You heard me. You already believe in God. Atheism is logically impossible. Why? Because the definition of God is so broad and wide-reaching that it is essentially impossible to disbelieve. If you live in the modern West, you cannot exempt yourself from this, unless perhaps if you are: 1. a traditional Buddhist (no, shitty individualized English sutra-recitation doesn’t count), 2. a real nihilist (of whom there are very few), or 3. a radical ultra-skeptic (you do not qualify for this title if you browse Reddit or watch Rick & Morty).
So what’s a decent definition of God? Let’s start with what the Bhagavad Gita says:
“I am the goal of life … I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation … I am what is and what is not.”
“There is no truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.”
We can see here at least four things identifiable with God: the purpose of life, the entirety of the universe, Existence itself, and Absolute truth. What does this mean for atheism? It means that if you believe in any of these things, you believe in God. This is not something that most people can choose to disbelieve in. Although there are many who claim that human life has no meaning, there are few who are willing to say that the universe has no origin, that Existence does not exist, or that truth is not truth. Western atheism is, fundamentally, not about belief or disbelief but about definitions. If you believe that there is existence, you must believe in God.
God does not have to be a person in the sky who commands you to do this-thing and that-thing. That’s a very weak idea of God. In order to be a good skeptic, you must be able to defeat the most generous interpretation of your opponent’s argument. You cannot make strawmen or attack idiots who misrepresent an internally-consistent belief system. If you can at least imagine a belief being possibly true, it is worth taking a look at it if you wish to call yourself a non-believer of that belief.
That’s basically it. It really does not take much to prove that most people believe in some barebones idea of God. Here are some FAQs:
Q. Surely most people would not agree with your definition of God?
A. Here is a list of theological writers who agree with this definition of God: Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Gregory Palamas, Ibn Arabi, John the Evangelist, Plotinus, Iamblichus of Chalcis, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areophagite, Adi Shankara, Moshe ben Maimon. The fact that there is a particular bad student does not mean that the teacher was wrong.
Q. Surely this definition of God is not very personal, not very inspiring?
A. Yes, this definition of God is not very anthropomorphic and would be hard to relate to. We can talk about the nature of these anthropomorphisms in another blog post.
Q. Okay, but there is no truth. There is also no existence. Also, there is no universe. Therefore, there is no God.
A. That is not something that you can actually say. If there is no truth, then you cannot say “there is no truth” and have this assertion be true. This is an argument-stopping logical contradiction that needs to be addressed by anyone who makes this claim.
If there is no existence, then how are you speaking to me? In fact, why are you even typing words on a page and expecting me to understand them? If there is no truth, there is no guarantee at all that your ideas will be correctly understood by anybody.
Q. Maybe God is existence, or God is truth, or God is the origin of the universe, but you can’t have all three. Come on! That’s a cop-out. These individual things exist, but how can they come together as a package deal?
A. This is actually pretty simple. The universe would not exist without existence, so the origin of the universe has some close relationship with Existence itself. Likewise, there are many who believe that the truth must be beyond the universe in order for it to really be true, so we could imagine that truth is also intimately related with God. Also, it could easily be the case that God is the name for a set, inside which there are many things. The set itself would be one God, but it has many attributes within it.
Q. You can’t use Hindu scriptures to prove the existence of a God that Christians believe in!
A. Why? Aren’t you committing the ad hominem fallacy right now? If you are an internet atheist, I’m sure you are very familiar with it. Just because an argument comes from a Hindu doesn’t mean that it’s wrong from a Christian perspective.
Q. You can’t just change definitions on me. Words have real meaning!
A. That’s not true. As long as I can point to an underlying concept, I can speak about that concept. Consider how the word “God”, which has Germanic origins and was used in a variety of pagan ways came to be identified with the Christian “theos”. Or consider how I can refer to the idea of apples as “bleebloo” and it won’t affect at all whether apples exist. Even the most skeptical atheist has to admit that the word “God” could be like “bleebloo” — a possibly-useless pointer to a concept that is ultimately real (i.e. the origin of the universe).
Q. Okay, but I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), and I assert that this is God.
A. First of all, you don’t actually believe in this. Second of all, you can’t believe in this, because the Flying Spaghetti Monster has the property of being made of spaghetti. Therefore, spaghetti is ontologically prior to the Flying Spaghetti Monster; the FSM cannot be the origin of the universe, since something comes before it. Hmm, but spaghetti might be God, since spaghetti is prior to the FSM. But wait, spaghetti is made out of matter, and wait — matter is something that exists. Dang! So it looks like Existence is superior to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Existence is a far better candidate for God than the FSM could ever possibly be.
Q. Fine, but I believe that the Big Bang is God.
A. This is a more defensible claim and is at least somewhat consistent with what theists believe.
Q. But what about Russell’s teapot? What if I told you there were invisible elves in this room? You wouldn’t be able to disprove me!
A. It would be unreasonable for me to seriously argue that there “might” be a teapot behind the moon. There are many things that “might” or “might not” exist. Here’s the difference — the origin of the universe is not like a teapot at all; the universe has to exist in order for us even to have this debate at all. There is absolutely nothing in this world that ontologically depends on Russell’s teapot, or on invisible elves. In contrast, everything in this world depends on Existence, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the world. Therefore, God exists, but Russell’s teapot might not. There is a fundamental, analogy-destroying distinction between the two.
There are different and more obscure arguments for why God does not exist, which I’ll explore in a later writing. But for now, these are my biggest gripes with most atheist belief systems that I have encountered in the modern West. If you can successfully disprove my reasoning (which is certainly possible in the current version of this essay), you are definitely an atheist who knows his own beliefs!
“Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.” – C. S. Lewis
fine whining & breathing 
[[“I am the goal of life … I am the beginning, the staying, and the end of creation … I am what is and what is not.”…“There is no truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.”]]
Definitions of god arising from spokespeople, and no individual is free from bias. On such a prevalent topic it would be amazingly simple to compile a number of people in agreement with whatever definition you choose, so long as it appeals to their belief in an omniscient, or omnipresent god – or even something on the other end of the spectrum. Likewise, you have bias via interpretation.
So many unknowns, and you choose to fixate on that singular permutation. And who’s to say god isn’t a dog? Who are we to presume upon a thing clearly beyond human comprehension if your words are taken as fact? :p
To “believe” in god in today’s society means nothing. Religious right-wingers are blind to their own greed and myopia. Revered political figures with backgrounds in sexual assault, paedophilia, money laundering, and general detestability, and yet people of religion stand idly by. Priests of all echelons, embroiled in the sexual abuse of children. The Westboro Baptist Church.
[[Q. You can’t just change definitions on me. Words have real meaning!…Or consider how I can refer to the idea of apples as “bleebloo” and it won’t affect at all whether apples exist.]]
False equivalence. An apple is an apple because we already have frame of reference in visual and tactile dimensions. To call it by any other name still makes it an apple. There is no framework for god, what with how ambiguous you’ve made its very existence. i.e. your underlying reference is a product of human opinion, and you choose to magnify and extrapolate based on a singular interpretation.
Addendum: On the off-chance you wrote this piece at gun point, I lazily scoured it for a call for help and found none. Never let it be said I don’t try.
So, god is something which is not something, and when you say, God says “I” you are using a maximally flawed analogy for a state of affairs which is not apt for a concept?
To talk about truth you have to step on the realm of lies.
First you have to believe historical refference of what we know as model of the image of God has not been manipulated by man (I mean, is not like we human like to bend, twist, edit, recreate and perform all sorts of deviations actions on originals, right?). Second you would have to compare your self found truth with the “same spoken concept” of those around you to create a new truth: therefore the question “the real God was the first one I believed originally or the new one, the more (add new quality found)?”
My point with this is, if God don’t ever present to humanity as a whole, perfect, all we are seeing are pieces of God. Imperfect versions to match our own existence.
If God exists, is not aware of our existence (or worst).
I think you’re basing your argument here in a conundrum that doesn’t really help the point that you’re trying to make (which, to me, is more or less that god is an inescapable assumption of the thinking mind). If your point boils down to semantics — “god is truth, god is exsitence, god is the origin of the universe” — then in fact why do we need the word ‘god’, when we already have the words ‘truth’, ‘existence’ and ‘origin of the universe’?
If you want to claim that others believe in god basically because they believe in reality, and reality is god, then you’re just adding a third assumption here (the ‘god = X’ equation where X is something we usually consider to be not god). The label ‘god’ becomes meaningless inasmuch as it adds nothing to what the labels ‘existence’, ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ already do. I could even add a third word, say ‘goop’, and claim that ‘goop’ is even prior to god, because goop in my view is prior to existence itself (how can this be? ah, but I have faith in goop!) and then claim that goop is the real deal while god is just an intermediary. You’d probably reply that, given my play with words here, ‘goop’ is really the same as ‘god’ — but that’s the same thing you do if you claim ‘god’ is ‘reality’ (or ‘existence’ or ‘origin of the universe’ or ‘a set which contains a number of things’…) — these things already have other names, and equating god to them doesn’t give it any of its usual attributes in Western religion, like omniscience and omnipotence.
I will end by noting that your view of god is one that most believers would find despicable. They’d say the god they believe in is much more than simply ‘truth’ and ‘existence’ (though these things flow from him or were created by it) in their view. They’d throw Jesus in the mix, too. And they’d turn away from you and say you’re just another atheist who doesn’t really get god. And they’d be right in a way, since the reason(s) why they believe in their god has little to do with the reasons why, according to your (re)definition, ‘we all, even atheists, believe in god.’
In other words, you’re just playing with words. Not bad — by all means enjoy yourself — but not convincing in any way either.
Bye!
I didn’t read this and I don’t care. goodbye