Proofs for/against the Existence of God Miss the Point

Medium is full of posts written by people who want to debunk claims for the existence of God. I find all these posts very interesting, but ultimately not persuasive. I wondered why. This is my attempt to answer that question.

For a little personal background, I was born and raised in a completely integrated family-church-school community. It only dawned on me at the age of 18 that I shouldn’t just passively absorb what my parents and teachers had taught me. I should try to “own it” for myself. I made an attempt. I won’t call it a valiant attempt, not something someone looking in on my life from the outside would see and be impressed. But it was an emotionally taxing attempt. As the community I grew up in and was educated in became more closely identified with conservative politics and broadly American Evangelical outlook on the faith, my convictions identified more and more closely with the other side of the political spectrum. This left me without a spiritual home to call my own and I stopped going to church for a period of 15 years. Only very recently have I returned to regular church attendance.

Against that personal background, I want to argue two interrelated points. The first is that arguments either for or against the existence of God are wrong-headed and miss the point. Persons making such arguments may find them emotionally satisfying or personally fulfilling, but this is far from what they are usually presented as — which is that they get at something objectively true. The second is that the generic idea of God — or, if you will, the generic idea of the Divine — has always raised more questions than it answers, the most fundamental of which concerns how it is possible for one person to intelligibly communicate the idea of God that they carry around with them in their to another person.

Proofs for or against the existence of God founder and finally sink on the reef of human subjectivity. The person who sets out to prove or disprove the existence of God has an idea of God in their mind which they either defend or critique with appeals to this or that method of argument and/or body of factual information. All of this takes place in their head. When that person goes to communicate their arguments to other persons, they invariably run into the fact that those other persons are committed to very different methods of argument and/or different bodies of factual information. This follows naturally enough. Different people have different experiences, have read different books, and find value and significance in different things. Again, excepting for the act of communicating, which is a bodily activity, all of this sifting through argumentation and evidence takes place in persons’ heads.

So I propose to begin elsewhere: not with God, whose existence can either be objectively proved or disproved, but with the idea of God in a person’s head, precisely where every idea of God is found. What sort of an idea is it? I take it to be uncontroversial to claim that the idea of God is an all-embracing idea: when a person claims to believe in Divinity, what they usually have in mind is a Reality that underlies the existence of every possible thing that might fall within the bounds of human experience. That includes everything within the universe, which is currently estimated to be 13.79 billion years old and maybe 7 trillion light-years wide: every inanimate object, every living organism, every living, intelligent organism, absolutely everything. In one respect, you can think of the idea of God as a short-hand expression for absolutely everything. Every possible thing a person might encounter can be fitted into it. However, in another respect, it does have an intelligible, objective referent — namely, everything that exists — even if limited beings like ourselves are unable to perceive everything that exists in a single glance or mentally comprehend with a single thought.

Thus this idea of God, this short-hand for everything that exists, is not unintelligible. I can communicate it to another person and they are able to grasp what it is I am mentally gesturing towards. But that is not saying very much. Saying everything all at once is equivalent to saying nothing at all. Why so? For the simple reason that everything and nothing are like each other in one important respect: they are not something which can be described in distinction from and/or relation to other things. From the vantage point of persons like ourselves, then, the idea of God is therefore a conspicuously empty idea. What is the nature of this God? What does his will demand? What does he intend for mere mortals like ourselves? The idea in your head says nothing but what you want it to say. The all-embracing external reality to which it corresponds is either unconcerned with human affairs or doesn’t speak in any language intelligible to human beings.

Provisionally I conclude that this all-embracing idea of God can be intelligibly communicated to another person, but that’s about it. It may not even be appropriate to call this an idea of God, since it cannot be filled with the usual descriptors that believers typically identify with a personal God. Generic nouns may be better: Everything, Being, The-One-All, etc. But — and this is a big but — the ability to communicate this all-embracing idea of God ought to transform how we understand the nature of the being who communicates this all-embracing idea of God.

Let’s say that someone talks to you about God. You know that the God they are talking about, aside from everything else that might be said about It, is an all-embracing idea in their head referring to everything that exists — or, if you prefer a more precise formulation, to existence itself. Step back for a second and look at this scene from the outside. A particular type of being, a human being, has an all-embracing idea in their head about everything that exists which they call God. This is the same sort of being that you yourself are, and you are able to make sense of what this all-embracing idea refers to, even if you are not willing to commit to any of the specific conclusions that person who is talking to you is drawing. That’s interesting. Only this particular type of being, which you yourself are, can communicate this all-embracing idea. Other living beings cannot do so. Certainly non-living things cannot do so. That indicates something distinctive about the mental capacity of this particular type of being. It sets them apart in some way or other from other living beings and non-living things.

What do we make of the mental capacity of this particular sort of being’s ability to communicate this all-embracing idea of God, an idea which notably lacks all specific content? Arguably, it ought to clear the decks of all intellectual pretensions. This idea of God belongs to everyone and therefore to no one in particular. Arguments that claim to prove or disprove the existence of God attempt to circumvent this very human limitation. They want to say something specific about God without taking into account the very human limitations under which such arguments are made. Insofar as the person making the argument is human, that’s simply not tenable.

The conclusion I draw is that specific arguments for or against the existence of God ultimately miss the point. It will not be any one argument that proves or disproves the existence of God. No one can reason from the familiar things of human experience to the existence (or lack thereof) of God.