of the stores on Frederick Street faced us about twenty yards away. And when we looked up, we saw through a back window billowing smoke and robes. It was the Hare Krishnas working in their kitchen! I turned to my friend and said, “Holy cow, everyone in this city is into this!” We called out, “Hare Krishna!” Two devotees (Gaura Hari and Babhruvahan) leaned out the window at the beckoning four travelers and exclaimed, “Ah! Krishna has brought us four! Have some prasādam!” We were offered a tray of peanuts, raisins, and chickpeas, which we wolfed down with gusto. We stayed in that lot for the last two weeks of our summer break, visiting the temple daily and meeting many wonderful devotees such as Jayananda, Madhudvisa, and Locana dasa, to name just a few. The rest was history. We all became devotees.

 

Of course, not everyone in San Francisco was into this. That was the lone Hare Krishna temple in a city. I am not sure that what happened is exactly synchronicity, but the probability of this series of mutual coincidences—how I went to temple, met the devotees outside the restaurant, and was granted a place to stay outside the only Hare Krishna temple in a city of millions and then dedicated myself to that same path—was small enough to at least stretch the concept of godless randomness. If this was the only coincidence of my life, I could pawn it off as chance, but when I look at my life and see how the world has repeatedly moved to teach me needed lessons geared directly at the most subtle impurities in my heart, the sheer probability of such synchronicity is implausible.

 

It could be argued that I am just seeing in my apparent destiny things that don’t exist, that synchronicity is just in my mind. But besides the fact that synchronicity happens too often in the lives of too many people to be disregarded as chance, the fact that there is a moral force or destiny in every person’s life beyond randomness—which is called “the law of karma” and can be proven by the science of astrology—makes providence undeniable. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss it all in detail, but I am puzzled as to why no one has applied the scientific method to the study of astrology to prove that there is a destiny set at birth. It seems that it can easily be done.

 

In summary, the argument of coincidence states that the preponderance of the occurrence of mutual coincidences in people’s lives and the fact of destiny are so far beyond the explanation of chance that the only plausible explanation for them is God.

 

[1] Nancy Seifer, “Synchronicity and the Soul.” http://whenthesoulawakens.org/synchronicity-and-the-soul_288.html

 

 

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