Is God Real

“Is God real?” Notice I didn’t ask, “Does God exist?” The latter is a much trickier question because it involves both the nature of ‘God’ and the nature of ‘existence’. Proving the existence (or non-existence) of anything is a heavy lift, much less God. 

Proving that something is real is easier. X is real so long as it influences something other than itself. Imagine the Universe (U) as a network of influential relationships: ‘to be real’ is merely to be part of this network, i.e. to be an element in the ‘concrescence’ of at least one other entity. 

Note: Being an influence is not the same thing as being a cause. Linguistically speaking, ‘to cause’ is the paradigmatic active voice verb; ‘to influence’ is technically voice agnostic but practically speaking, it’s passive. Cause is an orientable vector; influence is a globally non-orientable (but locally orientable) loop (aka Mobius Strip). 

Note: Being an influence is also not the same thing as being a part. Parts are assembled to form wholes; influence is a relationship between two wholes.

“X is real” is a purely empirical judgment; it tells us nothing about X per se. I am creating a name (X) to label a presumed precursor state. Being real is the ontological equivalent of Dark Matter: we ‘know’ nothing about it per se. We know it only by its influence, its shadow, in other phenomena. 

We know ‘that it is’ (Dasein) by its influence, we know ‘what it is’ (Wassein) by those influences, but we know nothing about ‘what it is’ per se…if anything. Consider an analogy from medicine:

Syndrome : Disease :: Real : Existent.

Note: When I say, “X exists”, I assert that X is something more than just the sum of what influences it and how it influences others. When I say, “X is real”, I make no such assertion. I testify to the influences of X, but I say nothing about X itself.

Example: Are my dreams real? Of course they are! One night’s dream can influence my thoughts and feelings for days to come. But what are dreams…and do they exist? That’s a much tougher question.

If I say, “X exists”, I am stating that X is something, i.e. more than its manifestations. If X falls in an empty forest, it still makes a sound. (Of course, this begs the question whether anything exists; a radical idealist might claim that there are only disembodied manifestations.)

But what might X be over and above its influence in others? Western philosophy offers a number of suggestions: Creativity (Whitehead), Freedom, Negation or Neant (Sartre), Reck (Anaximander), Aletheia - Truth (Parmenides), Idea or Form (Plato), a Divine spark or Shechinah (Hasidism), a Noumenon (Kant), the Dialectic (Hegel, Marx), Differance (Derrida), Consciousness (Penrose, Chalmers), Recursion (Pred, Cowles).

Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! But notice what all these models have in common? They all refer to some sort of process that is inherently non-linear. If X exists, then at some level X is self-referent: √X = X = X² (actually, X^1/n = X = X^n)  . Therefore X must be equal to 1, a quantum of Being, not a set of coordinates on a continuum. If Universe exists, X is its reflection; everything that ‘exists’ is ‘the image and likeness’ of that Universe...and of X.  

On the other hand, if I merely say that “X is real,” I am asserting only that there is a vector (linear) running from X to X’. Therefore…

Existence : Reality :: Calculus : Arithmetic

To be real is linear (arithmetic); to exist is dialectic and hence inherently non-linear (calculus). So what? Well, by the end of Grade 4, I had mastered basic arithmetic, but I still have not grasped calculus. That’s what! But that said, ‘arithmetic’ is not nothing, and neither is ‘being real’.

It is almost universally conceded that the existence of God cannot be ‘proved’, i.e. inferred by induction from experience or deduced by logic from a set of irrefutable assumptions. I have said so myself on many occasions.

The considered wisdom: you can’t prove the existence of anything from its essence. You can’t prove that something is (Dasein) just by showing what it is (Wassein). 

William of Ockham notwithstanding, even perfection (summum bonum, essence) does not entail existence because ‘existence’ is not an attribute or a quality; it is a quantum of being, not a spectrum of qualia. 

Existence is not something you can ‘perfect’…unless you’re Martha Stewart. It doesn’t come in shades, sizes or degrees. It’s a quantum! (The wonder is that we ever expected anything different.) 

Although there is not a causal relationship between Essence and Existence, there is a (non-linear) Uncertainty Relation (Heisenberg). Broadly speaking, the more we know about the essence of something, e.g. God, the less sure we can be of its existence. Conversely, the more certain we are that something exists, the less we can know about what it is that exists. 

Naively, we imagine an inert existent, a table rasa on which we may draw a rainbow of features. This is not how it works! Existence and essence complement one another; they co-evolve, and they co-exist. Slippery customers, these!

This Uncertainty Relation recapitulates Heisenberg’s primal pair: momentum and position. Knowing the location of something is akin to knowing that it is. Conversely, to know the momentum of something is akin to knowing what it is, i.e. its qualities, its behavior, its potential (trajectory).

How does all this apply to God? Basically all Western theologies can be divided into three camps. First, there are theologies that claim to know with certainty that God exists but is ineffable…i.e. cannot be described in any way. Mysticism falls into this category. So does St. Dallan, a medieval Irish poet: “Naught is all else to me save that Thou art.”

At the other end of the spectrum, there are folks who claim to know everything they need to about the essence of God but are agnostic re his existence. Pascal and Sartre fit here.

At the deepest level, existence and essence, like particles and waves, complement each other. They cannot be conflated but neither can they be disjoined. Disembodied essence is no more conceivable than featureless existence. 

But could there be a different approach? One that does not get hung up on the essence-existence dichotomy and so, perhaps, skirts Heisenberg…and even Heidegger? Should we be looking for God beyond essence and existence, in the deep structure of reality itself? If we are successful, we will be entitled to call God ‘real’.

The concept of God is bound up with notions of Immediacy (Presence) and Eternity, Becoming and Enduring. If I could identify an aspect of reality common to all events and if that aspect was Omnipresent, Eternal, the Source and Destiny (Alpha and Omega) of everything that was, is, or ever will be, would I be entitled to label that God and call it real?

Consider this reasoning:

1. A World exists: It is. (Big Bang)

2. Whatever exists is inherently recursive and self-reflective (above): I am. (Descartes)

3. The World consists of discrete but related events, things that exist. (Whitehead)

4. Events do not occur in time; they are temporary suspensions of time, local interruptions in the universal temporal flow. (Heraclitus) 

5. Events are knots in the thread of time, islands of order floating in an entropic sea.  

6. Events make meaning possible. They are ‘signatures of all things we are here to read’ (Joyce). Knots in a thread can be read as binary code, dots among dashes, an alphabet of runes. 

7. Every event is the Universe reflecting on itself…and acting on itself. Therefore, all events are recursive. 

8. Timeless, events occur only in the Eternal Present. They define the Present. They are what Presence is, what’s happenin’! Presence and Occurrence are synonymous.

9. Events can only be ordered with respect to one another by using an external lattice such as spacetime. 

10. The Present includes traces of past and future events. It is the Present that preserves the past and presages the future. Without Presence there is no Past or Future. Presence makes past and future events relevant.   

    
    

So, I believe we have now established some things about the Real World. Regardless of the physical details of ‘creation’, our end-product is clearly not a random sequence of dice casts, strung together to constitute a Cosmos. There is an omni-present, universal and eternal substructure that informs, or shapes, everything that comes to exist. So I ask again, “Am I entitled to call this substructure God?” 

If so, God is Logos, the deep structure of the real world. God is not ‘All Things’ (pantheism); God is not so much the Creator as the Precondition of everything that is. Have I proven that ‘God exists’? I have not. Have I established that God is real? I believe I have… 

Of course, this does not close the door, one way or the other, on subject of God’s Existence, but that is another topic for another day. Hopefully though, it does settle one thing once and for all: Regardless of whether or not God exists, God is most definitely real – not as a concept (Lennon) but as the universal and eternal substructure of everything that is. Deal with it.