God Does Not Exist: Get Over It April 6, 2009
Posted by Phil Groom in Theology.Tags: Atheism, Christianity, Existence of God, God, Religion
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God does not exist. And it’s high time that we as Christians got down off our high horses and gave the atheists their due: as Dawkins puts it, the idea of God’s existence makes as much sense as a giant teapot orbiting the earth.
You see, things that exist can be measured and quantified: God can’t. Things that exist — well, they’re like you and me, objects in space and time that you can walk up to, spit on and, if you’re that way inclined, crucify. You can hit them, analyse them, dissect them, write papers about them and draw final conclusions about them. You can bury them and be done with them. You can put them in boxes and count them.
But God: you can’t box him in. God isn’t an object in the universe: rather the universe exists in God. Existence is a characteristic of contingent beings and things: things that depend upon something else in order to be. Talking about God’s existence simply locates God within the framework of the universe, makes God another contingent being — just another thing, another crazy flying teapot crackpot idea.
Saying God exists — it’s like saying a river swims. Swimming is something that things living in the river do; it’s the river that makes swimming possible. It’s like calling planet Earth an earthling, when earthlings are the beings that inhabit the earth: it’s the earth that makes earthlings what they are. It’s the same with God: it’s God who (and I dare to say ‘who’ rather than ‘that’) makes existence possible.
Those analogies fail, of course, because a river itself exists within a valley; the earth exists in space. But God: God defines existence, not the other way around. God defies existence: existence is irrelevant to the reality of God. Except once, when he walked about amongst us and gave himself away and let us have our way with him and accepted everything we wanted to throw at him. Loved us, wept with us and for us, and forgave us — even when we couldn’t forgive ourselves.
Why? I suspect it’s got something to do with completing our existence. If God had never existed, had for ever remained apart from the universe, it would be like that river drying up, like planet Earth disappearing off into empty space away from the sun. There’d be a few skeletal remains, dried up fossils, proof that fish once swam in the river, that humans once walked about and built their little empires… but nothing else, just a dream that vanishes into the night…
God is the dreamer who makes our dreams of existence come true. But instead of sleeping through them, he steps into them, finds a nightmare, and dies.
Whether he stays dead is really up to us. We can live in the nightmare or reach for the dream. I don’t know how we choose one over the other: some people don’t seem to have any choice. But what I do know is this:
God does not exist: we do — thank God for that!
And I want to make the most of it.
absolutely fantastic post! thanks Phil.
Not sure that anything I’ve written quite qualifies for the accolade ‘fantastic’ (apart from one or two short stories, unpublished), Melanie, but thanks all the same
As Devid Jenkins, one time Bishop of Durham, said…
“God is,
as he is in Jesus,
therefore there is hope.”
Good post, Phil.
Astonishing, Phil. I may have to read a few more times before I garner the whole truth within.
Slow day at the bookshop?
Day off, actually: closed Mondays during vacation.
It’s just a longwinded way of saying what Paul said in Athens: “In him we live and move and have our being.”
God does exist but he is only a spirit. He’s not restricted with mass, time or space and he’s infinite, without beginning or end.
He created everything in his spirit. So all that we see is in this spirit. Since he’s infinite, most likely there is no end to the universe that we see or if that also has a limit, then he’s infinitely beyond that. He said he made things so small, that no man will understand how small it is and he made things so big, that we will never understand how big it is.
With a God like that, how can you not believe in him. Everything you see is him. Just because he hasn’t appeared to you physically doesn’t mean he can’t come and live inside you. This is what he did in Jesus, Peter, Paul, John, Timothy and all the others who received the Holy Spirit. God never changes so this same thing could happen to you, too. But only if you have faith to believe it.
Really enjoyed reading this Phil.
One of the better apologetic pieces I’ve read on the issue of God’s existence. I don’t know if it stands alone as an ontological argument, but it is at the very least part of a good one – and I don’t find that many that are convincing. Is this original? Just curious.
Dave
Thanks Dave. Original? Perhaps in the way I’ve presented it, but owing much to the thought of Meister Eckhart…
[...] God does not exist: we do — thank God for that! [...]
[...] What has me puzzled (there’s only one of me really, despite the voices in my head), though, is why the current crop of atheists are getting themselves so wound up over something that they say doesn’t exist. I’m not about to argue the toss on that one, though: as I’ve said before, God doesn’t exist: get over it. [...]
This really is an admirable piece of Christian apologetics–very interesting, and quite thought-provoking–and I say that as an atheist who, honestly, cannot even comprehend what it would take to ever believe in a god again, or even wanting to.
As a defense of monotheism–and, along with that, a defense of your monotheistic religion of choice–I would say this piece is about as good as such defenses get.
However, I have some problems with it–some reasons why it remains, to me at least, completely unconvincing.
First of all, for all its confident rhetoric, the piece presents no evidence of any sort for its claims. Everything is a part of God? Existence is an attribute of God, not the other way around? God came to Earth as a person? God came to Earth as Jesus, specifically, not as a figure from some other religion?
These statements might all sound impressive, when spoken forcefully, but the above piece provides no evidence for any of them, very likely because none of them have any evidence to offer for themselves.
If everything is a part of God, if to exist means to be a part of a god, shouldn’t you have to provide some evidence for that, other than mere anecdotes or strong feelings of conviction? How can you trust those anecdotes when so many have proven unfounded? How you can trust those feelings, when everyone feels something, and not always reliably, and often those feelings are in violent opposition to one another?
If God came to Earth as a person–and not just any person but one man, one time, more than 2,000 years ago–shouldn’t the evidence of his miraculous life extend beyond the few and often contradictory accounts of his most devoted followers? Why are there no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus during his life from nonbelievers? Why couldn’t even the churches of his closest disciples agree in their Gospels about whether or not he was born of a virgin? Why do the more miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life seem so derivative when he compared with other myths of that time and earlier times, such as those of Horace and Mythras? Et cetera!
As for your paragraph addressing why God would have sent his son to Earth–or himself as his son, if you like–that’s all speculation founded on some ultimately nihilistic philosophy–the idea that if there is no God, or no greater matrix of reality or unreality, then all of this life is just worthless, just “remains…fossils…a dream,” and I couldn’t disagree with that more. Maybe reality without God would be worthless to you, but those of us who focus on experiencing reality unadorned by folkloric or faith-based filigrees think life is wonderful and amazing enough as it is.
The Universe is so full of mystery at every level, from the quantum to the universal–real mystery that challenges us to discover it, to know it–that there’s really no need to posit the existence of other, unknowable mysteries, mysteries whose roots lie in Bronze Age superstitions, legends, and now-unsupportable beliefs.
Mike, thanks for such a thoughtful and thought-provoking response. I shall reflect on what you say and offer some further thoughts later.
Hello there Phil. I just stumbled on your blog. Interesting post
“Existence is a characteristic of contingent beings and things”
Where do you get that from?
I’m not particularly sure that applies to a “Christian” God as you seem to indicate, since the Bible starts out with “In the beginning God created…”. An actor, existing and taking action. Then the story talks about creation happening. So an actor outside of creation, not contingent on anything previously created. If that is the case, how does that follow given your line of reasoning?
Hi Paul – seems kinda obvious to me: everything that exists depends on something else for its existence: we exist in relationship to the rest of the universe. I could be wrong, of course: that’s simply the conclusion I’ve come to.
As for God: the God of Genesis isn’t a Christian deity anyway, although Christians have tried to claim ‘him’; but that’s another story. As for God being “an actor, existing and taking action” — I guess it depends on how you read Genesis. I read it as myth and anthropomorphism, as part of humanity’s ongoing wrestling match with reality, an early attempt to make sense of our origins, develop a sense of purpose and offer a polemical thrust against other ancient near eastern mythologies…