The atheist-existentialist argument for the non-existence of God, if God is supposed to be a perfect sentient being: As presented by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness [en.wikipedia.org], it states that since existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. Sartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi [a being-for-itself; a consciousness] who is also an en-soi [a being-in-itself; a thing]: which is a contradiction in terms. The argument is echoed thus in Salman Rushdie's novel Grimus: "That which is complete is also dead."