The Field of Abraham

 Theists, atheists, and agnostics all have the same God. One group believes in this God, one doesn't, and one doesn't know. But they all have the same God, the God who does or does not exist. They are all in the field of Abraham. And while that's not a bad field to be in, there may be a fourth option. There is the God that neither exists nor does not exist, the God for whom even the verb "to be" is inadequate. 

How can something neither exist nor not exist. I would submit, analogically, color. We all experience color, we who have eyes that function in the standard way, we experience color in essentially the same way. We can talk about it, name it, grade it, investigate it with science and math, create charts and equations, devote our lives to the theory of it, write massive tomes for artists, compare our relative acuity--and yet it doesn't exist. The angels, gazing over the universe, seeing it in their angel way, don't see yellow suns or blue suns or red suns or brown dirt or green trees. Kant granted it a secondary status in being. It's all in our heads. It's as real as a tree or a cloud or a cow to us. But it doesn't exist in itself. We dye nebula with colors in our photos so we can see the infrared and ultraviolet that we could never see with our eyes. And we dye everything in between with our eyes. 

Now I'm not saying, with the atheist, that God is a secondary order of being, an effect of our physical construction. God can't be that, since God makes no appeal to our senses. The Abrahamic God is invisible, five times, though there are scattered reports of hearing God speak and one of seeing God's backside. The idea that God uses human language or has a visible body are incompatible with God's transcendent being. I may have occasion to return to this. 

I could choose closer analogs, analogs from the realm of science, from Schrodinger's cat or photons that exist in two places at once, but I'm not enough of a scientist to pull that off in detail. You can all watch the same YouTube videos I watch about the double-slit experiment, and subatomic particles that come into and go out of existence in times too short to measure, and other spooky things science doesn't yet have final words for. And even if I were scientist enough, I would not be surprised if sometime science settle on words for such things, determined the were finally theorized and known. "Known" is the place from which you require no more words. You set up your principles of knowledge, you Occom the shit out of something, and there you have it. And anyway, these examples from science would still just be analogies, not knowledge itself.   

This God, this fourth way of talking about (I won't say of conceiving) God has appeared in history, in negative theology, most particularly, and in some biblical language and in conversation, and this God is approached more closely in some esoteric and nonabrahamic religions. But this God has never made much of a splash in Western discourse: the God that neither exists nor exists not. The claim that God could both exist and not exist is illogical. Of course. As a transcendent God must necessarily be said to be. A God that could be trapped in logic is a God of our own linguistic creation. And we must finally admit that a God beyond our linguistic creation is a God for whom even the concept of being is inadequate.  

The necessity of positing this God rests on the understanding of language itself, its inadequacies, its exigencies. The Abrahamic God doesn't say that much. There are plenty of people who claim that this God inspired the Bible, though no agreement on what that means. Not to be outdone, this God is also said to have spoken the Quran, word for word. That would be a lot of words if we took the claims literally. But to do so is illogical and lazy and irrelevant. Even if we knew it to be true, it would be of so little help to us that it might as well not be true. We still have to understand the text, which means putting it into other words, our words, like dying being with color, and we've proven certainly that this doesn't get us to what the inspired words of God are telling us. Even those who believe with all their hearts that God spoke the holy texts don't agree among themselves on what that means or what God said. God told us to love or enemies and to massacre them, depending on who you ask. 

The problem is not that some have it right and some have it wrong. The problem is that the texts have to be read. This is a problem of language. This is the problem of granting God language. God is very sparing of words because to speak is to say what is not as though it is. 

The best anyone has done, the best that can be done, in the depiction of God as speaking occurs in the Hebrew Bible when God says what is translated as "I am who I am." God is that which is. 

But not really. Because even "is," even "to be" ushers in ambiguity. Does God exist as color exists or as trees exist or planets or light or darkness? (Darkness, has a name but doesn't exist.) Being exists through God. God doesn't exist through being. God doesn't exist at all in the way that words posit existence as knowledge. Nor does God not exist as such.