On the Question about God in the Thought of Bernhard Welte

Bernhard Welte in memoriam on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his death

Abstract

This article interprets two essays of similar content by Bernhard Welte on the question of God, in which Welte developed a philosophical rationale for the religious conviction of the existence of an infinitely powerful absolute mystery, which starts from three general and undeniable (experiential) facts of human existence: First, from the fact of our human existence in this world; second, from the fact of our past non-existence (before our conception) and our future non-existence (after our death) in this world; and third, from the lived requirement of meaning or the lived presupposition of meaning for all our realizations of existence. From these three facts, Welte concludes that the ambiguous nothingness of our death cannot be a totally empty nothingness that irreversibly destroys the meaning of our human existence, but must be understood as the hidden presence of an infinite and mysterious power that guarantees and preserves the meaning of our being in this world. Finally, the plausibility of Welte's answer to the question of God is examined and judged.