Does God exist?

The eternity of truth is inherent in it : all truths—not a few grand ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

To my mind the question does God exist is easily answered – no. To other people the answer is just as easy – yes. The arguments are so well-known that they have become uninteresting and perhaps that leads us to a much more interesting question – does it matter?

Probably not as far as many modern, right-on progressives are concerned, but who knows? Maybe it would have been socially and politically useful to keep a firmer and more widespread hold of the idea of God before leaping into the divisive and nihilistic swamp of political correctness. Would God have helped us to avoid rootless modes of unbelief which seem so remarkably good at fostering disorientation? Perhaps not but the possibility has to be worth a thought or two because socially and politically things are not going well for the secular world.

God as a transcendental standard of truth does at least remind us that there is an immutable reality reflected in immutable natural laws. A secular reality has no such transcendental reminder. It only has money, politics and rather feeble appeals to integrity.

Here in the West, freeing ourselves from the restrictive embrace of Christianity, however imperfect that embrace might have been, has not been an unalloyed success. Family breakdown, abortion on demand, attacks on men disguised as feminism, attacks on heterosexual norms disguised as sexual tolerance, attacks on indigenous Westerners disguised as anti-racism, attacks on Christianity disguised as attacks on Islamophobia, attacks on free speech disguised as attacks on hate speech, overt sexual display disguised as personal freedom.

It’s quite a list and all are secular trends we cannot easily discuss or analyse because our brave new world promises to be far more intolerant than the one it seeks to replace. With huge irony, secular repression is proving to be even more onerous, even more of a drag on human freedom than perhaps we assumed. Yet we thought we were in control. 

In control? Fat chance. Even our science has not been immune, that dispassionate pursuit of truth which played such as large part in pulling us out of a life nasty, brutish and short. After supposedly climbing from the gloomy depths of superstition to the cool uplands of objectivity we in the West have taken to pseudoscientific fraud in a big way. The scientific method hasn’t protected us from climate fraud but that was just for starters. If lying to children and wasting billions upon billions of dollars on bizarre attempts to control the climate were not enough we have lots more destructive pseudoscientific nonsense in the pipeline. The secular nihilists are just getting into their stride.

For example those who advocate the mantra of biologically identical male and female brains are already trying to suppress extremely well-established scientific work which says otherwise. Common sense also says otherwise but common sense is definitely passé - and no longer common.

In an increasingly rootless Western world, it is perhaps worthwhile to take another look at Santayana’s quote and ponder the possibility that God as transcendental truth may have been our best defence against secular madness. Maybe that was the whole point but we didn’t see it - we allowed ourselves to home in on the religious baggage because it was an easy target. Easy to criticise, sneer at or lampoon perhaps, but the spiritual core is not at all easy to replace because the spiritual core is where the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name ought to mark its sublimity.

This is not to claim that believers are more truthful or more sane than everyone else because quite a few are decidedly loopy. But the loopy aspect tends to come with the baggage rather than the core monotheism. Whether God exists or not and whether this is a valid question or not, it may well be that some kind of unadorned monotheism would have provided a spiritual defence against the crazy excesses of secular political rhetoric.

Suppose we move on and conduct a thought experiment. Suppose we imagine a UK which is as solidly religious as it was a century or more ago. In addition, suppose we tidy up our thought experiment by sidelining sects, schisms and doctrinal intransigence in favour of a simple pared down monotheism. This would be a theism which does not seek to compete with a scientific standpoint but bases itself on a much more moral outlook. Even a moral cosmology.

Completely impossible of course because human nature would not allow it. The baggage would accumulate from day one, but this is merely a thought experiment so we may set aside the baggage issue, insurmountable though it is. Given the impossible nature of the thought experiment any conclusion is mere daydreaming anyhow, but even daydreaming may be interesting.

In which case it may be suggested that a simple monotheism may well have protected us from a number of malign social and political trends. Not only that, but it seems likely enough that it would also have left Western societies and cultures with the confidence to remain as coherent societies and cultures in the first place. It would have left the roots intact.

It may be that atheism and agnosticism are aspects of collective intellectual decline, not the intellectual progress they seem to represent - and I write that as an atheist. It may be that God’s existence isn’t the point but some degree of transcendental truth, moral authority and cultural continuity was always the point. A point now all but lost.