Merleau-Ponty on the Inconsistencies of God; a Critique

Merleau-Ponty sees the notion of God, as the Necessary Being, as incompatible with the foundations of his philosophy. According to him, everything in the world is contingent and this contingency is the reason why all things in the world are unexplained, obscure and, therefore, wondrous. But given the existence of a necessary being, i.e. God, theology explains all things and dispels any wonderment. Further, the existence of God takes away the freedom of human beings, because the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient being reduces man to an object and leaves no room for his creative activity. Thus theology which wants to explain and necessitate all beings and reach certainty is contrasted with philosophy which tries to maintain the contingency, obscurity and wonderment of being. On the other hand, the belief in God makes ethics impossible, because the appeal to the absolute, including God, leads to an ethics that is based on absolute values and this ethics is worthy of gods not human beings. The human ethics is based on relative values. The rest of the article deals with the view of Merleau-Ponty’s critics.