Does God exist?
On the Supposed Supernature of the Supreme Being
For millennia, the existence of God has been a subject of great debate with a wide variety of arguments for and against it, leading to theists and atheists respectively. Of course, theists bare the burden of proof, given that it would be impossible to disprove that the Supreme Being exists, although that didn’t stop Nietzsche or Bertrand Russell from trying. In sharp contrast to this, on the theistic side of the great debate, this has led to a number of assertions, like St. Anselm’s ontological argument or Thomas Aquinas’ cosmological argument. To make matters worse the question of the existence of God lies outside science’s purview.
As a fideist, I maintain that belief in the Supreme Being’s existence is not amenable to demonstration or refutation but rests solely on faith. With that being said, when you look back through the trillions of generations of life-forms that came before you, all the way back to the initial condition of the local universe, you will find that the Supreme Being is our progenitor. The Great Spirit is our original ancestor, but at the same time, creationism is wrong regarding the origins of humanity. Scientifically speaking, genetically proven evolution by means of natural selection disproves the claim that people were created in their present form only a few millennia ago.
The thing to understand is that this doesn’t refute theism, only creationism. That’s entirely separate from the notion of whether or not a Supreme Being exists in an ontological or epistemological form. One way to think of all of this is that God necessarily becomes sufficiently involved with a universe so that a spacetime continuum can become evolved. This rather academic notion of a Creator traces back to the philosophers of classical antiquity and beyond. The unmoved mover or prime mover is a concept that was advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things but is not itself moved by any prior action.
With that being said, my spiritual beliefs are based on a perennial philosophy, which postulates that there is one underlying theological truth, of which all religions only express a partial understanding. In other words, the great world religions worship the same Supreme Being, but through different, overlapping concepts. The thing is that I’m technically a pluralist because I believe that my version of God is the right one, even though I don’t deny at least the partial truth of other conceptions. I am also a syncretist because I combine different beliefs while blending practices of various schools of thought.
I guess if I had to give my version of the Supreme Being a name it would probably just be the Latin, or better yet the Greek word for what I’m talking about. That is to say, “Deus” or “Theós”. Either way, according to the more standard theological descriptions, the Great Spirit is the origin of the universe as well as the source of all moral authority within it. This is the general stance of all deists, including me. As part of this, the Gaze of God is how the Supreme Being begins a new universe after an old space-time continuum has become far too empty, too cold, and too big to be of any use anymore. As such, the evolution of a universe is done by natural selection, but involution is done by supernatural selection.
Simply put, Theós has to actually select a universe out of the multiverse, thus giving rise to a Big Bang. In line with this, Theós is the Creator, but not the Sustainer, or the Destroyer. For one reason or another, there are those who argue that the Goddess is both the creator and the sustainer of everything. This is the basic claim of theists, which is wrong. Then, there are those who go a step further asserting that everything is the Goddess, not just that the universe is being developed or governed. This is the position of pantheists, which is also wrong. In contrast to all of this, a significantly smaller portion of the human population denies the existence of the Goddess. This is the argument of the atheists, which is wrong, as well.
From a strictly logical point of view, the standard set of divine attributes is internally inconsistent. By this I mean, Theós cannot be omnipotent, omnitemporal, omnipresent, or omniscient. This is because the power of the Supreme Being is limited. Ultimately, the Great Spirit is neither omnitemporal nor omnipresent, meaning Theós doesn’t exist in all times and places. The Great Spirit only exists everywhere in the multiverse, but not everywhere in the universe. To be fair, the Great Spirit is omnibenevolent though. That is to say, the Supreme Being certainly possesses perfect goodness.
In line with this, Theós doesn’t know what someone is doing, just what they’ve done, and only after they die. This is really important to understand. The life review in the afterlife is how the Supreme Being will come to know what you have done. This all speaks to the omnibenevolence and lack of omnipresence of God. So, in spite of the Great Spirit’s disproval of all immorality, the Supreme Being can’t force anyone to be ethical. In the end, it’s up to us to be good people. Theós has no choice but to let bad things happen. Thus, the ethical “problem of evil” is ours to solve, not the Lord’s. As part of that, there is also Pascal’s wager to help further compel you toward piety.
In regards to this, secularism states that God is neither transcendent nor immanent, while monotheism states that God is both transcendent and immanent, and deism states that God is transcendent but not immanent. Since I claim that the Great Spirit does not permanently pervade and sustain the universe, I am a deist. As I said before, I believe that the Great Spirit is in a separate realm from humans. The Supreme Being dwells in the spirit world, which is the multiverse. That is to say, Heaven is in hyperspace. Thus, the Supreme Being cannot directly influence anything going on in the metaphysical and physical space of the local universe, regardless of what anyone claims. Your soul and body are separate from the spirit. Therefore, Theós is not omnipotent.
This is why mages need to invoke the Great Spirit and momentarily bring Goddess to Earth. In other words, the Lady is right outside of everything, just waiting to come in. That’s why I enter a ritual chamber to become the Supreme Being, not to appease the Supreme Being. So, the invocation of spirit, allows the deistic Goddess, to temporarily become partially panentheistic for the extent of a conjuration. Thus, I do not worship Theós through supplication but rather through invocation by way of voluntary possession. Evocations can then produce divine intervention. Thus, miracles are not something that the Supreme Being would do for you, they are something that you would do for the Supreme Being.
As I already mentioned, God is the source of all moral authority, meaning the Great Spirit possesses perfect goodness. This is where the role of the Supreme Being as a final judge comes into play. You see, once a soul emerges in a particular universe, then liberation is the only way out of an otherwise endless cycle of reincarnation, through countless lives as various different plants and animals. Then, after many lifetimes of being a really good person, and a lifetime or two of being really great, the spirit will eventually bring a soul out of metaphysical space, into hyperspace. Thus, we live and die, but in the process of doing good and undoing bad, the Great Spirit becomes even greater, only without ever actually achieving maximal greatness.
In line with this, the spirit world is always just on the verge of being full of righteous souls. As such, God/Goddess is partially made up of ascended gods and goddesses, some of whom have living avatars on Earth. Others make up an everchanging pantheon that should be maintained through ancestor worship. It’s important to understand that this is the result of theosis which is not to be confused with henosis. Theosis is when a person becomes a god or goddess, but henosis is when God/Goddess becomes a person. The former is the result of a divinization, which is not to be confused with divination, and the latter is the result of an invocation. More to the point, this means that I am technically both a deist and a polytheist. So, I’m really a henotheist, because I worship God/Goddess without denying the existence of gods and goddesses.
In the end, these distinctions mean everything, which is why holy wars still rage on to this very day. I’m not being pedantic, I’m being pious. I am finite but “I AM” is infinite. Ultimately, Theós is the most important thing that could ever be considered. So, I feel as though I am spiritually obligated to develop a personal relationship with my higher power and I would like to see others do the same. This means that we all need to understand exactly what the Great Spirit is and does, and why. This is how we can come to know what it means to live a good life. The path to Moksha and Paradise is one that we should all take, but in order to do that, we must first align ourselves with the Supreme Being. This is why I seek to know all that I can about God and I hope that you will as well.
