Who or What is God?

Ask ten people what they mean by “God” and you will get, at minimum, ten answers, and funnily enough, the people you asked will have answered ten different kinds of question mistaken for one. God is a word that gets nailed onto the end of several unrelated philosophical investigations that all seem like they point to the same thing. Right until we examine the fault lines and suddenly everything falls apart and Atheist run around screaming motte and bailey, iggtheism or simply shut their ears tight to say lalala science proofs your dumb.

At the same time Theists run around with an intuition they value like gold and assume cause they have a good answer for one of the ten questions it works equally well for all others.

Honestly, the “God” question is a pretty big shit show if you ask me. Everybody talks past each other and even when they don’t there is not a single standard that would satisfy everyone.

God as Creator (and Ruler) of Creation.

I struggle to see this one as anything but a naive oversimplification, but for many this is exactly how they conceptualize God. It helps them answer one of the most fundamental Questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing”; It orders there life (by answering why should they be moral with “God said so”); and it gives them a stable pillar they can trust in when shit hits the fan. “The creator wouldnT have designed the ship that way without a reason right?

RIGHT?!

God’s right to rule in this theological conception is akin to a birth right and direct ownership. You have absolute authority over your creation. So if we dont obey Gods command we are unworthy of the gift of existence and therefore at the mercy of the thing that not just stands at the pinnacle of the hierarchy but above that pyramide all together.

This kind of God is honestly revolting for me to even imagine. But luckily I would say it is also the one God concept Atheists are most right about. There simply isnt any evidence that would compell us to believe in such a Thing and philosophically it runs into all kinds of paradoxes and unanswered Questions.

God as Father/Parent of Humanity.

Less metaphysics, more personal. This one’s a claim about relationship. It often comes from people that if pushed revert into one of the other categories. (often the first one) But honestly they mostly just don’t care. Its just to scary out in reality without someone to guide us through this shit.

Its evidence is first-person (felt providence, answered prayer). And its utility is undeniable. Humans flourish if they can have trust and know they are loved and taken care of.

So in a way this type of God concept on its own is not even really a claim but a vibe. A feeling and a hope. Such hopes can manifest into a real relationship and atheists would do good if they would see that such personal truths are in no way inferior to those that are empirically capturable.

God as All-Being.

Pantheism often comes down to a matter of definition. You would have to deny the existence of Being to meaningfully disagree with someone calling Being God.

No creator/created gap to explain, no theodicy in the usual sense (evil is just a mode of the one substance, as Spinoza had it) but also no one to address, no one who could possibly answer. Spinozas God pretty inoffensive. And the objection to this type of god concept is immediately apparent. Why call Everything God if this name doesnt add anything to the table?

But I don’t think Pantheism is completely without teeth. Especially when we consider some other God concepts further down in combination with it. There is undeniable character to Reality. And for some that Character is in itself a sign that we should treat reality as subject rather than a background.

Plus it allows us to have a relationship with reality. which gives us the benefits of conception number two without falling into the atrocities of believing in number one.

God as Condition of Being.

Paul Tillich vehemently rejected the objectification of God. God isn’t a being among beings, however large, but the precondition for there being beings at all (also closer to Heidegger’s Being than to a cosmic person). This is hard to argue against, as even the classic gotcha “if god created the universe, who created God?” doesn’t really apply to a condition the way it applies to an entity. It buys that immunity at the price of content. Pushed far enough, “ground of being” is one bad afternoon away from meaning nothing more than “existence is a brute fact”.

It is again more a question of definition. But nevertheless it isnt the case that this is a postmodern invention of the apologetic movement. Be it Brahman or the abrahamic God in the eyes of Aquinas and classical theology. Many came to this conclusion through independent introspection and I do think it deserves credit for being a fully coherent conception all be it somewhat unfalsifiable.

God as Logos/Principle of Order.

The evidence here is the sheer intelligibility of the cosmos — that mathematics describes physical law at all. The implication: order and reason are basic to reality and everything happens for a (sufficient and logical reason)

What we have to be a bit wary of is moving from Logos-as-order to Logos-as-moral-good. A well-ordered cosmos and a good one are not obviously the same claim, though theology usually runs them together without paying the toll.

Anyhow this one is in my eyes the most undeniable of the bunch. People often resist it but for me looking at the natural sciences is like experiencing divine revelation. That shit is filled with beauty and meaning.

God as Ultimate Goal.

The final cause rather than the efficient one — Aristotle’s unmoved mover as that which is loved and therefore moves things, or the process-theology version where God is the future toward which complexity strains rather than the past that shoved it forward.

I sometimes like to drop the inversion of Nietzsches claim God is dead and say God is yet to be born.

Be it Teilhard or any other Progress optimistic trajectory. Evolution, Assembly Theory or even with the right Interpretation Entropy all give us an arrow. A direction and if we look at the logos along side it, we can reasonably conclude that whatever final state there will be. It will probably integrate everything into coherent and perfectly adapted unity.

Why not call that God?

God as Ultimate Moral Good.

Straight into Euthyphro: Is there good because God wills it, or does God will it because it’s good? Take the first horn and morality is arbitrary; take the second and God is a slave to a higher standard. Its evidence is moral-realist intuition that “torturing children for fun is wrong” isn’t a taste. Its cost is theodicy at full strength: omnipotent, identical to the Good, and a world with gratuitous suffering in it is a genuinely hard triangle to close.

I honestly think people who want God to be good suffer from to much black and white thinking..

“He who knows not that the Prince of Darkness is the other face of the King of Light knows not me.” ― Manly P. Hall

God as Love.

The attempted fusion of relation and ontology. Not that God has love or commands it, but that love is the basic texture of being, where 1 John and process theology converge with any relational ontology that makes feeling more basic than calculation. I actually quite like the attempt.

Phenomenologically, its the most resonant entry on the list but metaphysically its the vaguest. “love” names a quality of relation, not a mechanism, and needs one of the other conceptions underneath it to do real ontological work, or it stays poetry.

Beautiful poetry tho!

buy me a little treat? ☕❤️

All those basic concept can now of course be refined into more detail. Pantheism can be cosmopanpsychist, or idealist in nature. Panentheism leaves room for all being to go beyond being, Deism allows for Creator ideas without the weird ruler aspect. All have their own metaphysical theories and traditions.

Non-Western traditions such as Advaita Vedānta, where the individual Ātman coincides with the cosmic Brahman, or Neoplatonism, where the One unfolds into particular minds remain possible as well.

We also have the God of the mystics, Sunyata as divine Nothingness without essence or and I think that one deserves our attention more deeply:

God as Jungian Archetype

It is again the idea of “God as Ultimate Goal” but this time its existential, subjective and therefore personal rather than global and universal. It is what you put on the pedestal of your own worship that becomes the God drives you forward.

A guiding principle in life, A value you commit everything to or even a material goal. This ultimate goal of which every other desire is derivative of, seldom requires any deliberate and conscious contemplation. It most of the time remains fully subconscious.

Peterson’s God-talk is famously slippery but in between the lines he often gestures towards this exact psychological manifestation of God in all human minds. “God” as the deepest pattern the collective human psyche keeps re-encountering might be more real than any “God” as an entity out there ever could be. God becomes whatever occupies your highest ideal, the thing you organize your other choices around and sacrifice for. The beauty of this is that just like Jungs work in general you can read it as spiritual or as naturalistic as you want.

It can be a fully psychological thing and at the same time a spiritual jungian can say "where even is the difference” This desire you claim only exists in the abstract has real tangible impact through your actions. If the mythos you operate within has real effects, who are we to judge it as being less than any other physical cause?

Then we have another version of Logos (or Prajna).

The Tao.

Explicitly, structurally not a being and not obviously the God of the classical menu, and yet everything the mystical entries above are groping toward, the Tao says outright, in its opening line, by admitting it can’t be said: the named Tao is not the eternal Tao. It’s process rather than person, and closer to Condition of Being than to Creator — generative without willing, ordering without ruling, the ten thousand things arising from it the way waves arise from water rather than the way a house arises from a builder. The Tao is divinity without an author or God without a self. And we are all part of it.

And while I’m at it yet another Logos adjacent idea:

God as Dialectical Force (Geist). Distinct from Logos by not being a given. the cosmos isn’t already intelligible, already law-governed. Hegel’s Geist is order as an achievement, arrived at only through contradiction, negation, and resolution. Spirit externalizes itself into nature and finite consciousness, encounters an apparent “other,” and comes to recognize the other as part of itself. Unity-in-difference rather than unity from the get go. The lineage runs back through Heraclitus (harmony produced by the opposed pull of the bow and the lyre) and Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum (contraria sunt complementa)— God as the point where infinite and finite stop being opposites and become identical.

shoutout to my friend Luca McCorry for first making me aware of this maxim. It perfectly fits much of my philosophy xD

Jung lifted this almost wholesale for individuation as the reconciliation of opposites in the psyche, which threads back to the entry above. Two things separate Geist sharply from the Ultimate Goal entry. Direction: Goal pulls from ahead, a magnet in the future; Geist is only ever recognized looking backward — Hegel’s Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, meaning Spirit understands a shape only after living through it, teleology without foresight. It also carries the coldest theodicy on this list. The “cunning of reason” has Spirit using human passions, ambitions, and wars as unwitting instruments of a rational unfolding that doesn’t obviously care about the people inside it. Nature only works through outcomes. It’s Evolution baby!

Every other conception at least has to explain why a good or loving God permits suffering; Geist doesn’t promise to be good toward persons at all, only rational and willing to compromise by integrating all inputs. Suffering reduces over time because all agents that suffer bring in their vote, their antithesis to the status quo. Not because there is anyone planning utopia from day one.

And finally lets take a look at a God concept that lives in the heart rather than the brain.

The God of the Mystics.

Eckhart’s Gottheit beneath God, Pseudo-Dionysius’s darkness beyond light, the Buddhist śūnyatā that refuses even the category “existence” as too small. The apophatic tradition across Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism arrives, independently and repeatedly, at the same move: whatever God is, positive predicates falsify it by making it a thing among things, so the only honest speech about it is negation, or silence, or paradox held open on purpose.

This is Condition of Being pushed to its logical end and actually even past that. Where the word “God” is breaking logic for the sake of pointing at the moon before there is a word for it.

This God is better enacted than spoken about. Which is the opposite of what this essay is trying to do xD But hey, there’s a reason I called myself Left Brain Mystic 😎

If we fairly analyze the alternative of giving these ideas ontological weight, we are left with the question of why do we keep reinventing Gods if they aren’t real. Atheists have an answer that is actually quite compelling. God(belief) fulfills functions. Its a story we tell ourselves because we are creative creatures. And yes I treat Atheists as one collective here. That’s pretty wrong but given the context I think you can live with that xD

(Bear with me, I know this essay got quite listy)

God as Existential Coping Mechanism.

Mortality is unbearable to look at directly, so our species builds a story in which death isn’t final, isn’t random and isn’t the last word. On this account “God” is functionally a painkiller.

The fact that this works, that it demonstrably reduces death-anxiety and increases reported life-meaning, is easily considerable as evidence against its truth rather than for it, on the logic that comfort and correctness are independent variables and we should be suspicious of any belief that happens to be exactly the one we’d want to be true.

God as Parental Safety Figure.

The God-concept as an adult retention of the infant’s experience of an all-powerful, all-protecting caregiver, projected outward and upward once the actual parent is revealed to be finite and fallible. The attachment-theory research on this is genuinely interesting. People’s God-image tends to correlate with their early attachment style and overall appears to be a projection of what we need to feel safe.

This is similar to the active claim of God as Parent we looked at in the beginning but is here interpreted as something we evolved to do. No truth correspondence required.

God as Empirical Gap-Filler. We can’t look at atheist conceptions of God without looking at the “God of the gaps” in its familiar, unflattering form. The charitable reading is that this isn’t a concept of God at all but an abuse of the word, a placeholder mistaken for a referent; the uncharitable read is that several entries on the classical menu above (Creator especially) are gap-filling dressed in more dignified clothes.

I think we all fill our gaps with assumptions. That in itself is even compatible with bayesian inference. We all have expectations. But Religions do have a bad track record when it comes to updating their priors. So yeah.

Dont become dogmatic kids.

God as Poetic Appeal to Beauty.

“God” can simply be the place holder for an experience of awe. Think of the presence of a sunset, a symphony, a proof, a birth. The poetic exclamation of a superlative we all experience at some point in our lifes. It costs nothing metaphysically and buys real psychological and aesthetic goods.

This God is born from Art and remains their without ever claiming to govern anything. Even the biggest sceptic should keep room for this kind of divinity. Without it Reality can turn quite bleak.

God as Nihilism Defense.

This list wouldnt be complete without a refrence to the God that keeps the abyss at bay. What Camus claims to be philosophical suicide is this God’s lifeline to stop them from any other kind of life ending intervention.

For those people needing God the idea of value, meaning, and moral obligation as freestanding human inventions with no cosmic backing at all is intolerable to actually live inside. This is Dostoevsky’s worry in The Brothers Karamazov

Is life without God worth living?

See the pattern? Atheism acknowledges the effect of God believe but attributes it to worldly and or psychological origins. And I do think that is totally valid. It is a bit devoid of metaphysical contemplation. But not everyone needs to be into that ^^

Even this expanded list has gaps. I could go on and on.

The God of ritual and practice, The absent or hidden God — deus absconditus, The demonic or indifferent God, The God who is a placeholder for something greater…

In the words of Alex O’Connor one could make an argument for God based on the sheer amount of existing arguments for God.

And similarly one could talk about the manyfaced conceptions we feel inclined to call God as demonstration of the multifaceted nature of said “Being”.

God can live in our heart, our soul, our imagination or in nature. He can be real, become real, dead, alive. Existing, Nonexisting, Beyond Being and Nonbeing and anything in between.

While I do think Atheists are pretty much right to reject any loose conception, especially one that manifest as a real superhuman antropomorphic entity that cares about who we make love with, I also think that they might do well stepping off their high horses and learn to appreciate the more nuanced approaches to the numinous.

Line the whole expanded list up and a handful of these conceptions — Condition of Being, the apophatic mystical God, the Tao, cosmopsychism/analytic idealism, arguably Logos — are constructed in such a way that denying God becomes almost incoherent. If God just is the condition for there being anything at all, then “I don’t believe in God” reduces to “I don’t believe there’s a reason there’s something rather than nothing,” which is fine but often not at all what people rejecting the idea of God believe. If God just is the ordering principle by which the cosmos is intelligible at all, then denying God while still doing physics is close to performative contradiction.

That said most Theist do kind of pull a motte and bailey here and justify their stronger God concepts by hanging on those very vague ones.

The personal Creator-Ruler who answers prayers and could have prevented Auschwitz cannot be proven by gesturing towards a universal Logos. Notice the price paid for that victory, the “God” that becomes undeniable risks becoming arbitrarily universal. Stretched thin enough to cover consciousness, existence, order, process, and the mathematical structure of physical law, and calling it “God” rather than “Being” or “the fact that anything is intelligible at all” is close to a matter of taste. You can make atheism incoherent, but only by making “God” mean something so structurally basic that a committed atheist can accept every substantive claim in the sentence and still, honestly, decline the word.

My own preference lands on God as condition, as principle, and as desire, held together through will and evolution. It is both all of being and it is existence-enabling in its full strength. But it is also a final cause not yet in existence. That is the nature of a desire. We strive to achieve divine Unity. That is the force the poet identifies as love that keeps all of reality moving.

It’s śūnyatā. In a way it is the condition of being empty of any predicate that could pin it down as a this rather than that, beyond being and beyond non-being.And that shit while sounding crazy actually makes more sense than all substantive alternatives given what we know about Physics. Do you think its an accident all the original minds behind Quantum mechanics turned to hinduism and buddhism after dedicating their lifes to understanding fundamental reality?

I don’t.

And here is where I think the argument has to be followed all the way. This means that in no meaningful sense is God a real thing in itself. There is nothing that is God, in the sense “is” usually asks for (a being, locatable, countable, one among others or even one instead of others). So at least in that sense I am firmly atheist. I do not believe a God exists in our Reality.

I am left with the conviction that we have to acknowledge God as truth itself and simultaneously reject any specific God because no Concept can even in principle be true in itself. Nothing is true in itself at that depth, truth being one more predicate that doesn’t survive the trip down. It is a projection we project onto the world. And, at the exact same moment, from the exact same fact, it is something that projects itself onto us. Indra’s net catching its own light from both directions at once, the jewel that reflects every other jewel also being reflected in every one of them, with no jewel positioned outside the net to settle which direction the reflecting “really” runs first.

This is why I think worship and expectation are exactly the wrong postures to take toward this kind of divinity. Worship asks something to already be there, stable, and owed a response. Expectation asks it to arrive on schedule and in a form you specified in advance. Both require the thing to hold still and have a face, and I’ve just argued it can’t hold still and doesn’t have one. Religion’s characteristic mistake, on this account, is giving belief prescriptive character. It takes a desire, which is directional and alive and doesn’t require its object to already exist, and forces it into an expectation, which is a claim about a fact that either obtains or doesn’t. A desire can be faithfully followed forever without ever being satisfied and without that being any kind of failure. An expectation that’s never met is just a disappointment, and eventually a grievance, and that grievance is exactly what’s wrong with organized religious life.

So: do I fall in love with the goal of creating my God (Desire) out of God(All-being)?

Yes. 100%

Do I think everyone has to be in that project, or in this particular version of it?

Hell no.

The one conception on the entire menu of possible Gods that I reject most completely, more than any argument from evil or any merely intellectual dissatisfaction, is the anthropomorphic ruler of a kingdom he owns with humanity as tenants who owe rent in the form of obedience or praise.

Which is how I end up, funnily enough, agreeing with the mystics.

God is every grain of sand. Every facet in Indra’s net, each one a full and undiminished reflection of the whole, none of them and simultaneously all of them the center, none of them owned by any other. And what looks, from inside any single facet, like a striving to be united with the others, desire, reaching, love in the least sentimental sense of the word, things pulling toward each other is the mechanism behind all of existence.

That striving is the direction, the arrow of increasing integration and complexity that Logos gestures at abstractly as “order,” and that Love poetically describes in human terms. It’s the verb form of the very thing Condition of Being names as a noun and Ultimate Goal names as a destination… the same fact, forever moving towards One.

towards… God(?)