Before Asking Whether God Exists

Two people are arguing about God. They agree on the facts — about the age of the universe, what science has explained, and what remains unknown. Yet they disagree completely.

Perhaps they are not arguing about the same thing.

The word God is often used as if it names one idea. It does not. Philosophers of religion have long noticed that the word carries several. Brian Davies, for one, separates the God of classical theology from the more human-like God of everyday belief. What follows is one useful way of sorting the ideas into three. They are three ways of thinking about God, not three separate gods. Many traditions hold more than one at once, and the list does not cover every tradition — Buddhism, for instance, would sit uneasily in the first two, though some of its schools speak of ultimate reality in ways close to the third.

Three ideas of God

The God who listens

For billions of people, God is personal. God knows, cares, listens and acts. A mother prays beside a hospital bed. A farmer gives thanks for rain. Someone who has lost everything asks why. All three expect to be heard.

This is the God most people meet in worship and prayer. Richard Swinburne has written at length in its defence.

The hard question for this idea is an old one. If God listens and can act, why are so many prayers not answered? Believers have replies. The question has never gone away.

The God who explains existence

A different idea begins with the world itself: why is there anything at all? Everything we see depends on something else. A tree depends on soil, water and sunlight. The soil depends on rock and time. Keep asking “and what does that depend on?” and you reach a final question: what does everything depend on?

In this way of thinking, the answer is God. Not, first of all, a person who made the world and watches it. The reason there is a world at all.

Thomas Aquinas described God as existence itself — not one being among others, but the ground on which every being stands. Baruch Spinoza said God and nature are one and the same thing. From here the two part ways. For Spinoza there is no one to hear a prayer. For Aquinas, the ground of all being is also the God who knows, loves and answers. Same starting point, opposite destinations. That is how far the word can travel.

The hard question for this idea: why must there be a final answer at all? And if there is one, why call it God?

The God beyond description

Some traditions go further and say ultimate reality cannot be fully put into words. The Upanishads approach it by saying what it is not: not this, not this. Every description draws a line around a thing. No line fits around ultimate reality.

An old image makes the point. It comes from the Vivekachudamani, a text traditionally credited to the eighth-century philosopher Adi Shankaracharya. A wave has a shape and a name of its own. But it is not a smaller ocean, and it is not the ocean changed into something else. It is the ocean, seen for a while as a wave. In Shankaracharya’s school, Advaita Vedanta, the world is like that: not Brahman turned into things, but Brahman seen as things. Describe the wave as carefully as you like; you have not described the ocean.

The hard question for this idea: if no description can capture ultimate reality, then nothing can count for it and nothing can count against it. A forecast that says tomorrow there will be weather can never be wrong — which is exactly why it is no use. A related challenge was famously put by the philosopher Antony Flew in 1950. Those who hold the view reply that the ocean is known by being it, not by describing it. Whether that is depth or emptiness is a fair question, and this article does not settle it.

One answer does not fit all

Now see what happens when someone offers reasons for God.

A common reason runs like this. Everything depends on something else. So, the reasoning goes, there must be something at the bottom that depends on nothing. Call that God.

Suppose that is right. What has it shown? That there is a foundation. It has not shown that anyone is listening to a mother’s prayer. Knowing a house has foundations tells you nothing about who lives inside. Aquinas saw this clearly, and did a great deal of further work to get from the foundation to a God who knows and loves. That further work is a second set of reasons. It stands or falls on its own.

The same is true in reverse. An unanswered prayer is a problem for the God who listens. It is no problem for the foundation of existence. The foundation never promised to listen.

Each of the three ideas has its own reasons for and against. A reason for one is not a reason for the others.

The question before the question

So Does God exist? is not one question. It is at least three. Is there someone who listens and responds? Is there a reason why anything exists at all? Is there a reality beyond all description?

A tradition may say yes to all three and hold that they are one. It may be right. But each yes needs its own reasons. Once you know which God you mean, the reasons for and against that God can be weighed on their own.

Which is why the two people at the start could agree on every fact and still disagree. They were not asking the same thing.

Sorting the word does not prove that God exists. It does not disprove God either. It stops an answer about one idea of God being taken as an answer about all of them.

Before asking whether God exists, we may first need to ask what we mean by the word.

Glossary

Ground of being — The ultimate basis or condition of existence; a term used for non-personal or philosophical ideas of God.

Brahman — In Hindu philosophy, the ultimate reality underlying all things.

Upanishads — Ancient Sanskrit texts that form an important part of the philosophical literature of Hindu traditions.

Advaita Vedanta — A major school of Hindu philosophy teaching non-dualism, the view that the individual self and Brahman are not two; associated especially with Adi Shankaracharya.

Sources

• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Questions 2–3 (God’s existence and simplicity) and Questions 20–22 (God’s love and providence). Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Benziger Brothers, 1920.
• Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, Part I. Translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Swinburne, Richard. The Coherence of Theism. Oxford University Press, 1977.
• Davies, Brian. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Flew, Antony. “Theology and Falsification.” In New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre. SCM Press, 1955 (first published 1950).
• Shankaracharya, Adi (attributed). Vivekachudamani. Translated by Swami Madhavananda. Advaita Ashrama, 1921.
• Radhakrishnan, S. The Principal Upanishads (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6, “not this, not this”). George Allen & Unwin, 1953.