Is God for Real?

I’ve had many conversations with my teenage grandchildren and most of them declare themselves “atheist.” One challenged me to write something that might help them overcome their skepticism. It’s not as easy as I thought! But here goes!

I’ll start by dismissing ideas of God that most of us were fed as a child, and which clearly are not helpful. Then, I’ll explore why the question “Does God exist?” is the wrong question to ask, because, by definition, it will fail. After this, I’ll explore the very concept of “god.” What do we even mean when we use that term? Finally, I’ll explore some starting-points that might yield better results than the classic question we’ve dismissed.

No, my task is to not to “prove” to you that God exists. Living with the God question is perhaps the best approach, and, when we have the right tools (and the right motivation), each of us grapples with the question, and spends a lifetime trying out different approaches, until we finally find one that seems to provide us satisfaction, peace, and comfort, and a sense in being adequately grounded in the mystery of our existence.

1. Ideas of God that don’t work

Many of us have grown up in religious families of one kind or another. Some of us even attended some form of religious formation – at school or at church, or mosque or synagogue or temple. Well-intentioned people have tried to teach us some basics about the mystery of God in language that our young brains could comprehend.

Unfortunately, as we developed cognitive capacity, our religious formation did not manage to keep pace, and we seemed to get stuck with notions of God we acquired when we were still very young, and most of these can’t pass the critical test of our growing intellect, so we decide it’s all pretty much crap.

I know only this process in the Christian tradition, but I suspect teens and young adults from other religious traditions have pretty much the same experiences.

You know the images I mean… There’s the King on his throne in some heavenly realm. Those of us from the Christian tradition have seen these everywhere. Even the great painting masters of the previous centuries reinforce this image! Just think of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings, or almost any other depiction of God. He (yes, it’s inevitably a “he”) is depicted as an old man, with a great white beard who sits somewhere in a cloudy realm (because that must surely be where “heaven” is, right?)

Sometimes, this King is shown as a stern judge, judging all the new dead, and sending some to blissful heaven (with appropriate robe, and maybe a harp or wings…) and condemning others to “hell,” which is usually filled with pretty awful and painful things, like fire, and torture machines, and evil little creatures. And we are told that this judge is stern but merciful, etc., etc.

Some people were taught that this King is in charge of everything – almighty and all-powerful – and, therefore, can help you out, save you, or prevent something from happening. And so, you’re encouraged to pray. And most often nothing happens. And you’re told you didn’t pray enough, or you weren’t worthy, or God was angry with you, or God was trying to teach you a lesson, or you weren’t praying for the right thing, etc. etc. So, we often decide that the whole thing is a cruel hoax.

Earlier cultures, who knew far less about the working of the world, believed that processes of this world were all governed by gods – powerful invisible beings who controlled everything. As high schools kids, many of us learned about these gods in Greek and Roman mythology. A similar array of gods exist in other world cultures as well. We didn’t take them seriously, because we realized how much more we understood now about our world which for the earlier cultures was mysterious and therefore driven by gods. It was easy to dismiss those gods.

On the other side of the question, many of us were taught that the evil in this world was the result of the work of the devil, or Satan, or any other of the many names for the forces of evil. We were all taught to resist the temptations of the devil. Many of us came to realize that the only real forces of evil resided right within each one of us: there was no supernatural Satan, and the world was not the battlefield between the forces of Good (God) and the forces of evil (Satan).

So, if this is the kind of god you think doesn’t exist and this makes you an atheist, I join you, because I don’t believe in that kind of god either!

2. “Does God exist?” is the wrong question and here’s why

You might then ask: “so, does God exist or not?” A lot has been written over the centuries trying to prove that God exists (or doesn’t). There have been “Proofs for the existence of God,” all through the history of Philosophy. And philosophers have loved the chance to prove this or that theory flawed. Proofs became more and more complicated as they tried to respond to legitimate objections.

I suspect that this approach to God is bound to always fail. This is because the question “Does God exist?” is a question about a being, a thing, an object, alongside all other objects. The question assumes that “God” refers to a being – something (or someone) out there, that can be comprehended, walked around, as it were, measured, evaluated, assessed, like we would all other objects. And the question always is: does that being exist or not?

But what if “God” does not refer to a being, an object, or even a class of objects?

We are so conditioned by objects that we can’t even imagine something that is not a being. (See? Even our language is biased in favour of “things” I had to use the word “something” in that last sentence!)

Can we even imagine an entity that is not a thing?

Try this: is consciousness a thing? I believe we have the same problem with consciousness as we have with God: we keep thinking of it as a thing. Neuroscientists do it all the time! But it seems as if, try as they may, these scientists are unable to resolve what is called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Here’s the thing: try focusing on your consciousness… Try hard! You will soon realize that it is your consciousness that is trying to focus on consciousness! Consciousness always seems to be “behind” us! And when I turn around to look behind at consciosuness, consciousness is once again “behind”! Many philosophers conclude that consciousness is nothing – no-thing! Consciousness is not a thing that can be walked around, measured, dissected because the moment we do any of these conscious activities, it’s always with our consciousness.

A distinction that might be helpful at this point. A “problem” is something you can walk around, measure, experiment with, because you are not part of it. You are separate from it. A “problem” can be solved. A “mystery,” on the other hand, is something you cannot walk around because you are a part of it. You are involved in it. You are not independent of it. A “mystery” cannot be solved. It can only be lived with more and more deeply. You solve problems, you live with mysteries. Are there many such mysteries? As many as there are situations in which you are not truly only observer, but also participant. The universe is such a mystery: you cannot stand outside the universe to experience it because you are already a part of it. A relationship is a mystery because you cannot stand outside it to explore it objectively, since you are one of the partners in the relationship.

So we enter a world in which several realities are not objects because they are not problems…

If you’ve managed to see that, you’ve managed to understand the limitations of science. Science deals brilliantly with objects. It has all the tools for measuring, examining, testing, evaluating, and experimenting with objects. Because it uses consciousness to do all this, consciousness becomes one entity that is outside the realm of science.

Is it possible that what we call “God” is not an object?

Can we use other approaches to this mystery of “God”? Before we proceed with that line of inquiry, we need to ask ourselves what do we even mean by this word “God”?

3. What do we even mean by “God”?

Before we proceed much further, it would probably be a good idea for us to figure out what we mean by “God” in the first place. What is a “god”?

We could spend a lot of time looking over the history of religion: there have been “gods” (and goddesses”) since homo sapiens began to reflect on life and its meaning. In general a “god” is an entity worth worshipping. Worshipping means acknowledging our dependence on something or someone, and submitting somehow to their superior power.

Do you worship anything? In other words, is there anything or anyone on which or on whom you acknowledge you are dependent? (Okay, let’s get rid of the obvious: you are dependent on your parents, but you probably don’t worship them!) We do not live in a culture where that makes much sense. Our dominant culture tells us over and over that we are masters of our own destiny, and we owe nothing to anyone or anything. Remains to be seen if this is true! Our ancestors were very clear! They knew they were dependent – on the forces of nature, on fate, on the good nature of powers well beyond their control. We live in a culture where we think we are in control of everything… until, of course, we discover we’re not: we are struck with an incurable illness, someone we loved has left us, a terrible storm devastates everything in its path including all our possessions…

Here’s a question, then: do you truly own your own existence? Does anything own its own existence? This is not the kind of question we spend much time on. If we think of this question within the context of this incredible universe of ours, we might ask the question “why does the universe exist?” or even worse “why is there something rather than nothing?” However you choose to approach the matter, you soon discover that we are very fragile; it is easily possible that we could have never existed.

Spend a few moments just thinking about “existence.” We take the existence of things for granted. Things simply are. In a way, existence is a persistence through time. How do we persist?

There is something very special about the notion of “existence,” and many philosophers have spent their lifetime trying to understand what is it, to “be.” Other people coin the expression “be-ing,” to make sure we’re thinking of the act, not a substance.

Here’s the thing! Many of you know the story of Moses and the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Great story! Lots of deep truths in it! (See my pamphlet “Why the Bible?”) But what is really remarkable is that those who wrote the story, some three thousand years ago, had this idea that the “God” who tells Moses to rescue the Israelites from their Egyptian captors calls himself YHWH, which translates from the Hebrew as roughly “I am who I am.” What an absolutely remarkable name! Not the name of a beast, not some invented name. In essence, religious thinkers that far back imagined that the nature of the highest reality, worthy of worship, was existence itself! YHWH is not a being among other beings. YHWH is the very existence of things.

Is existence – or be-ing – worth worshipping? In essence, what we would be saying is that our existence is the ultimate reality, the foundational reality, the ground of everything. (For those of you who might be interested in philosophy, one of the branches of philosophy is “metaphysics,” which is the study of being, or existence.)

So perhaps we can say that the word “God” points to some ultimate reality, which is so foundational that it is worthy of being worshipped.

Now, all this still sounds pretty cold and detached. How does one even get warm to such an impersonal entity? But if God is the ground of all being, God is the ground of our consciousness, of our personhood too! Something which grounds something can’t be of lesser order than what it grounds. So if personhood is the highest kind of being we can think of, then the ground of being must be at least as evolved, developed, complex, as a person.

One can see that such an entity is not a problem to be solved, walked around, evaluated. It is our ground. We depend on it. We are part of it; it is part of us. We cannot get out of it to look at it, any more than a fish can get out of water to look at it to see what it is. Like water is to the fish, God is the environment “in which we live and move and have our being,” as the apostle Paul declared to the Athenians when he was preaching to them about this God.

4. Where do we start in exploring the matter?

If God is a mystery, how do we start exploring this reality? We certainly can’t do it with science, since science is confined to “problems,” the external, the physical, the measurable. Science cannot speak about God with any authority. Many scientists know this and are measured in their comments, acknowledging that when they speak about God or consciousness, they speak as individual humans who do science and not in the name of their science. Other scientists are not that wise.

I told you this was not a matter of me convincing you of something through arguments. One can do that in the world of problems: things and matter. In the realm of mystery, all I can do is draw your attention to something, provide you a few tools, but you have to do the exploring yourself.

One way of coming at the matter is by focusing on an important distinction between two ways of relating to something other than yourself. Jewish philosopher Martin Buber explained it best. In the world of objects, we relate to something through an “I-It” relationship. We talk “about” it, we evaluate it, we describe it, we categorize it, whatever “it” is – a project, an object, even a person.

But, says Buber, there’s another way of relating to others: “I-You” (he called it “I-Thou”). In an I-You relationship, I am taken in by you, I become aware of you; I don’t judge you; I just notice you; I get to see you as you are on the inside; I don’t talk about you: I talk to you; I talk with you. I listen; I let you talk; I try to see things as you see them. Just think of a relationship you have with a friend: when you listen, when you pay attention, when you are absorbed by that person, you are in an I-You relationship. When he or she leaves, you can, of course, turn around and talk about them, and that immediately becomes an I-It relationship. You have lost the immediacy of the contact; he or she has become an “It” for you. We see that all the time in relationships. In an I-You relationship, you each open up to the other because it is safe to do so; you know the other won’t judge. The moment you learn that the other has talked about you, you know she or he has converted the relationship into an I-It one, and it feels awful.

If “God” refers not to an object but to the very foundation of being, an I-It relationship fails to get at what is truly going on, because it treats God as a thing out there. In fact, God is the deepest part of myself because God, the very act of be-ing, is the ground of my own being. It is only in maintaining an I-You relationship with this ground of being that we can get anywhere. But, how does one even do that?

I’m going to suggest an image. You’re standing in a field. You hear the trees and the grasses rustle… And I come to you and ask you “can you hear the music? You, of course, say no, there is no music around. But I assure you there is. And I talk to you about radio waves. Invisible waves which are everywhere in the air at all times. You say that your senses don’t pick anything up. Then I take out a small black box, pull an antenna out, flick a switch, turn a dial, and, behold: music! The music is always there. But you don’t hear it unless you have a special piece of equipment, called a radio.

In the realm of spirituality (because that’s the name for the domain we are exploring – it differs dramatically from the realm of matter), four pieces of equipment help: 1) awareness, 2) awe and wonder, 3) learning from a community of curious and open-minded people, and 4) your attention to your own interior world.

Here are some ways to start exploring a relationship with the Ground of all being.

The first approach is awareness. Spend time each day reviewing your day and asking yourself what has brought you happiness today? How did you experience love today? What surprising insight occurred to you today that helped you out of a situation you thought was too challenging? Over time, look for patterns in your experience. Some people can come to a point where they are aware that they are deeply loved – not only by people, but by some mystery deep within themselves that’s nonetheless much bigger than themselves.

The second approach is awe and wonder. Allow yourself to be amazed by this amazing universe. Take the time to wonder at living things; the marvels of galaxies; at the complexity of mathematics; at the beauty of everything around. Take the time to experience your life in depth. Stop rushing from experience to experience; put down your cellphone; stop playing your addictive games and just notice. Notice deeply. Make it a habit of noticing deeply. Some people discover such profound awe at the complexity, fragility and resilience, at the majesty, at the richness of the world around them, that they eventually conclude that this all holds together and seems to be the concrete expression of something (someone) totally beyond all comprehension.

A pretty common approach is to build yourself a community of people you trust – either actual people or authors you value who have had deep experience of the presence of this divine mystery. Talk to them; listen to their experiences; read books which describe experiences of the sacred – there are thousands! Learn from them, and try to follow their path. Look for common elements among the authors, or among your own mentors; see if any of these common features show up in your own life. Share with others; learn from them.

An easy approach is to simply pay attention to the voices inside your head – you may hear them all the time! You arguing with yourself; some saboteur telling you you’re not good enough; the internalized voice of a parent. But there’s often another voice… A voice that always surprises you with ideas you would not have thought of; a voice that always has your back, always supports you; a voice, above all, that is always calling you to actions of care and love and empathy and compassion. It’s a “still small voice,” as someone once said long ago, but it’s real. If you pay attention to it, and if you still yourself, you might be able to engage it in a conversation. Do a lot of intense listening. Do this for quite a while. You might begin to discern a pattern; you might even become familiar with the sound of this voice… You might even develop a consistent I-You relationship with it. You might eventually realize that there’s nothing this voice wants more than a deep relationship with you. I would call that the Voice of God. It takes a while, and you need to be sure you’re not deluding yourself; talk to someone you trust about your experience; document the experience in a journal so you don’t lose anything.

A more challenging yet fruitful approach invites you inside yourself to ask yourself a series of questions about your knowing processes. Start by observing yourself knowing. Note that you seem to know things at different levels. At the level of common sense, you’re asking how do things relate to me? At the artistic level, you’re asking how do things express beauty? At the next level, you’re asking how things relate to each other, independently of you. That’s the level of science. As you reflect deeper, you discover another level: you’re asking how did scientific knowledge evolve over time, and across cultures? That’s the level of scholarship. When you reflect even more deeply, you begin to ask how it is that you know? That’s the level of interiority. Finally, if you go all the way, you ask yourself the question who is this “I” who knows? People who reflect at this level discover their radical dependence on some mystery which transcends them – yet grounds them.

5. And so…

As you can see, there are many ways to begin to be aware of the very ground of our being, the source of existence. All of this work is, as you saw, internal, and relational, i.e., at the level of an I-You relationship: you are trying to form a relationship with this mystery in which you live and who lives in you. The more we explore, of course, the more we want to share with others. We are forced to use words. Words come from the realm of things. And we find ourselves in the domain of I-It, and we find ourselves talking about our experiences, and about God! And we’re back where we started from: we each try to express to someone else what we are experiencing, and we fall back on images from the world of things. We can’t help it. Some people will talk about God as a loving parent; as the creator of all that is; as having a dream about what humanity might be like. And someone will ask you: “You mean, you believe in God?” What are you going to say?