Would You Want God to Exist? Depends Which One

Believers ask this one hopefully, as if it were a trap: but wouldn't you like God to exist? The expected answer is a reluctant yes, after which the atheist is revealed as someone who denies what he secretly wants, and the conversation can move on to why he is so angry.

My answer is a question: which God?

Two Gods Under One Word

I have written before about how many incompatible things the word covers. For this question two of them matter.

The first is the distant, transcendent creator. He set the universe going and does not deal in petty human affairs. He performs no miracles and alters nothing. He may not be an entity you could talk to at all. He offers no afterlife, has no commandments, and takes no interest in whether you are good. He is the God of the deists and of the more careful philosophers.

The second is the personal God. He has commandments and edicts. He is interested in us, individually and by name. He offers justice, an afterlife, and answers to prayer. You can talk to him and he hears. He had a son who was a first-century rabbi.

Almost nobody believes in the first alone, and the reason is plain: he does nothing for anyone. He answers no need. He is a metaphysical bookkeeping entry. Nearly all believers believe in the second, or in some superposition of the two that lets them retreat to the first when the second is under fire and return to the second when they need comfort. When people say "God" they mean the second one wearing the first one's respectability.

So the question has two answers.

Would I Want the First God?

He already exists, and I already talk to him.

The distant creator who fixed the laws and left is indistinguishable from physics. The laws are there. They are exact, they are universal, and they do not care about you. If you want to address this God you do it in equations, and he answers — reliably, in the sense that the equations predict what happens. Physicists describe the feeling of exploring this with something close to religious awe, and I do not think they are exaggerating.

But notice that nobody asking the hopeful question is asking about him. He does not resurrect the dead, he does not make the wicked pay, and he will not see you afterwards. If that is God, the believer already has what he wants and should be content. He is not content, which tells you which God he means.

Would I Want the Second God?

No. Emphatically no, and the reason is not moral, though I could give moral reasons. It is aesthetic.

Look at what we have found the universe to be. Two trillion galaxies. Thirteen billion years. Matter that is mostly empty space, held in shape by fields. Life assembled by selection from chemistry over a span no story can hold. A brain that produces the experience you are having now out of salt water and lipid. This is the most magnificent thing that has ever been described, and we described it ourselves, from scratch, against every instinct we had.

Now suppose it were established tomorrow that the author of all this had a son, that the son was a rabbi in Roman Judaea, that he was executed and got up again, and that the point of the two trillion galaxies was to arrange for this so that you could be forgiven for something an ancestor did with a piece of fruit.

It would make the universe smaller. Not more meaningful — smaller. It is Beethoven's Ninth ending in a fart. It is the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on in thick black marker. It would be the discovery that the greatest work ever made was, at the end, a parochial drama about one tribe on one rock, with a moral fit for a nursery.

I would grieve for that. I mean it literally. The personal God is not a consolation to me; he is a demotion of everything I find beautiful, and I would rather have the cold, indifferent, unbounded thing we actually found.

What the Question Reveals

The believer asks "wouldn't you like God to exist" because he cannot imagine an honest no. His God is the one that answers needs, and he assumes everyone has the needs.

But the question is doing something else too. It admits, without meaning to, that belief is being assessed by desirability. Wouldn't you like it is not a question about evidence, and the person asking it has told you what his own belief runs on.

To which the answer is: I would not like it, but that is beside the point, in both directions. Whether I want a God has no bearing on whether one exists — and I have argued elsewhere that wanting is, if anything, a mark against. The universe is not obliged to be to my taste. It happens that it is, and the version with the rabbi would not be.