On God ⋆ Philosophical and Other Essays

First, I’d like to make it clear that it’s really not all that important whether you believe in God or not. I’m not out to crusade, I’m not like those Christians of the past (I’m not even religious) who would slaughter anyone who disbelieves, and I don’t even particularly need you to believe. I believe that God can work with and through anybody regardless of whether they believe in Him/Her or not. Of course it’s that way, as there’s literally nothing else but God; you and He/She are one.

(All of us, all conscious beings everywhere, are all one. If that sounds illogical because we obviously experience ourselves as separate individuals, consider that there there are various levels to being, individuation, identity and self-awareness, and we’re only all one on the highest level, which we’re not currently aware of. Or at least that’s how I like to understand/model it. And as for us being separate, there really is no ultimate separation, only differentiation. Also, I think God can interact with a human as if He/She’s a relatively separate entity to accomplish some particular purpose, but only by temporarily creating a kind of apparent divide between Him/Her and them that works works on a practical level. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

But I will write out my reasons for believing in God and what I imagine God to be, because I get tired of so many people staunchly disbelieving and attacking notions of God for no ultimately valid reason, so much so that it seems to be the norm in modern philosophical circles, which is a shame. And besides that, maybe my expositions on God can serve to inspire somebody to look up.

First, I will explain (or link to) why the popular reasons for disbelieving in God are invalid, then I will expound on the particular reasons I personally believe in God, then I will explain what I believe the nature of God to be.

Another popular reason for disbelieving in God is the lack of evidence. Of course, there can be no direct empirical evidence for God, because God is ubiquitous, nonphysical, unpredictable, etc. And for any entity you could prove the existence of who has any particular degree of power, extent, or knowledge, it’s always possible that its power, extent, or knowledge is merely great but not infinite; there’s no way to measure an infinite amount of power, extent, or knowledge. So, in this case, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Of course, that’s not in itself a positive reason to believe, and not believing in God due to lack of evidence is fair. But staunchly disbelieving, arguing with people who believe, etc. isn’t. And furthermore, as I say later in the paragraph about falsifiability, there are less empirically provable reasons for believing in God. I make another point regarding lack of evidence for God here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/evidence-and-god/.

The error here is in assuming a belief is invalid unless it’s based in undeniable, proven empirical evidence. Again, in order to avoid repeating myself, I’ll link to some essays: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Empiricism, https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Skepticism, https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Hitchens, and the ‘Doubting Doubt’ section at https://megasociety.org/noesis/197.pdf. I also mention an important anti-foundationalist conclusion regarding physics and science, which naturally leads to the possibility of any imaginable governing principle of the Universe, somewhere in https://myriachrmat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Astrology and in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Rationalism. https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Science is also probably relevant.

Another reason people tend to disbelieve in God is the patent absurdity of religion, which more or less has a monopoly on the conception of God in most societies; for example, in Western society, when one thinks of God, they probably automatically go right to thinking of the Christian God, with its attendant characteristics, including vanity and neediness (in its demand to be worshipped), judgmentalism and condemnation, warmongering and encouraging homicide, etc., to say nothing of the self-contradictions and primitive morality rife in the Holy Bible and the absurdities of the more pop Christian beliefs, such as creationism, which goes flatly against scientific knowledge and discovery. But the God I’m presenting here is not the Christian God, neither of the Old nor the New Testament, nor is it a God belonging to any particular religion at all. There’s just no reason to assume the nature of God must accord with some religion’s or another’s understanding of it. Though it’s important to note here that that doesn’t mean anybody who believes in religion or “the wrong God” is hopelessly disconnected from the real God. On the contrary, in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialogue series of books, God says that He/She’s “sophisticated enough” to work through any particular religion or belief system.

Another reason people tend to disbelieve in God is that they’re unable to imagine a mechanism by which God could exist and operate, and the proponents of a belief in God can’t offer one, either. But one should just accept that the universe is fundamentally mysterious, and we may come to reasons for believing in a particular thing without necessarily knowing or understanding the “mechanism” behind that thing, and not to mention that with our puny grey matter evolved primarily for foraging, fucking, raising kids, etc., we probably wouldn’t even understand the truth of certain “mechanisms” if they were presented to us.

Not that I think reality is necessarily completely mechanistic, which is why I put “mechanisms” in quotes, in order to indicate some more general type of working principle or set of principles. The assumption of mechanicalism is based on a false extrapolation/inference from the relative efficacy of science and mathematics in predicting and manipulating certain limited classes of natural and artificial phenomena starting with Newtonian mechanics. The “anti-foundationalist” argument in two of the essays I link to above is very relevant here.

Another argument people use to refute God is the accusation that a believer is committing the logical fallacy of “onus of proof.” In other words, if I’m claiming God exists, then it’s up to me to prove He/She does, not up to you to prove he doesn’t, in order for you to change your (probably) staunch belief in His/Her nonexistence. The problem with this accusation of fallacy is that “onus of proof” actually makes a lot more sense if any side making a particular truth claim has the onus of proving it. In other words, if I claim God exists, then I have the onus of proving it, but if you claim God doesn’t exist, then you also have the onus of proving it. Otherwise, the logical fallacy is just used as a label to the effect of unfairly bullying people into submission in the context of debate, like most of the known fallacies often are. I wrote more about that here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Onus.

Another supposed problem with the idea of God is that it’s unfalsifiable. But unfalsifiability is really only a concept that should be a deal-breaker within the sciences, and the belief in God need not be (and indeed can’t be) scientific. There is meaning and metaphysical truth to saying “God exists” or “God doesn’t exist,” and there are observable consequences to that truth state. Scientific ideas may need to be falsifiable, but science isn’t the only legitimate means of knowing anything. It relies on hard empirical evidence, and there are more indirect, if indefinite, ways of inferring truths or probable truths.

To talk a little bit about subjects I brought up previously only to provide links to further explanations, only believing things that are provable/proven is too easy. (Simply analyzing whether something is proven or not is straightforward and relatively deterministic, almost algorithmic in nature and fear-based. The desire for social status is a fundamental drive of humans, so academics would fear believing in anything that they can’t defend on academic bases because they’d looked down upon. And there are other reasons we may fear the possibility of being wrong.) Making educated guesses based on personal experience, others’ experiences (while carefully weighing whether their stories are likely legit or not based on many available factors, rather than facilely dismissing them out of hand as “anecdotal”), heuristics, intuition, abstract/intangible perception, and whatever other bases puts more of our inherent mental faculties to work.

Another reason people might argue against the existence of God is Occam’s razor. I.e., the scientific explanation that introduces the least number of unnecessary elements is the most likely correct one. But that doesn’t actually work, because, as I say in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Occam, Occam’s razor only legitimately applies when there are no other legitimate or even suggestive reasons for believing in the “extra” element outside of the scientific theory and evidence themselves. For similar reasons, Occam’s razor is only rightly applied to scientific theories per se, and the belief in God is not even in the realm of scientific theory.

Another reason people discount the belief in God—and this is a popular one—is that God apparently cannot be all three of benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, because if He were omniscient, he’d know there was suffering and how to stop it, if he were omnipotent, he’d had the power to effect that remedy, and if he were benevolent, he’d want to, and therefore he would and there should be no suffering. In Neale Donald Walsch’s books, God explains how this all makes sense in a perfectly logical way.

I’ll let you read the books yourselves for that, but I will convey one personal experience I had on this topic. A number of years ago, I was in the back seat of a car at the drive through of Burger King or some other fast food restaurant, and I decided I wanted to briefly access whatever was there in the very back/top of my mind, I suppose to use that sacred knowledge for my own edification, so I did. And what I got was a kind of overall blueprint for existence, and I sense from the nature or vibe of it that it was so sacred that I should never share it with anybody. But after a few moments, the original concept faded from memory and all I had left was a shadow of it, and then it no longer seemed too sacred to share, so I’ve been sharing it.

What I saw was that all of existence is like this big matrix where in order to have any kind of experience, all experiences must be possible. And in this blueprint, I think “possible” was metaphysically synonymous with “sometimes happens.” The words alone don’t seem to give any justification for why it should be that way, but when the original blueprint was still in my memory, it all made perfect intuitive sense. I’ve heard that this idea is nothing new, that it’s common in spiritualist circles, but I didn’t get it from spiritualist circles; I got it from me.

Anyway, I have the sneaking suspicion that wondering why God doesn’t cure your suffering is somehow a mark of particular immaturity, I suppose because if you were more aware of yourself, what you’re doing, your path, where you’ve come from, why you’ve decided what you’ve decided, where you want to go, etc., you’d realize why you should fully take responsibility for your suffering and own it, and perhaps why even suffering can be a gift and can serve you if you understand it as a gift, fully accept it, and/or use it well.

I’m sorry, by the way; I know it sounds like victim blaming to say people should take responsibility for their suffering, when we’re often at the wrong end of somebody else’s or society’s cruelty or other shortcomings, and that’s often why we suffer. But perhaps not all is at it seems (I’ll leave it to you and your imagination to fill in the blanks there in a way that is beneficial to you), and also, the words on this page aren’t necessarily what they seem, as spiritual truths often have a way of being extremely easily misunderstood when it’s attempted to be put them into words.

The books also say suffering is not necessary, so I suppose it’s a choice we unconsciously make, and I can see reasons why God would not interfere with our own choices about ourselves, whether conscious or unconscious. To do so would be corrupting. You may think you want it, but you don’t really: if the universe actually gave it to you, you’d immediately feel somehow slighted by the universe and emotionally reject it. We can only get what we want when we resolve our own internal inconsistencies about what we want or expect or what our conditions for acceptance, happiness or prosperity are. I know this from experience.

But enough about reasons not to disbelieve in God, now onto the reasons I happen to believe in God.

I spent many years as an agnostic, until I came across Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Neale was at a very low point in his life, and out of frustration he wrote a “letter to God” asking questions like, “Why wasn’t my life working?”, “What would it take to get it to work?”, “Why could I not find happiness in relationships?”, “Was the experience of adequate money going to elude me forever?”, and “What had I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?”. He had prepared to toss the pen aside, when somehow his hand remained poised over the paper, then the pen began to move on its own. He decided to go with it, having no idea what he was about to write, and he wrote, “Do you really want an answer to all these questions, or are you just venting?”. That was the beginning of his conversation with God. God’s input eventually evolved into more of a “voiceless voice” in his mind. (God says He/She communicates with people all the time, especially via the imagination, and He/She only uses words when all else fails, because words are the most dynamic and hence the most easily misunderstood form of communication.)

Why was I so sold on this book/on the idea that it really was God he was talking to? Well, it’s because I’m really good at seeing all of the subtle flaws and shortcomings of people, maybe particularly in their writings, on a few levels: on the conceptual level, on the level of their actual motivations and intentions, on the level of grammar and whether they choose the best possible word for the job, etc.; and in the parts in the books where God speaks, it’s all absolutely flawless (in contrast to the parts where Neale speaks, which are more human). I’ve literally never encountered any other text or speech so flawless in my life.

And I know that, obviously, someone who’s purporting to channel God is going try to
sound as perfect as possible, but this is a matter of subtle things, unconscious motivation, cognitive perfection, and talent and grace at using language that you can’t do just by wanting to. It’s just like how an intelligent person can play domb, but a dumb person can’t play intelligent, at least not to a discerning audience.

Furthermore, I perceived the “energy” behind the text—as in the messages it contains and the style in which it’s written, or maybe even something actually spiritual that’s inextricably connected to the text (as if the text is something like a “carrier wave” or signal to convey the psychic impression, much like how people have psychic insight into others’ mental processes while socially interacting without even being aware of it)—as being absolutely, 100% pure. It was so pure and neutral that it was almost unworldly. (I guess it’s problematic to say that it’s totally neutral, because arguably if it were then he wouldn’t have had a reason to care or to say anything, but it was neutral of biases or all but the most sublime desires/energies or whatever.)

Also, the book said some important things that I’d always believed myself but had never heard/seen anybody else say. I was so moved by one of those things that I dropped a tear onto the page.

Another thing that has made me think God likely exists is personal psychic experiences. I’m not talking about “religious experiences” or talking to God, but just witnessing my thoughts being shared with others, sometimes overtly enough to be beyond any reasonable doubt. The specific manner of some of this sharing, the way our minds are apparently connected, seems to indicate a level of unity or non-separation between beings, at least between beings that are close to each other in some way. So, I reasoned, if our beings are “locally” connected to each other, there are probably more and more universal/higher and higher levels of this unity, up to and including the ultimate level, a unification of all beings, which could reasonably be considered to be “God.”

Also, I did once feel what seemed to me like the presence of God; I’ll copy the story below:

Another time, I had to walk through the cafeteria of my niece’s elementary school while it was chalk full of children, and I didn’t have my hat on which I usually liked to wear to cover up my baldness. I actually felt like I looked a little bit freaky, because I had long wavy hair and was also partially bald. So I was really embarrassed, but I decided to have courage and just do it. A minute later when I was back outside of the building walking along the sidewalk, I could perceive this soft white energy filling all the space and surrounding everything in it, and I felt so at peace and comforted by this energy—like it was God or something—that I smiled a huge smile for this little girl that was walking toward me from the other direction, and it was genuine…It would have taken more effort not to smile than to smile. Again, this is extremely unusual in my experience. That’s actually the only time I can remember smiling and not being forced to, besides when I happen to be laughing at something. By the way, I was also carrying an open black umbrella over my head at the time even though it wasn’t raining, just for for the sake of fun and free expression. =P

The complete text that’s an excerpt from can be found block quoted in this essay: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/06/17/what-is-the-meaning-of-ones-heart/.

So, those are all the historical reasons I believe in God that I can think of. Of course, any coldly, disembodiedly intellectual person will dismiss these as subjective and meaningless, but anyone actually more heart-based and open will see the authenticity and profundity in them and may be moved to at least take them into deep consideration.

Oh, yeah, the third section. What do I believe the nature of God to be?

The most important things to specify here are that God is not judgmental or condemning, is omnibenevolent/all-loving, is unlimited, and ultimately comprises everything. I say “ultimately” because there are more and less delimited ways of considering “God.” For example, you can think of “God” as specifically the highest, most perfect, most masterful, most unified aspect of God/life, or you can think of God more as every aspect of everything. In one of Neale’s books, God says, “I am everything that is, everything that is not, and everything in between.” This striking statement gives us a glimpse of the utter completeness, the fullness and the unlimited breadth of God. God also says that He/She contains both the profane and the profound, and if you only see Him/Her in the profound, then you’re missing half the story. I’ve also read that the universe is “the body of God,” but I don’t remember if that was in one of Neale’s books.

Another delimited way you think of god is to think of God as any God-realized being; it could be a smaller being than everything that exits, but it’s totally aligned with the divine, fluidly melding with the greater whole, and perhaps dynamically melding and unmelding in degrees as it changes, transitions from some intention/endeavor to the next, or travels. In one part of Conversations with God, God says that even He/She is just a smaller art of a much greater being, to give Neale a glimpse of the unfathomable vastness of life/the universe. Perhaps the alleged God-realized avatars of India (and perhaps in other cultures, just not called “avatars,” and perhaps unrecognized and/or more rare outside of India) are such beings, too.

There are other traits that I could mention, such as God is omniscient and omnipotent. (There are philosophical conundrums associated with the concept of omnipotence, so let’s just say that, according to God, He/She has “full power to match intentions with results.”) More fully, I believe in the God of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, but of course you’d have to read them to know exactly what that means.

One thing I haven’t stressed enough yet is that there is no real separation between us and God. In the books, God says that you are God, Godding. We are co-creators. And that our souls “knows everything there is to know.” And that you may change form all we want, but you cannot cease to exist. Because for you to cease to exist would mean God would have to cease to exist, and that is not possible. Also in one place God says something pertaining to His/Her maintaining the separation between Him/Her and Neale for the sake of discussion.

Another interesting thing about God is that He/She says, in other words, that He/She contemplated Him/Herself “for longer than you and I could collectively remember,” in the absence of being able to experience Him/Herself, until He/She eventually had the great idea to virtually separate Him/Herself (there’s no true separation in actuality, only differentiation) into many parts, or reference points, so that each part could witness the greater whole. And He/She was so elated by this thought that He/She exploded in delight, and that event corresponds with what we call the big bang.

Another thing I haven’t said is that, regardless of how much you read about God, nothing can fully convey or even prepare you to witness the astounding reality of God’s nature.

In one of Neale’s books, God says this:

God
Life
Love
Unlimited
Eternal
Free

Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.

So, by that we can infer a few other properties of God. He/She is Life, Love, Unlimited, Eternal, and Free (just like we all are, at our most essential level of being).

Regarding what “love” means in the above, God says this elsewhere: “Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.” Of course, if God is love, then love must be everything, which raises the question of how fear can exist as its opposite. The answer—and I think I read God saying something along these lines in one of the books—is that fear is actually not as primary as love; it’s ultimately a manifestation of love or exists within love, as the illusion of its opposite.

God says that fear is the energy that makes you feel like have to do something. I suppose this is necessary because, as God says elsewhere in the books, “nothing matters.” (Of course, the statement that nothing matters should be taken carefully in the context of the rest of the book(s). He does say, for example, IIRC, that “nothing matters” can also be taken to mean that “nothing is matter” and that matter is of no importance to our life, but then he says that, paradoxically, matter is also of utmost importance. (God mentions the concept of “divine contradictions” or “divine paradoxes,” I forget which, in a few places in the books.) He also says somewhere that there are moments in life that we may want to take very seriously. And he also said something like, while we’re under no obligation to do anything, we may want to continue to providing for people we’ve caused to be dependent on us, such as our families.

But I digress; one thing sort of necessarily leads to another, and then another, until I’m talking about a whole different subject. =P But that’s okay, there is much in NDW’s books that is worth repeating (though I probably did a bad job at butchering and maybe even misremembering or hallucinating things God supposedly said :P).

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On God

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