Faith In No-Thing

Modern Philosopher, by eneakalo

  

Pastor’s Epistle—May 2026

I saw a post online the other day, which claimed that 49% of Minnesotans—less than half—say that they believe in God. Now, I don’t put much weight behind such polls, however they gather their data. I remember reading recently that 30% of self-identified atheists also affirm that they believe in God. Try to make that one make sense.

But the very notion of “believing in God” is something of a category error, a confusion of terms. Most people who deny belief in God are thinking of a god; that is, of a powerful yet limited supernatural or spiritual creature of some sort, akin to what Jews and Christians might call angels, or even fae. Yet God is not a god.

God, in the classical sense—as understood by the great monotheisms, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Baháʼí, Zoroastrians, Platonists, and, I would argue, certain strains of Buddhism—is not a part of Creation, not a being within the universe, not even properly an object of belief; because God is not an object, not a thing, at all. God indeed is “no-thing.”

God does not exist in the way that you or I do, because God is Existence itself. And you and I and everything else can only exist insofar as we exist in Him. Everything comes from God, everything is sustained by God, and everything returns to God. He is the Source and Ground of all reality, the Father of this and every possible world, the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

God so understood is infinite and eternal, transcendent and immanent. He is not simply good and true and beautiful, but He is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, of which all goodness and truth and beauty that we have ever known here below is but a pale reflection. He’s not just all-knowing but All-Knowledge, not just all-powerful but the Power that makes all power possible. God is Consciousness, Being, and Bliss—which is to say that God is Life, God is Love.

God is reality at the root, reality at its most basic, life-giving, and pure. So to ask whether someone believes in God is akin to asking, “Is reality real, or truth true, or beauty beautiful?” The question proves nonsensical. If God isn’t real, then nothing is. And even the most hardened materialist must admit that all the things that we call real, everything that we can see and touch and measure, are themselves based on invisible, intangible realities—like math.

Thus the question cannot be, “Do you believe in God?” but “What is God like?” What, in other words, is really real to you? Is it love, or sex, or power, or faith, or art, or wisdom, or joy? Surely reality cannot consist merely of impersonal forces, for you yourself are personal, and very much a part of reality; God cannot be less than you. Is God faceless and uncaring, or harsh and exacting, or a kaleidoscope of religious myths and imagery? Or is God just like Jesus Christ?

“Do you believe in God?” turns out to be a rather silly question when considered by anyone alive after Plato. It’s simply a case of our culture’s pervasive theological illiteracy. Yet here it has given me opportunity to take comfort in the knowledge that God isn’t going anywhere—because reality isn’t going anywhere. And reality today is every bit as wondrous, shocking, blissful, frightening, mysterious, and enrapturing as ever it was in the past.

In Jesus. Amen.