Does it matter if God exists?

Naturalism's magic bubble

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

One of my readers on Medium recently posted an article asking two questions:

Does it matter if any God or gods exist?

And more importantly, does it matter to them that "we" exist?

In all these discussions about God, we assume we're using the word God to mean the same thing, but our conception of God is often very different.

What does the word God mean?

I generally don't like using the word God because I can't predict what someone will hear when they read it. It many cases it seems to evoke an image of an angry, grey haired old man who will smite you if he doesn't get his own way.

But that's nothing like what I mean by God. My understanding of God is more like the description in Isopanisad, "The self-sufficient philosopher who has been fulfilling everyone's desires since time immemorial".

The problem is, that's a bit of a mouthful and there aren’t many alternative English words available. I often revert to divine, because at least that has the texture and flavour of who and what God is. But it's also too impersonal. It's like calling someone, or something, gorgeous but not saying exactly what makes them so.

God with a capital G is a detached philosophical designation, a metaphysical category that communicates little more than its uniqueness, because it's a set with only one member.

Of course there's a lot that can be inferred from that one characteristic, but that's the problem, everyone infers their own characteristics onto that generic label.

Dressing a lifeless mannequin

God becomes an idol, a mannequin with the outer appearance of a person. Then everyone clothes Her with their own choice of fashion. It tells us nothing about the living person behind the mannequin we construct, her personality, the living pulse that brings the mannequin to life.

The modern world suffers from a kind of spiritual illiteracy, we lack the language to communicate any nuance about God, because we lack the concepts to think about God with any nuance. And words are only a label for a concept.

So our conversations are reduced to talking about God as an intellectual category, as if the question of his mere existence was the only thing of consequence. Atheists demand we prove his existence without realising that demand already assumes God is an object our intellect can grasp, and then pass judgement on it as a theoretical construct.

But God is not your object, you are God's object. In relation to matter you are the subject and matter is your object. In relation to God, you are the object and God is the subject. 

The eye cannot see the mind. The eye can only enter the mental realm through grace, through the mind's willingness to think of it.

The all-pervading sustenance of the world

When we view God as our object, we look at Hinduism and see millions of gods. Instead we should see millions of names and images to describe one God. We see idols instead of snapshots of God's endless moods, and the roles he plays in the drama of life.

With this conception of God as the absolute, it's hard to make sense of the question, Does it even matter if God exists?

Because if that doesn't matter, then nothing does.

Everything rests on God, is sustained by God, is powered by God. What could we possibly mean by "the world" if it doesn't include Sri Vishnu, the all-pervading power that sustains everything in existence from moment to moment?

And the same problem arises with the second question, Does it even matter to God that we exist?

The word God denotes the absolute, the infinite, the ground and source of all being. If we didn't matter to him, then we wouldn't exist. The instant he stops caring about something, it ceases to exist.

So of course you matter to him. Regardless who you are, you matter to anyone who loves you. You're at the top of their list of things that matter. Even if the entire world ignores you and rejects you, if you exist, you can be sure you matter to God.

The refusal to engage

This answer might sound too convenient and like defining God into existence. But from the theist perspective, the non-theist is refusing to engage theism on its own terms; they refuse to answer the questions theism asks.

The ridiculous caricatures of God that are presented by certain sections of the atheist community, comparisons to fairies and pixies, demonstrate nothing more than a failure to understand what the word God means. It only demonstrates some atheists don't even know what it is they don't believe in.

When I point this out to atheists the response is often, well some people believe God is like that. No doubt that's true. But it's also true that some people believe the lizard people control the world. You can always find someone who believes some ridiculous thing. But that hardly makes it a respectable response to the question of God.

The other response I hear is that as science advances theism is forced to retreat to meaningless abstractions, the God of the philosophers not the God active in most people's lives. But this is just another failure to understand what God means. The classical conception of God, God as the Absolute, is the orthodox understanding of (most of) Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Bahai, and many more.

Since that covers the vast majority of religions on earth, it's an irrelevance to say the popular level understanding is a caricature of that. That's a tautology. Popular level understanding just means, not the sophisticated version.

The sophisticated version is called the classical conception of God. God as the absolute foundation of everything that exists. The naturalist takes it for granted that this question of the origin of the world is meaningless, impractical or unanswerable. The popular (mis)understanding is that science will one day provide an answer.

But in fact every single non-theist response is some version of a refusal to answer the question of existence itself.

Naturalism's magical bubble

It's one thing to refuse to answer, and another to pretend the atheist or naturalist worldview is complete and coherent. It's only complete if we agree to their restriction of allowable questions and answers.

Within the naturalists explanatory limits everything is admirably neat and tidy and hangs together in a coherent whole. But the entire structure is a magical bubble, suspended in nothingness, with no visible means of support, no possible means of support.

And it's this realisation, like the epiphany of Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff that there is no ground beneath him, that changes minds. Because that realisation forces the non-theist to confront the consequences of the logical ground on which they stand.

When looked at from the outside, from beyond the boundaries of their own allowed explanations, the naturalist world view is an absurdity. It may be furnished with elegant and simple interior decoration, but it floats in nothingness, is suspended from nothingness and has no logical ground supporting it. The idea that such a structure could exist independently is absurd.

The attraction of the naturalist world view is like the satisfaction we get from solving a puzzle. Naturalism gives us an objective view of reality. It gives us something we can grasp with our intellect and use to great practical benefit.

But in doing that we sacrifice other things. Certain questions become unanswerable within the allowed explanatory boundaries. We necessarily leave our selves out of the picture. We abstract the world away from our own selves and limit reality to what can be grasped with the intellect.

We observe the cosmos from a God's eye view, a supposed observer independent reality. But it's a view from nowhere and nowhen.

These questions about the casual origins of the world, and the hard problem of consciousness are the gaping holes in the naturalist world view. Those holes aren’t seen from within the naturalist worldview, you must step outside that concept space.

You need to hold up that structure filled with impressive scientific facts and details, and notice it stands on nothing and your conscious self isn't anywhere to be found within it.

Why does any of this matter?

Some people think all of this back and forth is futile, but these questions of causal origins and consciousness are THE questions of human life.

Who are you? Why are you here? What is the purpose of your life?

Both theism and naturalism are meta-worldviews, they tell us who we are because they tell us why the world exists. Expressed as an oversimplified and crude binary, theism means the world is created as a vehicle to achieve the eternal existence of the conscious souls.

Naturalism means the world has no reason, no purpose and the conscious self dies with the physical system it emerges from.

If our choice of a/theism isn't about those questions, what is it about? It's not like choosing between two theoretical claims that have no practical consequence for how we live our lives.

This is why I see these questions as decisive in the a/theism debate. It's a forced choice, agnosticism isn't an option. You can't abstain from choosing because abstaining is practically equivalent to choosing non-theism.

Saying, we don't know the purpose of the universe, isn't the same as, the universe has no purpose. The latter is a strong claim, casually tossed around on the misunderstanding science has established its truth beyond any reasonable doubt.

But in fact, science has proved no such thing. That claim is accepted only on the basis of scepticism toward the theism answer. If we're to be consistent, we need to apply scepticism to naturalism's answer to those questions.

These are the questions theism confronts and they are beyond the explanatory limits of naturalism. This is where the serious challenge to the atheist and naturalist world view is found. Everything else is a distraction.

Coming full circle

Some people may object that even if we understand God as the absolute, that doesn't change the size of the universe. In the scientific view of the world, the universe is vast and mostly lifeless.

It’s sometimes argued this makes our existence as insignificant as moss growing on a rock. Even if God does exist, we are irrelevant to God.

I've never understood the logical force of this idea, that somehow a quantitative measurement of space “adds up” to insignificance.

My children are the most valuable and significant things in my life. And whether the universe is the size of one planet, or of infinite dimension, their value and significance remains constant.

And the amount of energy it took to create them seems equally irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether their cause was an unplanned moment of passion, or an investment of my life savings and years of IVF treatments.

Their value and significance is still the same. It always remains at maximum. Like the absolute and the infinite, it doesn't increase or decrease by changing any contingent variables.

Their value is qualitative, not quantitative. Their value is inherent in what they are, and is completely unaffected by any changing outer circumstances.

What is the purpose of my creation of those children? What do I want in return for the expenditure of energy it cost me?

Absolutely nothing.

Their existence is an outpouring of love, an out and out gift of existence from me to them. They owe me nothing. Their existence isn't an investment on which I expect a profitable return.

If they want to reciprocate with that gift in an exchange of love, that wouldn't represent payment due for services rendered, it would be the fulfilment and completion of that gift.

But that reciprocation must be their free choice. I'm satisfied by the mere fact of their existence. Let them use that gift as they will.

---