For Sartre, there is no God. God, as a moral, knowing, conscious, and personal Being, does not exist.
The assumption or the belief that there exists a God, a conscious and knowing God that preceded and created the universe is something that Sartre disagrees with and argues against.
For Sartre, there is nothing that precedes or exceeds the world; there is nothing that created the universe from out of nothingness or from out of something.
Sartre lists two reasons why God is impossible: firstly, God’s being as a being-for-itself-in-itself is an impossible being. Secondly, being must be independent of God.
God’s Being as a Being-For-Itself-In-Itself Is Impossible
Theists consider God to be a knowing, personal, and conscious Being; that is, a being-for-itself, according to Sartre’s existentialism and according to how Sartre divides that which is into being-for-itself and being-in-itself.
But although God is announced and confirmed as a being-for-itself, theists argue that God’s consciousness, unlike the consciousness of any other being-for-itself, refers to and emerges from itself, and is thus contained and held within itself.
This means that, for theists, the consciousness of God exists fundamentally and not because of a relation with nothingness, negation, or absence. That is, for theists, God’s consciousness coincides with itself and is thus self-contained.
This view is problematic, according to Sartre, because to be a for-itself, to occur as a for-itself, is to refer to and pass through what is negative and outside.
In other words, the being of the for-itself occurs and is sustained only because of a relation linking the for-itself together with nothingness, absence, and negation, which reside in the for-itself itself, and hence render it separated and distanced from itself.
Since theists consider God to be a for-itself that exists fundamentally and not because of a relation with negativity and absence, they assume the unity of God’s essence and existence; that is, they assume that God’s essence and existence are one and the same; they perceive God’s being-for-itself to be existing in itself. In a word, they consider God’s being to be a being-for-itself-in-itself.
But according to Sartre, this way of being is impossible; it is impossible, yet it is what every for-itself attempts to be. This God is impossible, but it is the dream of every being-for-itself, that is, to be a being-for-itself-in-itself, to hold itself within itself and to thus become identical with itself and contained within itself.
For Sartre, being-for-itself and being-in-itself cannot achieve any unity because being-for-itself is itself the negation and nothingness of being-in-itself.
This means that being-for-itself appears and exists only by holding within itself a negativity that separates it from itself. This negativity is itself the negation and absence of being-in-itself.
Being-for-itself cannot coincide with what it negates, with what it renders absent. This is why Sartre argues that God is impossible; God is impossible because the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself is itself impossible.
Being Must Be Independent of God
Sartre also refuses and argues against the notion of creationism. Sartre’s argument is that being cannot be created.
According to Sartre, if being is created, then its being would need God’s being in order to be thought and understood. In other words, if being is created, then its being would be nothing but a mode of the subjectivity of God, a subjectivity lacking any objectivity.
This is problematic because being must be independent of God so that it becomes what it is, that is, the extent through which entities arise and become themselves, the extent through which entities emerge and are interpreted as what they are, as themselves, as entities in the world.
Being exceeds and surpasses God and God’s creation, for it is its own foundation. Being founds and grounds itself. Being does not need God, for it exceeds God itself; it announces itself beyond God and beyond all creation.
Camus and the Absurd
Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the question of suicide, but it is the thought of the absurdity of existence that holds together Camus’s whole essay and confirms its force.
The Stranger is not only a stranger to the world or the others, but also to himself, his existence, his own body, that is, his whole being. There is an unbearable meaninglessness lying at the heart of, and giving rise to, this strangeness. But what is the origin of this meaninglessness?
Is the absurdism of Camus a form of nihilism? Is the absurd nihilistic?
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