God as Nothing

Thomas Aquinas and the Five Ways

20th Sep 2026

Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence

I’ve finally got to that stage in my life when I find myself, after fifty years of working in and around universities, with a collection of books which I don’t know what to do with any more. Now that I’m a ‘charming old gentleman’ – i.e. a pensioner – I find myself able to let go of a lot of these books, and local charity shops are reaping the benefit. At least I hope they are.

Every now and then during this process I return to a long-unopened book and think about it again. And this week the book I returned to was Anthony Kenny’s The Five Ways: St Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence. I bought it when I was in Oxford in 1984, and having read it I had a happy afternoon talking to Brian Davies about it.

Back then, in the 1980s, people would often mention Thomas’ ‘five ways’ to me, if we were talking about faith, about God, about ‘the existence of God’, and so on. They were always treated as if Thomas was trying to prove the existence of God. People assumed that Thomas was faced with an atheist who denied the existence of God, and was thinking up reasons which might persuade the atheist that God existed. This is certainly what Anthony Kenny thought Thomas was doing. He says on the first page:

‘I shall not discuss how seriously St Thomas meant the Five Ways as proofs. … I myself think that [he] meant them as seriously as he meant any other philosophical proof.’

In what follows I am going to suggest that this is not what Thomas is actually doing with his ‘five ways’. I’m going to explore this from three different angles.

First: a question of translation

At first sight it does seem that Thomas seeks to demonstrate by proof, by evidence and logic perhaps, that God exists. He writes, Deum esse quinque viis probari potest.[1] The traditional way of translating this would be something like: ‘God can be proved to be (or exist) in five ways’. Not that he exists in five ways, but the fact that he exists can be proved in five ways.

But what about this word probari – that’s the passive infinitive: ‘to be proved’? What does it mean? What does Thomas mean by ‘proved’ here? Latin probare can have a range of rather different meanings. It can mean ‘to prove’ in the sense that a mathematician proves a theorem, or in the way that the prosecution in a court of law might prove a defendant’s guilt ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’. But it can mean other things too. It can mean ‘to test, to try, to inspect’. Think of the phrase ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’. That is to say, you find out what it’s like by trying it. Think of the English verb ‘probe’, which comes from that same Latin word probare. To probe is to make enquiry, to explore and examine. You might end up wanting to assert something at the end of your enquiry, but the probing is in the enquiry, not the conclusion. Think of the word ‘proof’ in relation to whisky, where it is used to refer to how much alcohol it contains. It comes from the test that tax inspectors used to perform on strong drink, mixing it with gunpowder. If you could light the mixture it meant that the whisky was above a certain strength and so you paid a higher tax. But the ‘proof’ was the test.

So we should not simply assume that when Thomas uses the word probare he is offering a logical proof that something is the case. Perhaps he is ‘testing’ or ‘probing’ what it means to say that God exists.

Second: what is it that exists?

Normally if I said, “I know that X exists”, my friends would say, “What is this X that you speak of? What is it like?” If I didn’t know what it was, they would look at me – quite rightly – as if I were mad. How can you know that something exists if you don’t know what it is?

But St Thomas says, ‘This is what it is to know God: that we know that we don’t know what God is.’ (Hoc est Deum cognoscere, quod scimus nos ignorare de Deo quid sit).[2] Thomas does not know, and asserts that he does not know, what God is. And he says no one knows, ‘neither Catholic nor pagan’. If we don’t know what God is, the question of ‘Does God exist?’ becomes more or less meaningless. This is implied by what he says elsewhere: ‘Because we cannnot know what God is, but only what he is not, we cannot contemplate how God is, but only how he is not.’ (Sed quia de Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de Deo quomodo sit, sed potius quomodo non sit.)[3] We cannot consider how God is, then, or what it means for God to exist. ‘As the substance of God is unknown, so also is his being’ (Sicut ejus substantia ignota, ita et esse).[4]

This points to the idea that Thomas is not arguing for the existence of God at all in his five ways. Instead we should see him as looking at everything that does exist, the whole world of existing beings, and pointing to the mystery that underlies them all. It remains a mystery, utterly unknown. But as it is the mystery that underlies all existing beings, it cannot itself be an existing being.

Third: God is not in any list

One of the key insights of Thomas’ theology, implicit in his notion of creation, is that God is not a member of any category that we can dream up. Of course we use language in all kinds of ways that seem to suggest that he is. We say that God ‘knows’ things. And therefore it seems that God can be listed among the category of ‘knowers’. We say that God is ‘beautiful’, and therefore it seems that God can be listed among the category of ‘beautiful things’. We call God a judge, so he must be listed in the category of ‘judges’.

But for Thomas this is simply not true. He says that ‘God is not in any category’ – Deus non est in genere. If we make a list of all things which are ‘X’, we cannot include God on that list, even if we might have just said that ‘God is X’. We sometimes use language that suggests that he is one member of a list of certain kinds of thing, but that is just a trick of our language. It just looks that way because we use words about God which seem to help us, but they are not accurate representations of what God is, or what God is actually like. We speak of him by metaphor, or analogy, or (most accurately of all) by negation – God is not this, and not that.

So, in the first of Thomas’ Five Ways he observes that everyone knows that some things cause other things to happen. Things have a potential for ‘change’ or ‘movement’ and sometimes that potential is actualised, and they change. I have a potential to become hot, and sometimes I might actually become hot. That’s a change. Thomas says that potential can only be actualised by something else, an active agent like fire, or sun, or a hot bath. ‘Everything which is changed must be changed by something else’. Everything which moves must be moved by something else which is prior to that movement – a ‘mover’. And as there is movement all over creation, with one thing moving another, there must have been a first mover which is the origin of all subsequent movement but which is not moved by anything else.[5]

But let us think about this picture for a moment. First of all, the process of one thing causing or moving another thing depends on both occupying time and space. They must be related to each other and exist in the same dimension. That is part of what we mean by ‘causing’. Causation is a process within creation, within the order of existing things. But Thomas tells us that God is ‘completely outside the order of existing things’ (omnino extra ordinem entium). If God is not within that order where movement, change and causality take place, then how can he be the first mover, or the first cause?

And here is another way of making roughly the same point: if God is not a member of any list (Deus non est in genere), then he can’t be in the list of ‘movers’ or ‘causes’. He can’t even be the first one on the list, for he would then still be a member of that list. Whatever Thomas is pointing to when he speaks of the unmoved mover, he cannot be identifying God as simply the first one in such a series. We may speak of God as a ‘cause’ or as a ‘mover’, but this cannot be because he is one of the causes or movers that exist – not even the first one – because God cannot be ‘one of’ any category, including the category of causes. Thomas must be using the term primum movens ‘first mover’ in a strange way. And of course he is, because for Thomas all language about God is language being used ‘in a strange way’.

St Thomas Aquinas, in a fifteenth-century altarpiece {photo: Carlo Crivelli, Wikipedia)

What has been ‘proved’?

Given the foregoing, I think we must abandon the simplistic notion that Thomas thinks he has demonstrated that there is something that exists which corresponds to a description of God. What he has done is to look at what we know – the world of change and movement – and to point to an answer to the question ‘Why do things move or change at all, rather than remaining exactly as they are?’ It is an echo of another question which he asks, which can be summed up as: ‘Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?’ And just as the answer to the question ‘Why does anything exist? cannot be something which exists, so the answer to the question ‘Why are there movers and moved things in the world?’ cannot be simply just another mover. The answer to both questions is, of course, ‘We don’t know.’ It is a mystery beyond imagination or utterance. But it is the mystery – not an existing being, nor a ‘mover’ – which we call ‘God’.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published book God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.

For North American readers, it is cheaper to buy the New York edition,
which has a different title:
Presence and Absence: God as ‘Nothing’ in Christian tradition here:

[1][1] Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 1, art. 3,

[2] In Librum De divinis nominibus, Cap. vii, lectio iv.

[3] Summa Theologiae 1a, 3, I Prologus.

[4] De Potentia 7, 2 ad 1um.

[5] This argument is the origin of the modern English phrase, used to refer to God, ‘the unmoved mover’. It’s a phrase that often has an implicits sneer attached to it, in my experience, as if such an abstract philosophical concept was unworthy of any kind of devotion.
The Apophatic roots of an Irish theology

31st May 2026

Victorinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena

Much of my professional life has been lived in the medieval ‘Celtic’ world – that is the world of people who spoke Gaelic or (to a lesser extent) Welsh, between the fifth and twelfth centuries. I have worked as a historian in Scottish universities for nigh-on thirty years, teaching and researching in departments of Celtic or of Medieval History. Admittedly, a lot of my work has related to ecclesiastical history, belief and culture and literature in Gaelic-speaking monasteries, but I have been employed as a historian, not as a theologian.

But I have this other life too. Since I studied theology in Oxford and Edinburgh (three times – BD, MTh, STL) back in the 1980s, I have been haunted by the question “Why is there anything, rather than nothing?”, and the ways that Christian answer that question: the answer is, “It is a mystery.” Not really an answer at all, then. It is unknown and unknowable. It is not a ‘cause’, nor a ‘being’ of any sort, nor any existent entity in the world. I first wrestled with this idea while studying Thomas Aquinas with Herbert McCabe in Oxford, and vividly remember looking at In Peri Hermeneias with him and that passage about God being omnino extra ordinem entium – ‘completely outside the order of beings’. Since then I have found this idea in several other writers, and have written a book – God as Nothing – to explore it in more depth.

What I didn’t really expect was for my two worlds to collide in the way they have recently in the person of John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irishman who ended up in northern Francia (Reims, Soissons, Laon, Compiègne) partly in the service of the king. This remarkable scholar seems to have left Ireland and first appears in Francia around 851 AD, by which time he must have been about 40 years old. Within a short time he was very much in demand for his scholarship – for the refutation of Gottschalk’s teaching on double predestination, for example, and for his knowledge of Greek. This latter skill was very unusual in western Europe at the time, but Eriugena was most accomplished as a Greek scholar. This enabled him to translate into Latin several works of important Greek theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor.

We might ask where Eriugena had learned Greek. It seems that Irish monasteries were studying Greek as early as the late sixth or early seventh century, as a note about the fourth abbot of Bangor attests: ‘Mo Sinu maccu Min, scribe and abbot of Bangor, was the first of the Irish who learned the computus by memory from a certain wise Greek’ (Mo Sinu maccu Min scriba et abbas Benncuit primus Hibernensium computum a Graeco quodam sapiente memorialiter didicit).[1] David Howlett has shown other aspects of Greek scholarship in Ireland prior to the ninth century, and also points to the presence of Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek-speaker and scholar, as archbishop of Canterbury – a place to which students flocked in the late seventh century where they learned both Latin and Greek ‘as well as they know their own native tongue’.[2]

Quite what Eriugena had read in Greek in his native Ireland is impossible to say, but in around 860 the king, Charles the Bald, asked him to translate the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the probably late fifth- or sixth-century writer whose extraordinary writings offered Eriugena a vision of God as utterly unknown, unspeakable, beyond all description or utterance.[3] This tradition of ‘apophatic theology’ – a way of talking about God which stresses the unspeakability of the divine – was to shape Eriugena’s own theology quite radically, as is well known. For a discussion of Pseudo-Dionysius and his view of God as ‘nothing’, completely beyond being and non-being, see God as Nothing Chapter 6: ‘Pseudo-Dionysius: Two Ways of Talking’. For him to encounter God meant ‘renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belong completely to Him who is beyond everything’. And again, ‘He is called “King of the Ages”, for in him and around him all being is and subsists. He was not. He will not be. He did not come to be. He is not in the midst of becoming. He will not come to be. No. He is not. Rather he is the essence of being for the things which have being.”

All this kind of language is taken up enthusiastically by Eriugena in his own Periphyseon. Here God is discussed as ‘the negation of all things’ (negatio omnium). Because ‘all things’ only exist because they are created, ‘God’ cannot be the name of an existent thing. God therefore cannot literally (proprie) be said to be substance or essence, not have any quantity, quality, relation, place or time. You may want to use the word ‘being’ of God, but it cannot mean simply ‘a being’ in the sense that we refer to existing things as ‘beings’. So Eriugena says (following Pseudo-Dionysius) that ‘the being of all things is the superbeing of divinity’ (esse omnium est superesse divinitatis). God is not a being of any sort, but above being, and beings merely derive their being from him. God is in fact a ‘nothingness’ (nihilum), and is unknown and beyond all comprehension.

All this – the relationship between Eriugena and Pseudo-Dionysius – is well known and has been explored at length by numerous scholars. But there is another significant apophatic theologian who has had much less exposure, but who was also known to Eriugena and who influenced him. Please welcome Gaius Marius Victorinus – otherwise known as Victorinus Afer (‘Victorinus the African’) – to our discussion. Living more than two centuries before Pseudo-Dionysius, he was an African by origin spent much of his adult life in Rome. His own writings, drinking from the same neo-Platonic well as Pseudo-Dionysius, would later, be read by Eriugena. He shows that same determination to pursue apophatic theology as the best way to speak of God. To know God is to speak of what he is not, by negation (per privantiam), or to speak of how far above all beings he is (per supralationem). What God is is completely unknown to us (incognoscibile omne quod Deus est). So he says:

‘We say of God not only that his being and living and knowledge is incomprehensible, but that it is above or beyond all things: God is called non-existent (anhyparktos), non-being (anousios), unintelligent (anous) and lifeless (azōn), without existence, without essence, without intellect, without life, not through absence or privation (per sterēsin vel privationem), but by virtue of his being above (per supralationem). For everything, that is expressed in words, is after him. Therefore he is not Being (nec on), but is rather Before-Being (proon).[4]

Of course, we cannot take ‘Before-Being’ literally as if there could be a ‘before’ of being. For time itself only exists within the order of being. ‘Before time’ is a self-contradictory notion, since there can be no ‘before’ in relation to time itself.

There is no doubt that Pseudo-Dionysius is generally far better known than Victorinus, but it is exciting to find an Irish scholar reading and using Victorinus’s work – a much earlier expression of that radical apophatic tradition – in the ninth century. Given that some of the works of Victorinus were known in early medieval Ireland (his commentaries on Paul’s epistles – Galatians, Ephesians, Philipppians – for example, and some of his grammatical and logical works ), it makes me want to ask: was his more radically apophatic theological work known in Ireland too, such as his Adversus Arium cited above? Was Victorinus’ apophaticism not only part of Eriugena’s theological inspiration in Francia, but part of his early training in Ireland? And if so, who else was reading it in Ireland?

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.
For North American readers, the same book is published
under a different title, Presence and Absence: God as Nothing in Christian Tradition
and is available here

[1] D. Ó Cróinín, ‘Mo-Sinu Mocch Min and the computus of Bangor’, Peritia 1 (1982), 281-95: 283-84. Mo Sinu died in 610.

[2] Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica iv, 2. It is not clear how many Irish students went there, but there was a good deal of scholarly exchange between Ireland and England at the time. See D. Howlett, ‘Hellenic learning in Insular Latin: an essay on supported claims’, Peritia 12 (1998), 54-78.

[3] Is it possible that Charles thought it necessary to have the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (or Pseudo-Denis) because he imagined that the author was to be identified with Saint Denis, the patron saint of France?

[4] Migne (ed.) Patrologia Latina VIII, 1129 (Adversus Arium IV, 23. See also Alexey Fokin, ‘Elements of Apophatic Theology in Writings of Marius Victorinus’ (on line, English), published in Russian in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik (History of Philosophy Yearbook), 2011, no. 2010, 53-68.
A North American edition

3rd Apr 2026

No longer will North American readers have to order copies of God as Nothing from a UK bookshop.

No longer will they have to pay hefty postage costs for transatlantic shipping.

The book has now come out in an American edition with Seabury Books in New York. So henceforth I will include links for the UK edition (Darton, Longman and Todd) and the American edition (Seabury) at the foot of each post.

The American title is different: Presence and Absence: God as ‘Nothing’ in Christian Tradition, but the contents of the new edition are just the same as those of God as Nothing, except for a handful of typos that have been fixed.

Looking forward to feedback from American readers.

Wishing you all joy in the risen Christ.

Here’s the link.

Presence and Absence
There is no ‘Information about God’

15th Sep 2025

I have been thinking about grammar in Sacred Scripture. Well, why not? We think about vocabulary when we think about the Bible. We ask what this word means and that word means. We think about manuscripts, because there are thousands of variant readings in the Bible, and different manuscripts which people have made over the centuries have different readings. So why not think about grammar too?

In John’s Gospel (1:38-39), two of the disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus, and he asks them a question: “What do you seek?” It’s in the interrogative mood, and it really anticipates a reply in the indicative mood: “We are trying to find out more about you”, or some such thing. Instead, they answer with a question: “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Now it is they who speak in the interrogative mood, asking a question. Now they are looking for information, so the natural response to that would again be in the indicative: “I’m staying in Bethany [the one on the east side of the Jordan, not the Bethany by the Mount of Olives], in a house on the main street, three doors along from the butcher’s shop” – or some such thing.

But now Jesus answers, not in the indicative, nor in the interrogative mood, but in the imperative: “Come and see.” He utters a command.

These two disciples are looking for information. Jesus will not give it to them. Instead he calls them to a change in practise, to a way of living: come and see. Our encounter will begin not with information, but with a practice and corresponding experience: come and see. Walk this way.

This touches on one of the themes of God as Nothing. Over and over again, the book stresses the view of Thomas Aquinas, and of many other great teachers of the Christian tradition, that we cannot know what God is. To know God, Thomas says, is to know that we don’t know what he is. Knowing God is not about gathering information – and it cannot be, as there is no information about God to be had.

Even what might look like information about God is actually nothing of the sort. Of course, Thomas wants to say all kinds of things about God, but he insists that these don’t actually tell us what God is like. They might be metaphors (God is a rock, God is a warrior, God is a mother hen), or they might be analogies (God is good, or God is beautiful – though we cannot know what these things mean when they are applied to God). The most accurate things we can say about God are negative things, or Thomas: God is not this, and not that.

But whatever we say about God, Thomas says, even when they are true things, they do not give us information about God as he is in himself. They rather give information about his creatures in so far as they relate to God. This is a bit difficult. Let us put it this way: for Thomas, it is true to say that ‘God is the Creator’, but when we say it we are not expressing accurate information about God. We are expressing accurate information about ourselves: we really are created. It is a fact about us that we are creatures. It is therefore logically true that God created us, but that is not information about what God is like, because being a creator is not what God is like. If it were, then God would have changed from not-being-a-creator before the act of creation to being-a-creator after the act of creation. And of course God cannot change. And also there can be no such thing as ‘before creation’, because time itself is part of creation.

This is why Thomas says that calling God ‘the Creator’ does not actually tell us what God is. It is merely a logically necessary expression implied by the fact that we are creatures.

If God were a being, an individual of some sort, there would be various descriptive things we could say about him more or less accurately, about what he was like. Throughout God as Nothing, however, we deny this possibility. Where the mind quite understandably asks for information, for a description, it cannot find it. What it finds instead is a calling: come and see. An invitation to change your life.

We long to know God, and we do, in Christ. But not through information offered in the indicative mood. We know God by responding to his call in the imperative.

Of course we want to know God. And Jeremiah reminds us that knowing God is not about gathering information at all:

“Did not your father have food and drink?

He did what was right and just,

so all went well with him.

He defended the cause of the poor and needy,

and so all went well.

Is that not what it means to know me?”

declares the Lord. (22:15-16).

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published book God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.
A book for the people I will come to love

16th May 2025

This little thought is something I wrote for the Substack of my publisher, Darton, Longman & Todd. I share it here….

Most of the people I love are actually atheists. That’s how they see themselves. Family, friends, colleagues, comrades in politics – they will often say, with firm conviction, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ And then I might ask them, ‘What God is it that you don’t believe in?’ And they will go on to give an account of some being – a powerful and invisible individual who dwells ‘up there’ or ‘somewhere’, one who makes demands, who rewards and punishes, who sometimes intervenes in the world, and they will say, ‘That’s what I don’t believe in.’ And I will typically respond by saying, ‘Well I don’t believe in any such being either.’ Of course I might use images, language, pictures, that suggest that kind of thing if you take them literally. But I don’t actually believe in such a being. Because at the root of our monotheistic tradition is this question about the world: ‘Why does anything exist, rather than nothing?’ The answer to that question cannot be any kind of ‘something’, obviously, because that would itself be just one of the ‘somethings’, part of the ‘everything’, that we are trying to explain.

Once we have understood this ancient Jewish and Christian idea, that God is not any kind of being, that God is (as Thomas Aquinas said) ‘utterly beyond the order of beings’, then we can be free of the pictures. We still use such pictures, of course, whenever we speak, but we know that they are not ‘what God is like’. There is, and can be, no such things as ‘a description of what God is like’, because (as Thomas Aquinas said once again), ‘To know God is to know that we don’t know what he is.’

In many ways, then, the atheist is the believer’s ally. The atheist says that there is no such individual entity as what he imagines we mean by ‘God’. And our answer is not that there is such an entity; our answer is, ‘We are not describing any kind of being. Thank you for reminding us that no individual being can be God.’

Atheism is a kind of ally to belief, then, rescuing us from taking our pictures too literally. But there is in fact a real and bitter opponent of faith. It is not atheism, but is idolatry. The opposite of belief in the God who is the lover and creator of all that exists (and is therefore not one of the things which exist) – the opposite of that is the worship of some existing thing. Some object that exists. Some being who we are supposed to find more important than our neighbour, and to whom we give absolute obedience, even at the expense of other people. It is that ‘being’ which is the opposite of faith.

If God and a person are not ‘two beings’ or ‘two individuals’, we can never choose between loving one and loving the other. They cannot be two alternative objects of love. God is not one of anything.

But hear what Augustine has to say about this. He is wondering what it can possibly mean to love God, and he turns to the First Letter of John:

“If someone loves their neighbour, it follows that they must above all love love itself. But ‘God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.’ … Let no one say, ‘I don’t know what to love.’ Let him love his brother and let him also love that love itself. … Let us observe how much the apostle John commends brotherly love: ‘Whoever loves his brother,’ he says, ‘remains in the light, and there is no scandal in him.’ … He seems to be silent about the love of God, but he would never do this unless he wanted God to be understood in terms of brotherly love. And he says it most clearly a little later in the same letter: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’ This passage clearly and sufficiently declares how this brotherly love is proclaimed on the highest authority not only to be from God, but actually to be God” (De Trinitate VIII, 10, 12).

For Augustine God is not an object of our love among other objects. God is the love itself. It is the love, as Dante says, ‘which moves the sun and other stars’. We don’t love some object when we love God. We love the love with which we love one another.

So all you people I have loved, and whom I will love in the future, who call yourselves atheists – people who have loved me back, people who love one another, who love the poor, the excluded and the powerless, who love your neighbours and even your enemies – that is enough for me. As ‘atheists’ you deny that any individual being is God. So do I. You will give divine honour to nothing. Me too. But by the very fact of your love, you show that you love love. And love is the name of God. It is partly for you that I wrote this book, God as Nothing. Because I, a believer, believe in the Nothing which is another name for God.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.
Justice, Peace and the meaning of the word “God”

10th May 2025

‘A picture held us captive.
And we could not get outside it,
for it lay in our language
and language seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably.’

(L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §115)

When we first learned our native language, our ‘mother-tongue’, most of us learned nouns first, later progressing to verbs, prepositions, adjectives and the rest. We lived in a world of things, and the most basic linguistic task of attaching verbal labels to things – Mummy, Daddy, doggy, socks – is probably the easiest to learn. Verbs come later, having more complex concepts behind them, requiring a subject for example: “I am hungry.” or “Billy has stolen my sandwich.”

Food arrives at the Mercy Convent, Edinburgh,
for the meal cooked nightly for homeless people

The world of things (what theologians and others like to call ‘Creation’), still dominates our language, and therefore still pervades our ways of talking about God. It makes us think of God as one of the things which exist, as we use nouns( a judge, a warrior, a redeemer, a friend, a leader, a rock) or pronouns (he, she) to refer to him. And these nouns are the ‘picture that held us captive’. We talk about God, or to God, as to an individual being, because that is the way our language works, which we learned in the world of things.

But even if Wittgenstein is right, and we can’t get outside the picture, because we can’t get outside the language, we can still remind ourselves that it is ‘only a picture’.

If God is the creator of all that exists, visible and invisible as we sing in the Creed, then he is not one of the things that exist. And even though we use nouns and pronouns for ‘him’, we therefore know that these can’t be labels that we have attached to some individual thing or being. It is better, as Thomas Aquinas suggests, to think of God as a verb, not a noun. God is, for Thomas, simple esse, which means ‘to be’. Not ‘a being’ (that’s a kind of something), but ‘to be’ – the infinitive form of the verb. The esse which is the origin of all existence, of all existing things.

Now if God is not any kind of thing, not an existing object of any kind, then it makes no sense to ask, ‘Am I worshipping the right God?’ It is a meaningless question, because it starts from the assumption that ‘God’ is the name of an individual. It assumes that ‘God’ identifies one object in the world, out of all the other possible objects, and says ‘This is the one that we worship.’ But God is not one of the objects in the world. So you can’t worship ‘the right God’ – or ‘the wrong God’ for that matter.

So what is the question we need to ask ourselves about the worship of God, about the love of God, about faith in God?

It is not about finding ‘the right object’. It is about living the right way with one another, with other individual people and communities – who really are objects in the world.

The truth of our approach to God is not in the identification of the right individual in heaven, but in the love we show to individuals on earth. And so the movement for Justice and Peace lies at the very heart of our faith. It is not a consequence of our finding ‘the right God’ and then doing what that God tells us. It is the very foundation of our finding God at all. It is what makes our lives a dynamic sharing, by his grace and love poured into our hearts, in the life of God, in the very nature of God – how we become divine.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.
The blog of the book – and the book of the blog

1st May 2025

I’m very pleased to announce today the publication of the book, God as Nothing. For forty years I have been turning this one thought over and over in my mind. I wrote about it in my undergraduate dissertation in 1985, taught about it at Edinburgh University, and spent countless very enjoyable evenings discussing it with friends. London publisher Darton, Longman and Todd (with whom I have published in the past) have done a very nice job of making it into a book. It is available HERE from Writing Scotland at a significant discount – only £12 for UK customers (including postage), and a bit more (but still very reasonable) for overseas customers.
God Exists vs. God doesn’t exist

21st Apr 2025

One of the things that constantly draws me back to thinking about this idea of God as Nothing is the frustration of listening to so many conversations between ‘believers’ and ‘atheists’, each side digging into their respective positions, mutually uncomprehending, often mocking each other, or expressing concern for one another’s sanity or intelligence.

Because it is a pointless argument. And it’s not only pointless because no one I know has ever been argued into (or out of) belief in ‘the existence of God’.   It’s pointless because the very term – ‘the existence of God’ – is pretty much meaningless.

What does it mean to say of something that ‘it exists’?

Well, let’s think how that works in ordinary everyday human language. Say I want to persuade you that unicorns exist. First of all we both have to know what the word ‘unicorn’ means – let’s say it’s the name of a large horse-like creature with a single horn on its forehead. Without knowing what it is, you can’t make any sense of my claim when I declare to you with my ‘sincere face’ on that, “Yes, unicorns really do exist.”

Not only do we both have to know what the word ‘unicorn’ means. If I can’t actually show you one in real life, we’ll have to agree on what would count as evidence of unicorns’ existence. Imagine….. hoof-prints in the ground, marks on a tree where a horn (a single horn) has been rubbed against the bark, the testimony of a reliable eye-witness. But the evidence would have to bear some relationship to the thing that we know a unicorn is. It would be no good my pointing to a bottle of whisky and declaiming, “See! Unicorns do exist.” Because there is no intelligble connection (unless I can invent one) between that bottle on my desk and the presence or absence of one-horned equine quadrupeds.

That is how the statement “X exists” works. And note that to say “X exists” is to offer a description of the world. The world is just a whole lot of existing things.

But to say “God exists” is not like that, for several reasons.

First, it is fundamental to Christian belief that God is a mystery. We do not know what God is. We know what a unicorn is – or would be, if it existed. But we do not know what God is. As Thomas Aquinas said: The very nature of God, as he is in himself, neither the Catholic nor the pagan knows (ipsam naturam Dei prout in se est, neque Catholicus neque paganus cognoscit: Summa Theologiae 1a, 13, x). Even though we are joined to God by grace, in prayer and faith and love and good works, being conformed to him, Thomas says ‘We are joined to him as to the unknown’ (ei quasi ignoto coniungamur: ST 1a, 12, xiii). So, at the very outset, the discussion of ‘does God exist?’ simply fails to get off the ground. Imagine a conversation:

            “X exists.”
            “OK. What is this X?”
            “Erm … I don’t know.”

Secondly, the question of evidence. What counts as evidence of God existing? We have imagined what the evidence for unicorns existing might be – hoof marks, horn-scraping, etc – but what would be the evidence for God’s existence, given that we don’t know what God is? The believer points to the world and says, “The evidence is all this. God made it all.” But that merely asserts her conviction that the world is created. It isn’t what we would call evidence – certainly not the kind of evidence that might persuade an atheist.

But it is just this looking at the world that gives rise to a question: Why is there a world? Why is there anything rather than nothing? The answer to the question, ‘Why is there anything?’ simply cannot be the name of a ‘something’, an existing entity. Because such a ‘something’ would be part of the world of existing entities that we are trying to explain.

The question of God is not really about existence or non-existence. But it is about how we look at the world of existing things. They exist, and we may be amazed, filled with awe, touched by a deep – perhaps almost vertiginous – sense of mystery. And here “God” is the name of that mystery. Not the name of a being which might exist or might not exist; but the word we use for the unspeakable, unknowable depth of all the things which do exist.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.

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