Have you ever thought about the fact that you don’t exist?
This is the sort of thing that used to occupy my brain when I was studying philosophy at 17, suddenly worrying that I might be a figment of some alien’s imagination, or indeed that the world was my own solipsistic dream. This second one has more purchase for most of us: our own existence is obvious, someone else’s much less so; conveniently this makes our moral duties to one another much easier to shelve.
Thinking you don’t exist is really just your brain on too much philosophy and not enough theology. It’s not a particularly interesting question beyond demonstrating that obvious things can sometimes be hard to prove.
Except I think there’s a sense in which it’s true. Or, it’s a clunky way of saying what I’m getting at, but there’s something to it. What I mean is this: if God exists (and he does, there is no more ‘brute fact’), and if we exist (and we certainly appear to) then those two statements cannot mean exactly the same thing. I cannot exist in the same way that God exists. We cannot share the same category of being.
When I say I exist, and you exist, and trees exist, and stars exist, and cats exist, and dragons exist, these are all statements of a similar kind. We mean the same thing by ‘exist’ even if we might want to debate whether all those things do have being. When we say God exists, we cannot be saying the same thing.
If we were saying the same thing then we would be saying that God and I have the same sort of being. We would be making God into a thing like me or you or dogs or herons or maples. Classical theology is clear on this: God is no thing. Things are made, God is not made.
That sounds odd to our ear, not least because ‘God is nothing’ seems like an obvious nonsense. It’s true is a similar way that it’s true that I don’t exist.
What I mean is this, to say God exists is to say that I don’t. No thing exists in the same way that Yahweh exists. Yahweh is no thing. I exist in the same category as all other things exists, God belongs to a different category. To put it another way, I have being, God is the ground of being. The Bible says it this way, using the categories of ancient Greek philosophy deliberately: in him I live and move and have my being (Acts 17). My being is in him. He is the source of being.
I exist; he is.
God makes this claim for himself, his personal name—Yahweh—is connected to the verb ‘to be’ and he announced himself to Moses as ‘I am who I am.’ God is the creator, we are creatures, along with cats and herons and the Enemy and the corkscrew hazel I can see out of my back window. God cannot belong in that list even though everything else that has being can. I’ve stuck to living creatures in my lists, but I could add inanimate things too; while they aren’t alive they do exist in a way that is comparable to the way I exist. We aren’t the same, but we can be spoken of in the same breath. God cannot be spoken of in that same breath. God is no thing. Both I and the laptop I type on are things, for all we are radically different in a million vitally important ways, we are still in some fashion comparable. God is not comparable; God is.
Why care about what seems like an esoteric thing? We need to not speak of God irreverently, as though he were a thing like us. We need to not suggest he is a thing like the Enemy either, or like the world. Yahweh is.
I’m not wild about arguing for his existence beyond ‘open your eyes!’ though obviously that has little currency for those who doubt that God does exist. This is mostly a modern thing and, as Joseph Minich has persuasively argued, is closely linked to changes in technology and our relationship to labour due to those technological changes. Nevertheless, doubt is now the air we breathe, and throwing your smartphone in the river won’t be particularly helpful in terms of making a substantial change to how we see God.
We sometimes do have to argue for God’s existence. Try when we do so to not argue as though he were a thing, but instead the ground of being itself. ‘God is no thing’ is why questions like ‘so who created God?’ are a category mistake.
Personally, I find arguing from the resurrection more useful than arguing about the existence of ‘a’ god, because it focuses the mind on whether God is in fact whoever raised Jesus from the dead. God is no thing but he reveals himself in story: Yahweh is he who led Israel out of Egypt and he who raised Christ from the grave.
And this abstract principle of being that you can’t really talk about well because he is categorically different from anything you might attempt to compare him to? He loves you.
Which is as mad as it gets. Thank goodness it’s the truest thing there is.
Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash
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