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Asking if God exists is like asking if electrons are purple.
The questions are alike because both are category mistakes. It makes no sense to ask if electrons are purple, because the concept of color is utterly inapplicable to electrons. They are smaller than the wavelengths of light required to have colors at all. Electrons are relevant at a more fundamental level than are color categories.
My position (inspired especially by Paul Tillich) is that asking whether God exists implies a similar category mistake. Just as the content of the electron-concept is more fundamental than color-categories, the content of the God-concept is more fundamental than ontology-categories. This is why Tillich, for example, talks about God not as a being but as the ground of being. Subatomic particles can in some sense be thought of analogously as the ground of color, because they enable color-categories to be relevant.
So “Does God Exist?” is the wrong question to be asking. Some of the right questions to ask instead might be, “How do we interpret experiences of the divine?”, “Is it meaningful to talk about the action of God in the world?”, or “For what is the language of the divine a useful metaphor?” But if we ask the ontology-question, if we ask “Does God exist?”, we’ll always be disappointed, because there is no answer.
The broader issue, of course, is that of what categories we can use for God if not ontological ones. Aesthetic? Ethical? These are questions to consider. Hopefully I’ll have some more thoughts on this once I read Marion’s God Without Being, which arrived from Amazon today. But these are some preliminary thoughts on the subject before I dive into that text.
It is critically important in theological discussion to carefully distinguish between the terms belief and faith. These terms are used in multiple (often conflicting) ways among various thinkers, but for my purposes I generally distinguish them as follows.
Belief is a mental state of confidence in the factuality (or lack of factuality) of a fact-claim about “the way things are”. I can believe that the world is roughly spherical and not; I can believe that the sky is red (though that would be an incorrect belief); I can believe that the Gospel According to Matthew is literally historical, word-for-word (almost certainly also an incorrect belief, though); and so on. Faith, in contrast, has little to do with belief in a fact-claim per se, but has everything to do with orientation towards or ultimate concern for a person, event, or story, independent of the validity of any fact-claims about that subject. (The idea of faith as “ultimate concern” comes from Paul Tillich, who in Dynamics of Faith makes the point that idolatrous faith thus occurs when one’s ultimate concern is oriented towards something that is not in fact ultimate, like the nation-state). Thus, we have beliefs about propositional statements regarding reality, but we have faith in narratives and in people.
Any definition of “being”, “existence”, “actuality”, “ousia”, “essence”, etc, etc, etc, is inadequate as a description of the mystery that we call “God”. Thus we must be extremely careful in believing that “God exists” or in believing that “God is real”. Perhaps, in fact, we must remain agnostic about the “existence” of God, if only as a way of coping with this divine transcendence of human ontological categories. But as the above discussion makes clear, holding belief (and disbelief) in suspension in no way rules out the potential for faith. It is fully possible to have faith in this God, the question of whose existence is meaningless. For we understand that the idea of God as a person has been made relevant though the powerful narratives we tell in order to understand the world in a God-oriented way (such as the Gospel According to Matthew, which thus does not need to be factual (belief-worthy) to be true (faith-worthy)). We can have faith (as defined here) in the “person” of God, in the narratives about God, and we can use this faith as a lens to understand the world and guide our actions in it. We can have faith in God without belief in God’s existence.
