This is the fifth post in a series that details my evolving thoughts on religion. The first ones are:

Here, I want to tackle one of the most difficult topics: God.

As detailed in the other posts from the series, I was a militant atheist for about a decade. I was certain I knew everything relevant there is to know about the topic, and that nothing could surprise me. I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours participating in and watching debates on this topic. I found the arguments advanced in favor of God to be completely unconvincing, and reveled in taking them apart or seeing them get destroyed.

But as the title says, I eventually ended up learning something new, something that actually made sense. This came as quite a shock, after all the time I had invested in exploring the topic. Let’s see how it happened.

I. My original understanding

I want to go in some detail in my atheistic understanding of God, both to prove my “atheist credentials” to any atheist who’s reading this, but also to contrast it with what I now know. (I was always annoyed when I heard testimonials from “former atheists” who sounded like they never encountered rebuttals to the points they were now making).

As an atheist, I understood God to be a supernatural explanation for the phenomena that we find within the universe. A placeholder that people used because they didn’t want to say “I don’t know” when pondering questions how the world they saw around them works. Richard Feynman summarized it as such:

God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand.

My case wasn’t that “God doesn’t exist”, but rather “there’s no good evidence that any god exists, and so there’s no good reason to believe in one”. It was an “unnecessary hypothesis”.

I was familiar with all the typical ways in which people tried to argue for God, as well as with the typical replies:

Appeal to ignorance: “Life, the complex cosmos, etc. couldn’t have formed through natural means, God did it”. (Our ignorance on a topic doesn’t give us the license to put anything in its place. And how do we know the limits of what can naturally happen, anyway?)

Appeal to consequences #1: “If people don’t believe in God, there’s no objective basis to morality, therefore people must believe in God if we want them to behave”. (This may be an argument for religion, but not for the truth of religion).

Appeal to consequences #2: “If people don’t believe in God, life is pretty bleak. You need to believe in God in order to be happy.” (This may be an argument for acting as if God is real, but not for finding out that God is real. Reality is the way it is, regardless of how we feel about it.)

Genetic fallacy: “You disbelieve because you want to sin”. (How does this prove God, anyway?)

Argumentum ad baculum (appeal to force): “If you don’t believe in God, bad things will happen to you after you die”. (Pascal’s wager also fits here, to which I’d answer that “belief isn’t a choice, you either have evidence to believe or you don’t”)

Argument from personal experience: “Pray to Jesus and you will feel wonderful”. (If that’s the case, it doesn’t prove God to the skeptical mind, although the individual may be convinced. It only reveals things about human psychology. There are countless personal experiences specific to one religion or denomination that others dismiss as prelest (spiritual delusion))

Argument from consciousness: “Without God, how do you explain consciousness?” (a variant of the argument from ignorance)

Appeal to Bible prophecies: “Many prophecies of the Bible came true!” (Yes, it says on page 600-something that what was prophesied on page 400-something came true. Is this a serious argument?)

Appeal to Bible facts: “Historians just discovered a city mentioned in the Bible!” (Does this mean that any book where the action happens in real locations is true? Have these people not heard of historical fiction?)

It should be clear by now that I have no patience for bad arguments.

On issues of uncertainty I chose to take a position of agnosticism: “well, we just don’t know how that happened, so why should God be the explanation? Especially considering that every other time we were in this situation before, the answer turned out to be completely natural.”.

I still consider Richard Feynman’s following statement on knowledge and ignorance to be intellectually honest and respectable:

I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

II. My current understanding

As mentioned in my post about why I’m no longer a New Atheist, at one point I became disillusioned with it as a movement.

Just out of curiosity, I picked up a polemical book by Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher: “The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism”. I liked it, so I followed that through with another book by him, “Aquinas (A Beginner’s Guide)”, and two books by the Orthodox philosopher, David Bentley Hart: “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies” and “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss”.

Both authors make the case that the “god” that’s being thrown around in the theism vs atheism debates is a caricature of God as understood by classical theism.

They go to great lengths to differentiate classical theism from “intelligent design”, “Paley’s watch”, “God of the gaps”, deism and all other religious ideas based on the argument from ignorance. These simply postulate “god” as an explanation for why this or that aspect of the natural world is a certain way. David Bentley Hart calls this a “demiurge”, a master tinkerer which molded the physical world into shape.

By contrast they argue, each in his own distinct way, classical theism is based on reason. How can this be?

The case for the God of classical theism is based on three steps. These aren’t explicitly enumerated by the authors, but structuring them these way makes things clearer, from my perspective:

Recognizing the distinction between physical and metaphysical questions.

They show that physics is by definition constrained in what questions it can answer, even in principle, and that there exist questions that are qualitatively different from physical ones. Feser deals with the origin of change and causality, Hart with the question of existence. Recognizing the need for certain necessary answers.

They show that the questions posed at #1 must have an answer, and this answer must be qualitatively different from what we’re used to. Identifying certain characteristics of this answer.

Here is where they conclude that personhood and subjectivity must be essential characteristics of the answer identified at #2, which is why they use a name, “God”, rather than a generic, impersonal designation.

#1: On the distinction between physical and metaphysical questions.

In the modern world, science and education make us comfortable with questions that have physical answers. Why does it rain? The water cycle. Why does the Sun shine? Gravity and fusion.

And Feynman is right, people often did and still do invoke gods in order to explain such physical questions.

But are all questions of a physical nature? Both authors argue that there exist questions which are in a completely different class. The way to get to these questions is to step back and to look from a distance at physics, to start to ask questions about physics itself and what makes it possible. Hence, the name “metaphysics”.

One such question that I really like is the question of existence: “how it is that anything (including any cause) can exist at all?”.

Just to clarify, the question doesn’t ask “how did our Universe appear?”, but rather “what is the source of existence itself?”. If the Universe and the laws of physics have always existed, this doesn’t do away with the question of their existence in the slightest. “How is it that they have always existed?” is a completely legitimate question. We aren’t asking “how did they start?”. We’re asking “how is it that existence itself is a fact of the world?”. Both authors make it explicit that questions about the origins of things don’t rely on the assumption that the Universe had a beginning.

The question isn’t about the previous state in the evolution of a physical system. It’s about why there is a physical system to begin with.

In case you aren’t convinced that the distinction between physical and metaphysical questions is significant, let’s explore a related physical question: “what is the physical mechanism that keeps everything in the universe fairly consistent from moment to moment?”

Modern science bets heavily on the fact that the question makes sense and that it can be answered. That’s why we invest billions in particle accelerators.

If you try to answer that using physics, you may start by observing that there exist conservation principles which prevent things from simply disappearing. But then you may simply ask: “how is it that there are such conservation principles in the first place?”.

Suppose we find an even deeper principle from which conservation laws are derived.

…maybe the quantum vacuum constantly gives rise to an infinity of multiverses, where many different “laws” manifest in an infinity of incremental variations, and only in some of them is it the case that the physics can sustain minds capable of posing this question. (Some scientists believe there are bound to be universes where conservation laws don’t apply, while in others, the underlying space-time can’t even give rise to anything).

…maybe the answer is in string theory or in some yet undiscovered more fundamental theory. Or maybe we all live in a simulation.

These are all physical answers. But every new possible physical answer can’t help but raise the original metaphysical question.

The metaphysical question was: “how is it the case that this situation exists and can even exist, in the first place?”. It applies equally well to this new answer, whatever it is, and we’re back at the beginning. Of course, we’d understand incrementally more about the world, but we wouldn’t have advanced one bit towards answering the original question.

In the terms of Thomas Aquinas, a finite thing’s essence (what it is) entirely fails to account for its existence (that it is).

#2: On necessary answers to metaphysical questions.

We observed that there exist certain tricky questions which are completely legitimate but which simply fall outside what physics will answer. It’s not that physics can’t answer them now, but might answer them with more science, it’s that physics won’t answer them even in principle.

Answering “why does there exist a physical world in the first place?” falls outside the competency of physics because it demands an outside look.

There’s a qualitative difference between physical questions and metaphysical ones, and the gap simply can’t be breached by adding more layers of physicality. To confuse the two is a category error.

This is as certain as the fact that there is no “largest prime number”, as proven by Euclid more than two millennia ago. No matter how fast our computers get and how much memory they have, be they the size of planets or galaxies, they will never find a prime number they can determine to be “the largest prime”. There will always be a larger one, even though we don’t know what that number is for any given large prime number. In this proof there’s no requirement for any “empirical evidence”. What “empirical evidence” could there be?

Similarly, physics can’t answer the question of existence. But we exist, so there must be an answer.

The only remaining rational option is that there must be a non-physical answer, whatever “non-physical” means. Notice that we’ve not indicated what the answer is, we’ve just established that there must be one. Let’s call it the “source of existence” or “origin of existence” for now.

But why would this answer be the final one? Why can’t we simply re-ask the question, like we did with all concrete examples before? It’s because that’s how we pinpointed it in the first place. We said: “let’s consider that answer where the questioning stops”. It’s the way we defined it when we set out looking for it.

There must be “something” that ceases to require an external cause for its own existence, in order for it to be able to impart existence on everything else. So even though we don’t know anything else about this “something”, we know one thing: it is necessary that it exists in an of itself. By definition.

This isn’t dissimilar to (but neither is it identical with) establishing a limit in mathematics, when working with convergent infinite series. You don’t start with a value and declare that that’s the limit. You start with the concept of a limit and determine there must be a value. Since that value is the limit, the series can’t go past it, even though it can always go past any value prior to the limit.

Notice that the question of existence doesn’t depend on the complexity of the world, on the existence of life, or anything like that. If the only thing that existed was a quantum field that never produced any particles, or a single proton that always existed and will always exist, the need for a necessary answer to the question of existence would be exactly the same. Nothing would change even if it turned out our Universe is part of a multiverse, that we’re part of a simulation, etc.

To stress the point about complexity: if the only thing that ever existed was a single electron, it would still require an explanation and a cause for the existence of the universe that enables it. And this explanation would, by definition, require no further explanations, even though it’s infinitely more complex than the electron. The simple electron’s existence needs to be explained, while the necessary source of its existence wouldn’t. By definition.

#3: Why God?

Having established that there needs to be a “source of existence” that falls outside the realm of physics (because it’s what makes physics possible in the first place), is there anything meaningful we can say about this “source”?

It would seem that we stumbled upon an intriguing and unavoidable conclusion, only to be completely stumped by what to do next, just when we were dying to find out more. Can we do anything other than to throw up our hands up in frustration, simply because this “origin” or “source” is so completely incomprehensible and unfathomable?

My former agnostic-atheist self would and did argue that yes, maybe there can be an ultimate origin of everything, but it’s surrounded by an impenetrable fog of uncertainty, and it’s likely so incomprehensible that nothing meaningful can be said or thought about it. This position, however, is based on the refusal to even try, and just states outright that one shouldn’t even bother.

Let’s try, for the sake of intellectual honesty.

Here, the argument goes like this: whatever essential property is observed to exist in the world can’t be missing from its origin. If the origin didn’t have it, by definition it couldn’t impart it to anything else.

Well, we know the world contains conscious persons with minds and subjective experiences. We’re here, aren’t we? Therefore, the “origin” that keeps us in existence simply can’t lack these characteristics. Of course, the physical stuff we’re made of doesn’t need to have these traits, but since they manifest when the choreography of the stuff we’re made of all comes together, they can’t be absent where existence itself springs from.

It’s just common courtesy to stop calling the “metaphysical source” a “source”, and to use a name, as you would when referring to a person. Hence, people simply started using the name “God”, in order to relate to Him. It’s also a convention to use the “He” pronoun.

And that’s about it.

This isn’t the god of deism, who forged a self-sustaining Universe and then retreated. The relation is more analogous to a violin player and the song he’s playing.

It may be the case that we live in a simulation, and there actually is a team of scientists running our Universe inside some sort of computer. But they wouldn’t be God, because they’d be in the same position we are.

“But isn’t this just the argument from ignorance?”, you may ask. And the answer is “no, it isn’t”. Arguments from ignorance find a gap in knowledge and arbitrarily place a specific explanation in that place. This isn’t how this argument went.

We didn’t say “This guy we really liked anyway, God, just happens to be the answer we were looking for”. We didn’t find a gap in our knowledge and declared, by fiat, that the answer is the Abrahamic God. We asked a good question and determined a minimal set of characteristics that must be true of the answer, by reasoning that all possible alternative characteristics simply can’t be true. We didn’t start with a known conception of God, but rather we ended up with “something” that we then reasoned to have certain features. Among these, that it can’t lack consciousness and that there must be only one.

I deliberately used the expression “God can’t lack…” or “these characteristics can’t be missing from God” because we are simply constrained when it comes to what positive statements we can make. Things in the world are imperfect reflections of characteristics present in their ultimate origin.

Feser says that none of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, would apply to God in anything but an analogous sense, and that such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God. I found this tentativeness to be intellectually honest.

Notice also that the case isn’t a matter of evidence or probability. This isn’t a hypothesis that’s being postulated as one possible explanation among others. It doesn’t require any kind of faith, let alone blind faith in a book or in authority. It was arrived at through a strict metaphysical demonstration, not very dissimilar to mathematical proofs.

#4: God isn’t optional.

Once you understand how God is defined, His existence stops being a matter of “if”. God isn’t optional. God is not something “extra”, just one more entity inside the natural world, which might as well just not be there.

And yet atheism, agnosticism, as well as almost all popular debates “on the existence of God” will hardly ever even acknowledge an awareness of this definition.

The result is that unbelievers, when pondering the topic, are unlikely to encounter the kind of understanding of God that we’re exploring here.

#5: God as noncompetitively transcendent

If God is imagined to be just another entity that “takes up space” in the world, then we’re not talking about God at all. The uncreated God by necessity has to transcend the created (physical) world.

God is not, by nature, located anywhere inside the world, rather, God contains the world.

God is both immanent to the world (not absent from anywhere), and noncompetitively transcendent of it (not identical with it, but infinitely larger).

#6: Is this God?

At this point many believers and nonbelievers might be thinking: “well, that doesn’t sound like the God we know about”. Yes, it certainly doesn’t sound like Him.

God is almost never taught from this philosophical perspective, except in certain theological schools. Perhaps it wasn’t considered necessary. I highly doubt peasants in rural Europe were especially inclined towards metaphysics.

The traditional religious narratives were good enough for the people because the people were good enough for the traditional religious narratives.

They grew up with God and they didn’t need to find Him when wandering “outside”, as through a blizzard or a sandstorm.

This is just the metaphysical or philosophical description of classical theism, not the dogmatic or confessional one. It’s a sort of “minimum viable understanding”, and it is in no way complete, nor does it claim to be.

Some don’t like this philosophical approach:

Pascal lamented in his Pensées that he is interested in the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.”. He worried that the abstractness of this kind of demonstration would make the Christian God unrecognizable. Eastern Orthodox Christians are also known to be skeptical of this “Western” approach.

People like Richard Dawkins scoff at this “sophisticated theology”, and dismiss it on the grounds that “it isn’t what regular people believe”. But people have incomplete knowledge on a wide variety of topics, including on the theory of evolution. Dawkins would argue that this in no way affects the validity of evolutionary science.

Others argue in favor of the philosophical approach:

David Bentley Hart notes that this view of God, with the characteristics attributed to Him, is at the core of almost all world religions. Each religion builds on top of something like this.

Bishop Robert Barron has praised Thomas Aquinas, and argued that this philosophical intellectual tradition needs to be recovered and is much needed today. He also acknowledged, in his interview on the Rubin Report, that philosophy only takes you part of the way.

So to me it’s pretty clear: the God of the philosophers certainly gives a glimpse of God as explored in traditional religions. A much needed glimpse for someone who doesn’t know where to start thinking about this.

III. On religion and science

One interesting fact is that all my objections from when I was an atheist were entirely justified. They just flew right past the transcendent God of classical theism.

Under this view, there’s no conflict with modern science. Big Bang, evolutionary science, modern physics, chaos theory, the science that is yet to be discovered. None of these pose any difficulty to classical theism. Multiverse, simulation hypothesis, you name it, if they end up being proven true.

Consider the God I’ve described so far. If you don’t believe that God exists, suspend your disbelief for a moment. Why would evolution contradict God, when God is the one who maintains the existence of the very stuff that evolutionary forces operate on?

Do you suspect God is caught by surprise when oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water?

Similarly, is he surprised when this particular combination of GTAC nucleic acids “just happens” to start a chemical reaction that results in something that purrs and meows? And is He surprised when a change in one of the nucleic acids produces something that purrs in a slightly different way?

All possible combinations of nucleic acids constitute a bounded, multi-dimensional space that is as “established” ahead of time as Mendeleev’s periodic table was, before the atoms even condensed from plasma and before the first supernovae produced heavy elements. There’s no need for God to force physics to give rise to cells, cats, and human bodies.

I dislike “intelligent design” and similar theories because they presume God just didn’t know how to make self-assembling matter, so he constantly needs to nudge molecules from time to time so they don’t stray. This would imply that they wouldn’t naturally do that.

It assumes that physics, chemistry and biology are independent from God. The premises on which it is based already exclude the God of classical theism, opting for a tinkerer “god” that exists as just another entity in the natural world, doing his best to mold matter into shape, matter over which he has no control other than a physical one.

But when considering the God of classical theism, the idea of any physical system doing anything “on its own” (which then needs divine intervention to give rise to complex systems) doesn’t even make sense.

The “fine tuning” argument doesn’t fare much better, in my opinion, because it reduces God to the task of turning the knobs of fundamental physical constants, as if these constants have the power to constrain Him in what He can do. It’s as if God found Himself in a Universe that has space, time, matter, and energy, and he can only adjust variables that determine the number of dimensions and how particles interact, until He finds the goldilocks zone for life.

But the God of classical theism doesn’t need to intervene in order to push nucleic acid molecules out of their usual way, in order to achieve some sort of “irreducibly complex” design. Their usual way is the right way because He is the one who designed all possible patterns and possibilities (the Logos). There’s no need for any “morphic field” or “élan vital” to give shape and life to inanimate matter. God doesn’t need any special “stuff” to animate matter, when He’s the one continuously generating it, space, time and all the potential states that the Universe may ever be in. (“visibilium omnium et invisibilium”, as the Creed goes).

The world can physically work as described by any valid scientific theory, without this coming in contradiction with anything I wrote in this post about God.

Richard Feynman agrees on this point:

I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God; I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God — an ordinary God of religion — a consistent possibility? Yes, it is consistent. Despite the fact that I said that more than half of the scientists don’t believe in God, many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way. But this consistency, although possible, is not easy to attain.

So how did we get the mistaken conception that science and religion are in conflict? Feser and Hart comment on this. The fault belongs to both sides and the process goes back as far as the 13th century. First, well-intended religious philosophers and revolutionary theologians nitpicked and stripped down their own religion into incoherence. Afterwards, in modernity, skeptics misunderstood and were content with their misunderstanding. Then they exaggerated the merits of their own epoch in order to contrast it with the previous one, and ended up creating a mythology, a creation myth of the modern age. The more skeptics advanced the idea that science disproves God, the more apologists reacted by feeling threatened (an attitude that didn’t exist originally). Biblical literalism is actually a modern phenomenon and the presumed conflict between the Church and science is a modern fiction. (Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

The New Atheist “discovery” that biblical fundamentalists and literalists are talking nonsense was just common sense in the age of the Church Fathers. Apologists tried to compete with science on science’s turf, when there’s no need to do that in the first place. Quite the opposite.

There’s no reason why any modern person, scientifically literate and theologically informed, needs to choose between God and science. Ultimately, everything comes from God, but there’s no contradiction between accepting this, and accepting that when you “zoom in”, you find out that various natural phenomena are made up of ever smaller classes of interacting parts.

IV. Now what?

If I did a half decent job at presenting the arguments that I found relevant, and there’s still an atheist or agnostic who has read up to this point, it may be that I convinced someone to at least entertain the idea of God.

The fact of His existence can hit you hard, though. Because if the argument is correct, it has several immediate implications.

If God really exists, in some unfathomable fashion, despite the objections of skeptics and the unlikely reliability of religions, something will dawn on you pretty soon.

If God is a conscious person, with a subjective experience, you can’t help but realize that at this very moment God is conscious of you, like you are of Him perhaps for the first time. Even more so, incomprehensibly more so, and has been conscious of you for every moment of your life, waiting for you to wake up to Him.

What to do? You can’t simply conclude that God exists then carry on as usual. Don’t you have to say “hi”, at least? And how to even do that?

Here’s where religious traditions come in. In these situations, people are most comfortable exploring the traditions they were born in. You may look at it with completely new eyes and see what was there all along, but you just missed.

Accepting the existence of God has nothing to do with faith. And it is the existence of God that is the stumbling block for atheists and agnostics. Faith has to do with what you choose to do once you realize the existence of God is an inescapable conclusion. You do have to “trust” that the religious tradition you’re engaging with is saying meaningful things, and that you yourself are progressing in the right direction. But at least that trust is based on the knowledge that the goal of the whole endeavor is real, and it’s possible that what you’re finding out is legitimate.

I personally follow Taleb’s Lindy rule, and bet on what has stood the test of time. There’s solid spiritual guidance in both the Roman and the Byzantine Church, once you deepen your understanding of why they do things the way they do.

The topic is obviously very complex, and I presume that the symbolic language and iconography used in traditional Christianity is a feature, not a bug. That is: the topic is so counter-intuitive that language is simply insufficient to articulate things in a direct manner. So they use story and image in order to guide and to direct attention. Some confusion is likely inevitable. But wouldn’t you want to know what people who were in the same situation as you are have to say?

If the reader wasn’t convinced of the case, then at least I hope that I’ve managed to present an image of God that goes beyond the “invisible friend in the sky” caricature. Yes, there are people out there who believe nonsense. But don’t just assume that every believer is a dummy who just needs to watch more Dawkins and Carl Sagan videos.

Richard Feynman himself, even though he was an atheist, was favorably disposed towards the religion that stands at the core of our civilization: