On the Necessity of an Invented God

God is a set of ideas that defines good and evil. Can good and evil exist without a mystical deity?

I believe they cannot. Not as concepts — they can be defined and analyzed and parsed by any moderately competent philosopher — but as forces in a life. Good and evil are not abstractions you reason your way into. They are weights you carry, and the carrying requires a frame larger than your own short years. Without that frame, the weights become unbearable and you put them down.

Existence is tragic. It is loss and grief concluded by the loss of everything in death. To live, knowing that you will die — knowing that everyone you have ever loved will die, that the child you raised will die, that the stranger you helped will die, that your own body will dissolve into dust and the dust will scatter — is the ultimate lesson the universe has to teach. It is also the lesson most lives are organized around not learning. We work, we plan, we accumulate, we distract; the architecture of an ordinary life is largely a structure for not noticing the only real fact about being alive.

When you cannot help noticing — when illness or grief or the slow exhaustion of a long bad year strips the architecture away — what remains is the question of how to take another breath. Why bother. What is any of this for. The honest answer in pure materialist terms is nothing, it is for nothing, you are an arrangement of atoms briefly self-aware before the arrangement disperses. That answer is true and almost no one can live inside it for long. The mind looks for handles.

The handles humans have built for themselves, across every culture and epoch, have a name. The name is God. Sometimes God is a person, sometimes a force, sometimes a void, sometimes a covenant. Sometimes God is many gods, sometimes one, sometimes the absence of any gods rendered with the same gravity. What is consistent across the variants is that God is a frame larger than the individual life that has to bear the weight of being alive. Without such a frame, most people cannot bear it. With such a frame, they can.

I want to be careful here, because I am not arguing that God exists. I do not know whether God exists. The question of metaphysical existence is, for the purposes of how a person actually lives, beside the point. What matters is the idea of the divine — the righteous beauty of the divine, as an organizing structure of a human consciousness. The idea does work that nothing else does. It locates good and evil in a register beyond personal preference. It promises that grief is not a final word. It tells the dying parent that the child will be carried by something. It tells the homeless veteran that the failures of the world are not the failures of the universe. None of these consolations require God to be metaphysically real. They require only that the believer treat the idea as operative.

I cannot live without hope. I cannot live without the idea of God. I can live without believing God exists in any specific form — and most days I don’t believe — but I cannot live without the frame the concept provides. To be honest about this is not weakness or naïveté. It is the report of a person who has lived long enough to know what his own mind requires.

And yet — and this is the part the materialist atheists I admire would force me to say — God is also clearly something humans built. The deity is a self-portrait, projected outward and upward so the species could finally look at itself. Every God any culture has produced bears the unmistakable fingerprints of the people who produced it. The concept did not descend from the sky. It rose from the collective need of social primates trying to coordinate moral behavior at scales their biology was not built for. We needed a witness. We needed a judge. We needed a love that did not end at death. So we made one. And the making worked.

That irony does not collapse the argument. It deepens it. The fact that we built God does not mean we don’t need God. We built houses, too, and we live in them. Some structures are necessary even when — especially when — we know we are the ones who built them.

Evolution is now in the process of making survival of the fittest obsolete. Democratization, socialization, ethics, morals — the slow installation of the belief that any and all human life is sacred and should be preserved regardless of fitness — these are the most distinctive features of the late human project. They are also the features that the older logic of selection cannot account for. The species that protects its weakest is not the species the textbooks predicted. We are doing something we were not designed to do.

The God-shaped concept is part of how we did it. Not the only part — secular humanism gets there too, by other routes — but a part. The traditions that taught generations of humans that the lowest among us was sacred were religious traditions. The ethics they bequeathed to the secular descendants who now disclaim them are still shaping how we live. There is no clean exit from the building. We are walking through rooms that earlier humans built using the only tool available to them, which was the idea of the divine.

I cannot live without hope. I cannot live without the idea of God. I am also not naive about what God is.

Both things are true.