[Reflection] God Exists = Reincarnation
It is guaranteed that a typical intro to philosophy course at a university in the United States will have some kind of section about God- or, god. It is an important subject matter to be discussed and understood if one wants to operate in the world. Human culture has always had some trace of belief in God or gods, or Gods. In these typical philosophy courses, the multiple omni qualities of God: omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence (omniscience is also used at times, but it’s pretty synonymous with omnipotence in my opinion so I omitted it) are used to describe God. It’s pretty standard divinity stuff which likely came into Western thought formally through the theology of St. Augustine, in which he synthesized with platonic philosophy in the 4th and 5th century. It’s pretty intuitive. God with a capital G has to have these qualities otherwise what is the point of being God? If He isn’t the most powerful, existing, knowing, good, etc. then what is He? God has to be the most of everything in order to be God.
Of these three qualities, I want to focus on the idea of God’s omnipresence. Presence doesn’t just mean physically in space, but also chronologically in time. We use the “present” as a time measurement, synonymous with “now,” but it’s not always understood when it’s applied to God, and is often limited to space. Looking at the etymology of omnipresent, it is clear that it actually originates with this chronological implication. Coming from the Latin praesent which literally means prae (which became the English prefix: “pre”) “before” and esse “to be”. Combined with the prefix omni meaning “all,” it can be understood as: “to be all before” with a slight rearrangement of the word order. To be all before, or to be eternal.
A few weeks ago I met a Christian gentleman at the University of North Texas while I was at my book table trying to share some Hare Krishna literature with the students there. We were speaking and I was sharing some philosophy from the Bhagavad Gita and he was sharing from the Bible. When I told him about the section where Krishna declares all living beings and God to be eternal (2.12), he tried to refute Krishna’s words by quoting from Genesis 1:1 that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and so on and so forth, therefore, human beings were created at a certain point. This greatly confused me because it begs the question: if the creation started at a certain point in time, and God is eternal, omnipresent in time, then what the heck was God doing for the eternity before He created anything?
It makes no sense that God, in the classical, widely understood definition in Western thought, is an eternal being who just existed forever, maybe twiddling His thumbs or something, and then all of the sudden: “oh! I think now I will create everything.” It lacks any logic or sense that an eternal being would wait for an eternity to pass before making any sort of recognizable action like a creation of everything.
The perspective of the Bhagavad Gita augments and deepens the understanding of God in contrast to this less rational Biblical conception that people hold. In the aforementioned verse from the second chapter of the Gita, Krishna tells his friend and student, Arjuna: “Never was there a time when I [God] did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings [all the living entities]; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.” Of course if God has always existed, it reasonably follows that His creation or expansion of His energy would also always exist.
If God exists, everything else has to exist, because what is everything? What does this whole universe consist of other than the energy of God (Bg. 7.4-7)? How could He just fashion up a whole universe with countless stars, living beings, and all the rest from nothing? Or, where did He get all of His ingredients to make the world? If God exists, the energy and components to create have to come from Himself. In those paraphrased verses from the seventh chapter, Krishna describes that He, or God, has always existed and has always expanded Himself in particular ways (which are too complex to explain here) in order to manifest and maintain the entire creation since time immemorial. The alternative to this, that God is a cosmic loner who exists forever before having the nice idea to give everyone and everything existence, one fateful day, is completely illogical given the definition of God.
Thus, if we always exist, and the creation always exists, but these bodies are temporary, then reincarnation must be the only explanation of our ontology. There can’t be a permanent destination that the soul attains after this particular body passes away, otherwise, what about all of our other bodies in the past? If we’re eternal (because God is eternal), but our bodies are temporary, then we have to be transmigrating into different bodies.
The implications of these theological conclusions, which intuitively make much more sense than the perspective propounded by some of the Abrahamic theists, who compose the vast majority of the theists in the world, are extensive and awesome, and thus will not be explored in this article. It is of the utmost importance to question the rationale of religious beliefs in order to prevent dogmatism that propounds philosophies that are not logical to believe.