God as Nothing

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.