God's Existence Is The Best Possible News

Theism is the coolest imaginable worldview

The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.

—Muriel Keyser (found through Aron’s essay of the same name)

I think we often don’t take enough time to appreciate just how wonderful it would be if God exists.

This might be a reason to be suspicious of belief in God. Sometimes we believe false things because they want them to be true. Perhaps theists believe in God because we are biased to believe in a promising fantasy. But I’d caution against this inference for a few reasons.

First, the power of motivated reasoning—reasoning to maintain your preexisting beliefs—is orders of magnitude stronger than the power of wishful thinking. Most bias is in favor of what you already believe. Theists will likely be biased in favor of theism, while atheists will be biased in favor of atheism. This should caution one towards humility and uncertainty rather than atheism.

Second, a stronger bias is in favor of the ordinary, the banal, and the mundane. We are psychologically inclined to believe that nothing ever happens, that things will continue chugging along roughly as they have up until this point. We cannot imagine a world radically transformed by AI, and for this reason, we are biased to imagine such a world will not exist. Prior to COVID, people were biased to think that no major pandemic would occur because it was hard for them to vividly imagine such a drastic change in the world.

But theism is as far from the mundane as a view can be. It posits an essentially unlimited God, who will guarantee an infinitely good postmortem fate for everyone (at least, in its most plausible form). Even when one seriously comes to believe in the arguments for theism, it can be hard to really believe, deep-down, that the story sketched out is true—that we will see our loved ones again in paradise, that everything sad will become untrue, that every tear will be wiped away, that every hardship ever experienced is but a drop compared to an incalculably greater ocean of joy. While this is what I believe, I find myself psychologically pulled against it—it seems too extraordinary to be true.

While there is a bias towards wishful thinking, there is also the opposite bias. We are biased not to imagine things could really be much better than they are now. Our present lives would have been scarcely imaginable throughout most of history. While we can sometimes reject a conclusion because it appears too horrible to be true, we can similarly reject one because it seems too wonderful to be true.

Third, I suspect that we are psychologically biased to underestimate some of the best theistic arguments, compared to the best atheistic arguments. The best atheistic argument, bar none, is the problem of evil—the problem of reconciling a God of limitless goodness with a seemingly blazingly apathetic and indifferent world, that disburses death, suffering, and misery by the trillions. Other top atheistic arguments include the problem of divine hiddenness, of explaining why God hides from us, why so many do not feel his comforting presence even in the times of greatest hardship.

Each of these things pull at us on a deeply emotional and existential level. They do not merely strike us intellectually but have great experiential force. They are the sort of things which, when glibly and dismissively responded to, strike us not merely as indicative of intellectual folly but of genuine moral failing.

In contrast, the best theistic arguments are much more philosophical and technical—having to do with the nature of anthropics, consciousness, and fine-tuning. While these arguments can induce in us a feeling of vertigo and wonder—wonder at the grandeur of the cosmos—they do not affect us emotionally in the same way. Just as one is likely to be more persuaded by a gripping testimony than by a dry recitation of facts, we are likely to overestimate atheist arguments and underestimate theistic arguments. Therefore, it is not at all obvious that we are overall biased in favor of theism.

Now that I’ve explained why I don’t think you should reject theism on grounds of wishful thinking or it being too good to be true, let me try to convey at some level just how good it will be if it is true.

First there is, as I described before, the fact that God will undo every injustice and heal every wound. In his perfection, he will put an end to every evil. If there is a God, evils were only ever permitted by him because he could work greater goods out of them. Having no limits on his creative power, we will experience joys the likes of which we cannot imagine—joys so far above the best experience any human has ever had up until this point that they make the most extreme pleasures and pains of earth look like mere child’s play.

We will be reunited with our dead loved ones. We will see those we never expected to see again and will spend forever with them in paradise. God will reform our characters so that everything about them that is defective is washed away, and everything that is good is amplified. Guilt, wrongdoing, and hardship will be things of the past. The end of wrongdoing is well explained by the proclamation in Isaiah 1:18, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

We cannot imagine the precise details of our glorious future, but all we know is that it is far grander than anything we might be able to imagine. The greatest existence we could imagine is but a pale shadow compared to the coming future. Anselm famously called God that than whom none greater can be conceived, because he did not want to claim that we could conceive of God; the coming future, if there is a God, is one that which none greater can be conceived. No matter how hard we stretch our intellect to try to guess at the glory that is to come, it will remain an incomplete picture, rather like trying to fully capture the beauty of looking out over a literally infinite sunset with a pencil sketch on a notepad.

We will look back on the world’s evils as akin to brief nightmares rather than the total, all-encompassing horrors that they are while we are on earth. They are but an infinitesimal dot in the face of endless joy, love, perfection, and glory. A single second of heaven will have outclassed them all so totally that they scarcely register to us.

We will love others more deeply and more fully. If relationships are one of the greatest goods, the sorts of relationships we will have will be as grand as the joys we experience. Just as a cockroach cannot conceive of human love, in our limited state, we have no hope of grasping the boundless kinds of deep connections we will experience in the life that is to come.

But, of course, the grandest thing about this is that we will get to meet and connect with God himself. He is the source of all that is good and beautiful, a being of limitless greatness—of perfection beyond perception.

Think about the person you most respect in the world who you’ve never met. Perhaps it’s a public intellectual whose work you’ve read or someone else who strikes you as the pinnacle of human virtue: wise, kind, and brilliant. Wouldn’t it be cool to meet this person?

I don’t know exactly who I most intellectually respect, but I have, over the years, met some of the people I look up to. Each time, it was a very cool experience—especially in the cases where the people knew who I was and were fans of my writing.

But if it’s cool to meet wise, temperate, and brilliant humans—celebrities of sorts—how much cooler will it be to literally meet God? While human minds are limited, his is boundless. While every human you meet will be in some way morally defective, even if quite virtuous on the whole, God has no such defects. God—infinitely better and more influential than everyone else in history combined—is someone that you’re going to meet.

But God hasn’t just been reading your blog posts! He knows your deepest thoughts. He knows you completely—more than you know yourself—through the good and the bad. He has seen the quality of your heart. He has witnessed every wicked thought you’ve ever had as well as every virtuous thought. And he loves you in spite of that. He knows every bad thing you’ve ever done, and despite all of that, he wills your good. When you acted immorally—lying, not giving to shrimp welfare, hurting others—he felt disappointed, and wished you’d do otherwise, but he never stopped loving you. Even as he hated what you did, he never hated you.

This union will be like meeting a long lost parent—one who was only absent in your life for your sake, perhaps because they were falsely imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit. But this does not do it justice. It will be a union of each of us with he who is our highest good, with the one whose goodness is not bounded, the one who is and was and will be.

Think about the experience of peering into the vastness of space and realizing that we are but an infinitesimal speck in the face of a boundless existence, or of standing from a great height and peering over a great canyon. This kind of experience confronts us, in a tiny way, with how small we are in the face of an unbounded reality. How much grander would it be to have the deepest imaginable kind of connection with a mind—infinitely more unbounded—but unbounded in love and goodness and glory rather than merely size. While we are merely impressed by the grandeur of the grand canyon, when we come to know God, we will not merely be impressed by his grandeur but by his perfection. It would be like discovering that the endless universe itself is conscious—and loves you!

The boundless glory and interestingness and goodness of God is the sort of thing that’s better expressed by poets than by analytic philosophers, the sort of thing that the Bible expresses well in, for example, Isaiah 6 (to think this, of course, one need not think that the Bible is true):

I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train[a] of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Imagine the wonder of meeting a being like that, one so far above you that you feel unfit to even be in his presence. But despite that, he loves you—always has, always will. This is the God most high (אֵ֣ל עֶלְי֔וֹן), one of greatness and goodness and glory beyond anything we could readily bring to mind.

I really hope that this is true! I’ve argued at great length in various places that it’s not just a nice fantasy but is supported by powerful arguments. The arguments for theism are, in my view, quite strong, and nothing approaching an adequate response has been given to many of them. The kind of boundless mind I described—unlimited in glory, power, knowledge, goodness, interestingness, love, and every other positive attribute—is the best explanation of numerous otherwise surprising features of our world. But whether you think it is actually true, I think it is wholly beyond doubt that we should each want it to be true.

Praise be to God most high.