Chapter 14 NOT THAT GOD

The God worth considering isn’t the God most people argue about.

14.1 The Straw Man

When people argue about God, they often argue about the wrong thing.

The atheist says: “There’s no evidence for a cosmic person who created the universe, answers prayers, and cares about human sexuality.”

The believer says: “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist. I feel his presence. The Bible says so.”

Both are arguing about what we might call “folk theism”—the God of popular imagination. An extremely powerful person, perhaps with a white beard, sitting somewhere above the clouds, watching and judging, occasionally intervening in human affairs.

This God is easy to attack and hard to defend. He raises obvious questions:

If he’s all-powerful, why doesn’t he prevent suffering?
If he’s all-knowing, why does he need prayers to know what we want?
If he created the universe, what created him?
If he’s outside space and time, how can he act within them?

Folk theism has no good answers to these questions. Its defenders typically retreat to mystery (“God’s ways are not our ways”) or faith (“I just believe”).

But here’s the thing: folk theism is not the only form of theism. It’s not even the philosophically serious form. The greatest theological minds—Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Arabi, Spinoza, Leibniz—weren’t defending folk theism. They were articulating something far more subtle and harder to dismiss.

The conversation about God, at its best, is not about the bearded sky-father. It’s about the ground of being—the answer to why anything exists.

14.2 The Tradition

Let’s trace the sophisticated tradition.

Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Aristotle asked: what explains motion and change in the universe? His answer: there must be something that causes motion without itself being moved—an unmoved mover. This isn’t a creator who made the world at some moment; it’s the eternal source of all activity, the final cause toward which all things move.

Plotinus and the One. Neoplatonism posited the One—absolute unity beyond all differentiation, beyond even being and thought. The One doesn’t think or act; it simply is. Everything else emanates from it like light from the sun, not through decision but through necessity.

Aquinas’s Ipsum Esse Subsistens. For Thomas Aquinas, God is not a being among beings but Being itself. God doesn’t have existence as a property; God is existence. Everything else exists by participation in God’s being—borrowed existence, contingent and dependent.

Maimonides’s Negative Theology. The great Jewish philosopher argued that we can’t say what God is—only what God is not. God is not limited, not physical, not multiple, not changing. Every positive statement about God is ultimately a metaphor. The divine essence exceeds all description.

Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. Spinoza identified God with Nature—not “nature” in the sense of trees and rocks, but the infinite substance of which all things are modes. God is not separate from the world; God is the world considered in its totality and necessity. There is no supernatural; everything is natural, and nature is divine.

Tillich’s “Ground of Being.” Twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich argued that “God” names the ground of being—that which concerns us ultimately. God is not a being alongside other beings; God is the power of being itself, the source from which everything emerges.

Notice what these formulations share:

God is not a being among beings but the ground of all being
God is not one cause among others but the condition for causation itself
God is not described positively but approached through negation or analogy
God is not separate from the world in a simple way; the relationship is more intimate and complex

This is not the God of Sunday school. It’s not a person in any straightforward sense. It doesn’t answer prayers the way a powerful friend might grant favors. It’s something stranger, more abstract, more fundamental.

14.3 Being Itself

Let’s try to articulate this more clearly.

The fundamental question is: why does anything exist? The concept we’re reaching for is: whatever answers that question.

If nothing answers the question—if existence is simply brute—then there is no God in any meaningful sense. The universe just is. End of story.

But if something answers the question—if there is a ground or reason for existence—then “God” is the name for that ground.

What would such a ground be like?

Not a being among beings. If God were simply one more entity in the inventory of existence, God would require explanation just as much as anything else. Why does this entity exist rather than not? The regress continues.

The ground must be different in kind—not an item in the list but the reason there’s a list.

Not limited. Whatever grounds all existence cannot be limited by anything external. There’s nothing “outside” it to impose limits. The ground is infinite—not in the sense of being spatially unbounded, but in the sense of being unlimited in being.

Not composite. If the ground were made of parts, we could ask what holds the parts together, what explains the combination. The ground must be simple—without internal division or complexity.

Not contingent. The ground cannot be something that might not have existed. If it could fail to exist, then its existence would require explanation. The ground must be necessary—its non-existence impossible.

These are what medieval philosophers called the “divine attributes”—not descriptions of God’s personality but logical consequences of what it would mean to be the ground of existence.

The concept, not the proof. I want to be clear: this doesn’t prove God exists. It clarifies what the concept means.

The question remains: is there such a ground? Does something match this concept?

We can’t answer that question the way we answer empirical questions. We can’t run experiments on the ground of being. We can only ask whether positing such a ground makes existence more intelligible than denying it.

14.4 What Remains

So what’s left after we strip away the folk theism?

Left behind:

God as a very powerful person
God as an old man in the sky
God with human emotions (anger, jealousy, love in an anthropomorphic sense)
God who micromanages events
God whose existence is proven by miracle or scripture

What remains:

God as the ground of being—the reason anything exists
God as necessary—the condition for possibility
God as infinite—unlimited by anything external
God as simple—without composition
God as the answer to the deepest question—why there is something rather than nothing

This remaining concept is compatible with science. It makes no claims about the age of the universe, the evolution of species, or the mechanisms of nature. It doesn’t compete with physics or biology. It operates at a different level—asking why there’s a physics to do, why there’s a biology to study.

This concept is also compatible with doubt. You can accept that the concept is coherent while remaining uncertain whether anything answers to it. The question “is there a ground of being?” is a legitimate question even if we can’t answer it confidently.

Is this still “God”?

Some would say no. If we strip away personality, will, action—if God becomes an abstract principle rather than a person—have we lost what makes God God?

The worry is real. The sophisticated tradition risks dissolving God into a philosophical abstraction that no one actually worships or relates to.

But the alternatives are worse. Folk theism faces devastating objections. Confident atheism leaves existence unexplained. The sophisticated tradition at least addresses the deepest questions honestly.

Perhaps the truth is that God—if God exists—is stranger than we imagine. Not the cosmic grandfather. Not the stern judge. Not even the loving father, except in some highly analogical sense.

Something more basic. More mysterious. More fundamental.

The ground.

Coda: The Limits of Language

We’ve been using language to discuss something that may exceed language.

Every word we use—“ground,” “being,” “necessary,” “infinite”—is borrowed from ordinary experience and stretched to cover something beyond ordinary experience. The words are pointers, not descriptions. Maps, not territory.

The mystics of every tradition knew this. They spoke of God through negation (via negativa): God is not this, not that, not anything we can name or conceive. They spoke in paradox: the darkness that is light, the silence that speaks, the emptiness that is fullness.

These aren’t failures of clarity. They’re recognitions that clarity has limits. Some truths can only be gestured at, approached asymptotically, never captured.

If God exists—as the ground of being, the answer to the deepest question—then God exceeds our categories. Any statement we make is at best approximately true, at worst deeply misleading.

This should induce humility. The confident theist who knows exactly what God wants and thinks and feels has probably mistaken their own projections for divine reality. The confident atheist who dismisses “God” based on folk theism hasn’t engaged the real question.

The honest position is uncertainty. The ground may exist; the ground may not. If it exists, it exceeds our comprehension. We are finite minds trying to grasp the infinite—or trying to determine whether there’s an infinite to grasp.

The question remains open. It will probably remain open forever—at least for beings like us, limited and mortal and embedded in a cosmos we didn’t create and don’t fully understand.

But the question matters. And the question is not the one most people argue about.

Not that God. Another one. Or perhaps—if the mystics are right—not any “one” at all.