[Friday Edition] The God Both Atheists and Believers Get Wrong
Most debates about religion are stuck arguing over a "magician" god that even classical theologians abandoned centuries ago.
Before We Begin
Welcome to the very first Friday edition of The Unholy Truth!
Mondays through Thursdays are reserved for deep-dive textual and historical criticism. Fridays will look a bit different: lighter, opinion-based essays meant to raise open questions rather than aggressively sell you on ‘the ultimate truth.’ As a quick note, these Friday pieces are complimentary exclusively for paid supporters as a thank-you for keeping this project going.
I drafted today’s piece a good while ago and kept it tucked away, concerned it might be misunderstood—a recurring risk around here. I decided to run it anyway. If you read this and think I’m taking a definitive stance on God’s existence, let me clarify up front: this essay isn’t a defense or a denial of belief. It’s an inquiry into how we talk about the question.
An Essay I Was Hesitant to Run
Who am I to tell anyone their life would be better with or without religion? People believe what they believe for whatever reasons they’ve got, and on a personal level that’s none of my concern. I don’t care what gets someone through the week. If a story about a loving heavenly father helps a person bury a parent, or stay sober, or sit with a terminal diagnosis without coming apart, then the story is doing real work, and I’m not going to march in with a stack of footnotes and tell them they’ve been comforted by a fiction.
What I do care about is the argument itself, the one that’s been running on a loop since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, the one where the believer says “God exists” and the skeptic fires back “No, he doesn’t,” and both of them walk away convinced they’ve said something. What nobody seems to flag is that they’re almost never talking about the same thing, and most of the time neither of them has bothered to say what the thing is. The whole fight runs on a word neither side has defined, and a word that hasn’t been defined can’t really be affirmed or denied. You can only nod at it.
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