The Existence of God is the Wrong Question

What is your personal relationship with ultimate reality?

The existence of God is the wrong question.

The right question is: “What is my personal relationship with ultimate reality?”

Are you grateful, every day, that you wake up, that you have a life, that there is a world at all? Do you take your life, and the world as a whole for granted, while trying to optimize some small portion of it according to an optimization metric that you aren’t totally clear on? Or are you angry that the world exists as it presently does?

You make this choice, not just every morning, but every second of your being. The question that matters is not “what name do you put at the series of causal structures that lie at the root of your belief network”, but rather, “do you love what they point to?

The question that matters is not “what is on your map”, but do you love the territory?

Do you treasure your reality? Do you take being as a given? Or do you despite it?

Have you cultivated so much gratitude so that it towers over your subconscious like a pine forest? Have you planted and tended so many seeds of thanks that everywhere you walk is a bed of needles, pliantly giving way to the footprints of deer and rabbits in the morning mist?

Do you practice awe at the world around you, so that when the mosquitoes come to bite your neck, even as you slap them away, you are grateful for the marvel of their existence, too? When you step in dog shit, do you scowl and bitch? Or do you throw your head back and laugh? When you walk over the bridge, are you grateful that it exists? Or annoyed that it intrudes upon nature or wastes your tax dollars?

Are you satisfied with the amount of love that flows through your body, on a moment to moment basis? Or do you strive to be ever more loving? Would you rather give to the world far more love than you have received? Are you content to pay it back roughly equally? Or would you prefer to end up being a net loss in terms of that most precious of investments?

Whether or not there is someone doing the accounting is not something you can decide, or ever know for certain. It’s not worth debating. It’s not up to you.

How you want those books to balance is something you are deciding. Every second.

You are Already Making this Choice

All of those questions are questions that you must answer, in your own heart. They are not matters of fact. They are matters of choice. Of desired disposition.

Would you rather, on your dying bed, be grateful for the life you had? Or angry that the ride is coming to an end? Do you think it’s really possible for you to maintain a state of steady indifference as your kidneys fail and you have to pee through a catheter? Or shit into a colostomy bag that hangs from your bed, a nasal momento mori? As your intestinal lining sloughs off, would you rather be filled with bitterness and regret? As your lungs fill with fluid and you gasp for every breath, would you rather the final beats of your heart be a slowly decaying thrum of “kill me, kill me, kill me now?”

Or would you rather give your loved ones the cryptographic keys to your heart - your root representation of the cause of value - so that even as you lie, dying and in pain, they can see your lips move along while they recite the passphrases to tranquility which you repeated so many times in your life that they wore tracks deep enough into your brain stem to reach you at the end?

That choice is up to you. Not what ultimately is, you can’t know that, not without faith. But the absence of faith is no barrier to answering the more important question:

How do you want to be during the time you have in this world?

Predictive processing makes it clear that this one choice of what to value, the choice of what story to tell yourself about what reality is and how you relate to it - that one story will impact every other experience in your life. Predictive processing tells us that your relationship with ultimate reality is the root Bayesian prior that informs and shapes every other relationship in your life.

Large languages models give us an answer to the question: “why do so many people who claim to believe in a loving, all powerful God act anxious and frightened?” The answer is: they don’t actually believe.

Yet.

With every choice we make to prioritize being our desired way instead of the default, intentionally and through effort, we activate neuroplasticity and reshape our brain networks to make that mode of being easier and more automatic.

The only way to consistently be loving and generous and kind and patient and open minded - the only way to do this all the time, even when we are suffering and in pain - is to have that way of being wired into the biocomputer throbbing in your skull. The only way to do that is to keep choosing it, moment after moment, after moment.

Do you want that?