Does God Exist? Some ruminations.

And you thought Crocodile Dundee was deep...

[Special thanks to a friend who has challenged me to think more deeply about such things.]

Does God exist?

Of course, the definition of terms here is more important than usual.  First, God.  We can set aside the pantheons of old as a separate category, along with the use of the word ‘god’ to rhetorically call out an obsession: “the god of progress” or something implied like “the almighty dollar”.  These are but mere gods., even if we may treat them as God. 

God, here, refers of course to an entity—no, The Entity—beyond our mere world, from which the world came into existence.  From which existence itself came into existence.

We thus arrive sooner than we expected at the second important definition—to exist—and there is already a logjam muddying the waters.  If God exists, it is not—cannot—be in the same way that we exist, or that the world exists.  God’s existence is the foundation of all existence.  So, for God to “exist”   is a different kind of question than for anything else to exist.  God is the answer to the unanswerable question: why does anything exist at all?  Why is there anything instead of nothing? 

The flying spaghetti monster was dreamt up to mock the idea of God because it precisely doesn’t exist.  It can exist only in the realm of imagination and only “exists” in this way because someone imagined it.  God, by definition as far as I can tell, is the reverse of the flying spaghetti monster.  We can only conceive of either through imagination: one because it does not exist, and the other because it precedes existence, and thus exists in a way that can only be imagined, and only attempted at that.

When Moses took a message down for the Israelites from God, he asked “whom shall I tell them is calling?”  The reply “I am that I am” was as much an answer to the question of existence itself as it was an answer to the question of the name of God.  Underneath everything we know, lies the ultimate fundament of reality.  When a child keeps asking “why” to every answer you give, you are being led ultimately to This.  This is where the buck stops—where else? 

There must be Something or Someone which simply is, not is because.  It is that it is.  I am that I am.  Something or Someone to which “why” doesn’t apply.  There must be a Prime Mover, a headwaters from which everything else flows. 

The trouble with a headwaters, or any worldly metaphor, is that we can’t point to any physical object or event that is set apart from the everyday currents of why and because.  Everything fits into its place.  If it has effects, it also had a cause.  What about the big bang, one might ask.  Was the big bang caused?  Was there existence before the big bang? 

Those who would say no to these questions should correct us in our spelling: ahem, The Big Bang.  And we’re back to the Something.  It’s a deist kind of Something, but it is Something.  Interestingly, though many associate the big bang with “science” over against “religion,” the theory was first imagined by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest (who was also a physicist).

But to equate the big bang with God seems erroneous, for a couple reasons.  For one, the idea of God implies a Presence that is, well, present, and not just some primordial force in the distant past.  The deist idea of a divine watchmaker who set the world ticking just to watch it go (or to simply ignore it), is fundamentally different from the theist idea that God is in some way involved in events in reality. 

This deist idea of God seems to have more in common with atheism than theism, at least from a practical perspective.  If God’s not going to do anything with the world, having somehow lost interest in this Creation, then what does it matter for us whether God exists or not?  A deist God really is not much more than the Big Bang in the end: a Big Bang with some kind of intention for the world, perhaps, but we can only guess at that intention if God has virtually always been incommunicado.   

A deist God also doesn’t seem very much like a person, and God is supposed to be a person, right?  Or at least “personal,” in a looser sense.  Most people, if they refer to God, use a personal pronoun, and imagine God as a person (typically as “Him”, but we’ll set that to the side here).  Indeed, the word God implies personhood, and most religions that conceive of God do so in this way. 

To many people, the idea of a personal God is a preposterous notion.  Firstly, because it comes off as anthropocentric.  What are the odds that the Supreme Being of the universe just so happens to be just like us? 

This is related to a second objection, just as sensible: the very idea of a personal God only shows how self-absorbed we are, and how God—like the gods of old—simply springs straight from human imagination; it shows how Man created God, not the other way around. 

Third, coming from a different direction: how can we possibly imagine the Supreme Being of the universe to be at all like us mere mortals?  One whose existence is eternal, who is all-knowing, all-powerful—the difference between us and such a Being is infinitely greater than the difference between an amoeba and each of us.  Even the nature of God’s “existence” must be very different from our own.  By this last objection, deeming God personal is not just mistaken, but an insult to God’s very nature, which cannot possibly be compared to ours.

Then why are there so many long-lived traditions of understanding God as a person?  In addition to the above claims, perhaps a more charitable answer is that people imagine that an impersonal God cannot be God because in our world anything other than a person is less than a person.  God must have consciousness greater than ours, and we don’t know of anything else with a consciousness other than us.  If God didn’t have consciousness, God would be lesser than us. 

The same goes for other “higher” capacities we observe in ourselves but not quite so in other creatures: love, justice, self-reflection, imagination, and abstract thought, to name a few.  God must be capable of such things if such things exist.  Since God is the greatest thing that can possibly be, God must be a Person, at the least. God must be more like us than like any other created thing, in terms of our ability to speak, to think, to understand, to deliberate, etc.  From this perspective, the insulting thing is to think of God as impersonal, not personal. (But perhaps we loaded the dice here: the capability of being insulted seems as personal a characteristic as any.)

These personal traits of God are also important if we are to relate to God in any way other than simply owing God our existence.  Despite the qualitative difference in the nature of our existence and God’s, is there some way we can get in touch with God?  Only a God that is “personal” in some way would be capable of that.  This is why the deist God doesn’t seem so godly.  Why would God make such an amazing world, and then turn away from it altogether?  Almost better to think of the world itself as always having existed, as being its own basis for existence.

At this level of analysis (or perhaps this level of imagination; which is not say that God is merely imagined but only to say that our imagination is the only way we can really try to grasp the concept), it’s quite unclear whether God is, or even could be, anything at all like us.  But we can probably surmise that God subsumes us: everything we are is at least included in who/what God is.  (The Christian idea is that God not only could be like us, but did even became one of us, but that is another story.) 

I think of God’s existence as similar to the existence of free will.  I remember being introduced to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism in college.  The argument is likely familiar to you: if, as we observe, things can be caused by other things, and if everything in the world can be explained by such causation, then with perfect knowledge of the present state of things, and perfect knowledge of how things work, then everything should in theory be predictable, even exactly predictable.  In other words the world starts to look like a machine, which, though complex, is nothing but a series of events with airtight links of causation between them, and which is utterly predictable. 

In such a world there is no room for free choice, because everything, including your so-called free choices, are caused by prior events.  Perhaps even caused materially: your thoughts and decisions are ultimately just electrical impulses that are just as caused, just as subject to physics, as the opening break on a billiard table. 

We even have neurochemical evidence of this, as brain scans have shown us evidence that people’s decisions are neurochemically determined several seconds before the decisionmaker is even aware of having made a decision.  This all sounds very compelling; we find an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting our commonsense theoretical model of causation, from everyday observations to a variety of sciences, including neuroscience itself.  And this evidence seems to stack up against the idea of free will.

But on the other side of the debate I have one simple fact, which trumps all of this reasoning.  I make decisions.  This “observation” is prior to all the observations made in support of the idea that I do not really make decisions.  I know that I make decisions, and this knowledge is far more fundamental, more experiential, more certain than any observations about causation, which are mere speculation by comparison.  “I think therefore I am.” 

“Who are you going to believe: my airtight chain of reason, or your own lying eyes?”  This doesn’t even fully express the point, as I can trust this knowledge more than I can trust my own eyes, ears, or nose.  I can trust it more than I can trust reason itself, which depends on constructed concepts, unarticulated assumptions, and its own faith in itself.

 I don’t have to rely on reason to arrive at the conclusion that what I do every day is make decisions.  Decision after decision after decision: what is my existence if not that?  To talk of “causes” is to construct a device to try to make external sense of my experiences indirectly, but when this device leads me to deny the fundamental experiential fact of life itself, then the only “reasonable” conclusion is that this device is not appropriate for that task.

How does this all relate to God?  I sense a symmetry here between the existence of free will and the existence of God.  We can’t “observe” free will scientifically from the outside, and we can’t even define it in analytical, logical terms (what would “uncaused” behavior look like?), but that does not mean it does not exist.  More than this, if we could somehow observe or define free will, these observations or definitions certainly couldn’t account for our experience of it—that is to say, it probably wouldn’t look very much like free will at all.  

An analytical and logical framework of causation simply can’t account for free will, and yet that is what makes its defiant presence in our lives so mysterious and ineffable.  Our lives would no longer make sense or have meaning without it, much less our societies and laws, or any ideas of right and wrong.  Yet reason cannot make sense of it, because it is an experiential reality that comes prior to reason. 

For a long time I thought the argument for determinism was ironclad.  But I had missed a key underlying assumption of determinism: that scientific observation and analytical thought comprise the only pathway to truth.  That something cannot be true unless it is externally observed and empirically verified. 

But this is a trap that led me to deny the most basic reality of my existence: my own agency.  In the words of The Police, “Their logic ties you up and rapes you,” quite literally against your own will, by compelling you to deny it.

Their logic can only be resisted by remembering that you are a whole person, and reason is but one of your faculties.  There are some truths too basic, too axiomatic, too foundational, to be uncovered by reason alone. 

Logic, after all, is not a source of light, but more like a clever series of mirrors that can bring light to new places.  Experience provides the light that reason and science work with, experience which is externalized, conceptualized, operationalized, observed, and chopped up into data.  Each mirror brings the light to a new place, but at each point the light is fragmented, refracted, dimmed, and warped. 

The distortion is so great that by the time we look through to the last mirror, we see no evidence of free will, and declare that it is an illusion, because otherwise it would show up in the final mirror.  But we have already forgotten about the original light at the source. 

Stepping back from the narrow focus of the mirrors, and looking again at the light of my own direct experience, I felt free again.  I felt like celebrating: I had reclaimed my own experience from the oppressive grip of determinist logic.  I could trust my lying eyes over those mirrors.

The existence of God is a different matter, of course.  One big difference is that the idea of God is certainly less directly obvious to us than the idea that we have free will. 

But let’s count the similarities.  We can’t externally observe God, or perhaps even define God.  (The nature of God probably necessarily is this way: just try to imagine a world in which it is obvious to all that there is nothing else Beyond.) 

Just as in the case of freewill, the null hypothesis of science gives the burden of proof to the existence of God, and gives the atheist position the benefit of the doubt.  Evidence must be adduced for the existence of God, and not against it. 

And knowledge of God’s existence, I think, would be very much like knowledge of one’s free will: not to be found by confirmation of external evidence, not through reason alone, but directly through experience.  One could make a logical case for the existence of God, and I find some of those sorts of arguments moderately compelling, but I think the transcendent idea of God—the presence of an all-powerful being whose very existence subsumes, transcends, and provides the basis for our own existence—cannot be proven through logic as one would prove a proposition about, say, the way oxygen will react with sulfur. 

If God gave rise to—and even actively sustains—a world in which reason and logic can operate, then obviously God would precede such things as reason and logic, just as my direct experience of free will precedes even the thought of causation. 

In these ways, the “existence” of free will may be like the existence of God.  We can’t observe or define God in the way we can other things, perhaps because, like experience, God exists prior to reason.  Whether we are looking for free will or for God, we should not look exclusively to reason, but also to the human experience more broadly. 

And just as free will is the basis for living our own lives and making our own decisions, God is the basis of existence itself.  I come back again to that deepest of questions: why is there anything instead of nothing?  The question begs for an answer that far precedes any reason or logic.  Like my rediscovery of free will, this question invites a celebration, not of freedom, but of existence itself. 

That anything exists is cause for wonder.  That we get to exist and even consciously experience the gift of existence, however briefly, is cause for worship.  This sense of gratitude points me, on my better days, toward the ineffable Source of existence.