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Question of the Month

Is There A God?

The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book. The harvest was abundant, unsurprisingly; just sorry we couldn’t fit you all in. The votes were, loosely, Yes: 52%, No: 31%, and Don’t Know: 17%. So we’ll start with a ‘Yes’.

The answer to the question will hinge on the meaning of this word. St John tells us that “God is love,” so perhaps we could rephrase and ask “Does love exist?” Jacques Derrida’s answer would be yes – but love as a ‘necessary impossible’.

Pure love is impossible in human intercourse because we always contaminate it with the instinctive or the calculative. We love because we want some reward or because we experience love as an instinct, convenient or inconvenient. But we must look beyond this.

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