Do I believe God exists?

Recently I was talking to a Christadelphian I’d not met before. It wasn’t long before the question came up, “Do you believe God exists?”

I find this a hard question to answer – it’s not a simple ‘yes' or ‘no' – and I hope to explain why here. So instead I answered that, "questions such as these quickly descend into semantics" and the conversation moved on.

As an aside, “Do you believe...” questions are kind of odd ones to ask, and they perhaps tell us something about the asker because what follows the “Do you believe” is normally something that there is little or poor evidence for. For example, “Do you believe in Father Christmas?” sounds much more natural than, “Do you believe in Mount Everest?” (I’ve never seen either so I can’t answer based on my experience, but I think the chance of Mt. Everest existing is much higher.) It’s almost as if the asker already knows that they are on shaky ground; that they already know the thing they are asking about is not self evident or widely agreed on, or perhaps even that it is unlikely.

But anyway, back to our question: Do you believe God exists?

To answer that I’d first like to think about Limited Liability Companies. Do Limited Liability Companies exist? A long time ago they didn’t, if we went back to days of old then local traders simply worked for themselves. If a trader entered into a contract that he couldn’t keep and went bankrupt then those he owed money to would come after him, take his possessions, family and perhaps throw him into prison until he paid up. There was a lot of risk involved in starting your own company, if things went wrong then you may end up in bondage for the rest of your life. Then in more recent times people invented limited liability companies and starting your own business became less risky and consequently more businesses were started. If things went sour your company may go bankrupt, but your personal possessions would be safe from your creditors.

Let’s take an example and think about Google, which came into existence in September 1998. Back then it was just a small company, I’d never heard of it and if I was given a list of tech companies and asked to underline the real ones I'd have highlighted Yahoo, Netscape and AOL among others but not Google. To me Google didn’t exist. But if you were to ask me today I’d confirm it does exist. So what is it that exists now that didn’t two decades ago? What is Google that allows it to exist? It may surprise you that Google is actually nothing more than a shared idea. Google exists because people agree that it exists.

‘What about the offices, the web servers and the employees' I hear you ask, ‘they are proof that Google exists'.

You assume that the offices are Google, which is false. Before Google moved in they were occupied by someone else or perhaps where they now stand fields of cows once lived and the bricks were just clay in the ground. If Google change premises, or even give up their all their office spaces, will Google cease to exist?

And what about the servers? At the rate technology advances Google will have to completely turnover their hardware every few years. Google remains even though their servers are completely different.

Finally the employees. Well, they aren’t Google either, they come and go just like the hardware does.

Google exists simply because we agree that it does. Google came into existence the way all limited liability companies do. The Priests of Bureaucracy wrote out some Sacred Texts on their computers printed them out and put magical lines on them with a pen. They then sent them off to be stored in the Temple of Commerce for posterity and Google was born. Once Google was born they started building offices, filling them with servers and hiring people. Google’s existence is nothing more than legal conjuring leading to a shared idea. I’m sure you paralleled Google’s existence with the existence of at least some gods in my sentences above because there are gods (which are God to some people) that exist in just the same way. For example, priests wrote sacred texts (like the bible) that allowed people (like Christians) to unite together and cooperate in the real world to do actual work (like building Churches) - a sentence that would also be true of many and varied religions whether they are objectively true or not.

By the way, the same is true of all human constructs including the Dollar, Europe and even the nuclear family, not to mention the legal systems that spawns all of these. Each of these also depends on shared ideas that originate in our heads, but have physical world implications.

So if you are going to ask me about God’s existence first you need to tell me what you mean by “exist”. For starters, do you mean existence inside people’s heads, outside people’s heads or both?

If we ever got that far we would then have the harder task of defining what we mean by ‘God’. There are probably more definitions of ‘God’ than there are of ‘exist’. What does ‘God’ mean? Is it:

1. El, head of the Canaanite pantheon
2. That which nothing greater can be thought
3. Ground of Being
4. Ultimate Reality
5. Something else…

So to ask me the question, “Do you believe God exists?” actually tells me that you have not thought too carefully about the question yourself. I’ve barely scratched the surface and already I could happily answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ without lying depending on what mood I was in. Perhaps we should try to ask better questions instead like:

• Do you think that supernatural events take place? (No)
• Are you superstitious? (No)
• Is there some objective reality that we are unable to fully describe using current science? (Yes)
• Is there some underlying stability to nature that means the fundamental physical constants stay constant and allow the things we call matter, planets and people? (Yes)
• Is the future already determined because of the current physical state of the universe (including our brain state) or do we have conscious agency to intervene in the natural cycle of cause and effect? (I don’t know, but I hope we have agency)

Or perhaps it would be easier if I just said ‘no’ when a Christadelphian I barely know asks me if I believe God exists.