Thinking About God

For those who never stop doubting and believing.

There are questions that leave their mark on us, questions that seem endless. They return in different voices, across different centuries, cultures, and eras, like spirals that refuse to die and that we cannot quite let go of.

Why is there a universe at all?

Perhaps it is the oldest question we possess, and certainly one of the most enduring. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary quantum physicists, from the Aztecs to the first Christians, this question has remained a constant thread in the fabric of human existence. The answers change; the need to ask does not. Perhaps that need seeks less a final answer than a way of inhabiting the mystery that surrounds us.

That need is not merely logical. It precedes argument itself. It begins as wonder, as the strange sensation of finding oneself in the world without fully knowing why. It is an impulse felt before it is articulated, one that eventually takes the form of philosophy, religion, or science. This is what I mean by an existential need: not simply the rational demand for a cause, but the lived experience of someone asking what their place is in all of this.

Theism is one of the most powerful answers humanity has constructed. In the great monotheistic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—God is conceived as a personal, incorporeal, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, perfectly free, and perfectly good being. In short, God is the cause that requires no cause: that which exists beyond the physical world and, precisely because of this, can explain why the physical world exists at all. Faced with the question of why there is something rather than nothing, God appears as an answer that encompasses everything, a kind of totality.

And yet. Because there is always an and yet.

Kant reminds us that existence is not a property. We cannot derive the existence of a thing merely from its concept, no matter how absolute that concept may be. To define God as necessary is not the same as proving that God necessarily exists—at least not without a leap that logic alone cannot make. This does not refute God; it merely tells us that the concept itself is insufficient to close the argument.

Then there is order. The universe appears to possess it: biological laws can be explained through chemistry, chemistry through physics, and physics... through what? Order suggests a designer. The idea of a designer points toward God. Yet there is a vast distance between an idea being coherent and reality confirming it. The order of the universe makes the notion of God more conceivable; it does not prove it.

Then there is fine-tuning, one of the most striking observations modern cosmology has placed on the table. The initial parameters of the universe—the conditions that governed its evolution after the Big Bang—appear to fall within an extraordinarily narrow range, the only range compatible with the emergence of life. The question seems unavoidable: who calibrated those conditions?

It may have been God. But it may also be that we inhabit one among infinitely many possible universes—a multiverse—and that, through a process of selection, we happen to exist in the one capable of sustaining life. Which is more likely: one universe with God, or countless universes without Him? The question does not disappear; it branches.

Leibniz formulated the problem with a precision that remains unsettling. Everything that is a certain way, yet could have been otherwise, requires a sufficient reason for being as it is. The universe is contingent—it might not have existed—and therefore demands an explanation. But if that explanation is itself contingent, then it too requires an explanation, and so on ad infinitum.

It resembles a Russian nesting doll: each doll contains another, and another, and another, until there are no dolls left and one is left holding empty hands. God enters the picture here as the stopping point, as that which is necessary rather than contingent, the ground upon which the infinite regress comes to rest.

Yet even this can be questioned. If God halts the regress, does He truly explain it, or merely name it? Is it not possible that the demand for explanation persists even there, and that what we call God is simply the place where we decide to stop asking questions rather than the place where the question is actually answered?

What emerges from examining these possibilities—as thinkers such as T. J. Mawson have argued—is that neither theistic nor non-theistic explanations fully close the matter. Both leave the demand for explanation intact. The universe remains, after all the arguments have been made, something that insists upon being understood, beyond both God and science.

The idea of God, then, does not necessarily resolve the mystery of the universe. Rather, it offers a way of inhabiting it.

This is where the question becomes more interesting—and more intimate. Perhaps the issue lies not only in the strength of the arguments but in something that precedes them. The Principle of Credulity—the notion that we should trust appearances unless we have reason to doubt them—suggests that certain beliefs may be justified even in the absence of decisive proof.

Faith is not irrationality. It is an existential wager, a commitment to something that, although it cannot be conclusively demonstrated, is nevertheless experienced as true. In this sense, belief in God is less a logical exercise than an act of trust.

And before choice itself, there is experience. Heidegger spoke of Dasein—being-in-the-world—as a condition prior to all rational formulation. Before one thinks about God, one already finds oneself thrown into the world: unasked, uninstructed, exposed.

That exposure can be experienced as anxiety. And anxiety is not resolved through arguments; it is a mode of being. The question of the universe does not arise only in philosophy books. It emerges in the early hours of the morning, in silence, in those moments when the mere fact of being here suddenly weighs upon us.

That condition may also be experienced as a need for God—not as the conclusion of a chain of reasoning, but as a response to an openness that precedes our ability to name it. Something breaks through. Later we represent it through science, religion, or art, but the opening itself comes before all such representations. It is the need to close the question that paradoxically remains open.

And so here we are: with a question that refuses to disappear, with arguments that never quite suffice, with a faith that is neither irrational nor demonstrable, and with an existential condition that makes us feel the question before we formulate it.

Neither theism nor its alternatives offers a final answer to why there is a universe. What they offer, at best, is a way of inhabiting the question.

Wittgenstein suggested that the meaning of the world must lie outside it—not within its facts or its laws, but somewhere beyond the reach of logic itself.

Perhaps that is what this question has always been trying to tell us: that there is something within us that looks beyond everything that exists, searching for something no answer can fully satisfy. God then appears as the most immediate and enduring response: a refuge against uncertainty, a response to openness, a necessary illusion for some, a source of meaning for others.

Believing in God is not about solving the mystery of the universe; it is about choosing how to inhabit it.

Yet even there, the question does not close. And that search—uncomfortable, persistent, irresolvable—is itself part of the condition that defines us. It is part of what we are: an open space, an impenetrable mystery.

References:

T. J. Mawson, Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Martin Heidegger, ¿Qué es la metafísica? (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2022)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2012), §6.41.