Hi Reader,

You'll recall last week I proved the existence of God.

Ok, haha. Very funny, Michael.

I can be more precise: I explored the idea that we can, at least in part, define God in such a way that God is more or less likely to exist, and with a sufficiently broad definition, God is inevitable and essential. (That definition being something like God is simultaneously everything and the source of everything.)

I ended by saying that yes, I do think God exists. And I mean that actually, not simply because I came up with a super broad definition in the same way we can define islands in or out of existence. No, I think God exists because hunger implies food.

Maybe that sentence didn't end the way you expected. Let's look closer.

I've been thinking about this from an evolutionary perspective. I'm using the term evolution here in a slightly broader sense than the typical science class. I'm trying to refer to our current best description (in the same way gravity is a description and not a reality) of how things come into existence, change over the course of their existence, and maybe eventually pass out of existence.

The evolution I'm talking about does include what Darwin was talking about, as it does a good job of describing how species come into existence, change, separate, compete, and either propagate or die out. But I'm also talking about the way ideas and culture do those same things. And the way stars and galaxies and solar systems coalesce and change, the way your own thoughts develop over the course of your life (or reading this newsletter). I'm using the term evolution in a similarly broad sense that I'm using the word God: it's just a really good description for the way everything moves.

Evolution is such a useful story. It gives us incredible explanatory powers. And one of the things it explains is that hunger implies food.

I get hungry. I assume you do, too. I'm not particularly hungry right now, having just finished lunch. But I know I'll get hungry again.

And the reason I get hungry is because something exists that can satisfy my hunger: food. The evolutionary insight here is that if I didn't need food, I wouldn't experience hunger. We might say that hunger exists because of food, or we might say that food and hunger arose together at some point in the distant past, the way bees and flowers must have arisen together. Neither can exist without the other.

The spiritual comparison is harder to describe than hunger. Speaking for myself, I have this longing to... know. To question, to seek, to find. To be found. To look for meaning in a vast and mostly senseless Kosmos that appears fundamentally meaningless. To create that meaning within myself, regardless of whether its promise has any hope of being ultimately fulfilled.

I just want something, something I can't define or describe or even understand very well, but the wanting is still there, so powerful that when I focus it brings tears to my eyes. Just as would the thought of a feast to a starving person.

And it makes no evolutionary sense that this longing could arise in an environment where there was no way to satisfy it. Like all things, it must be aimed at something. Or, to say it differently, co-arising with something. Hunger implies food. Spiritual longing implies... something. And the best candidate I've heard of for that something is God.

My analytical side can see this isn't a perfect argument. Perhaps our understanding of evolution just needs to be updated. (Surely that's true, since our track record of correct understandings is close to zero, and anyway "correct" isn't even a very good description of what's possible.) But I can also see that, in the same way hunger can never be permanently satisfied, this longing, too, is infinite. Perhaps it's just because everything in life keeps changing, which includes (or is included by? Is there a word for that?) what I'm calling God. But even then, it would only be our time-bound experience of God that changes. The everything I'm referring to must also include all of what we call past and future, even all possible pasts and futures. Once you get big enough to include everything, you don't change.

Looking from here, God looks like the unchangingness in which change exists, the unlimitedness in which limits appear, the ground upon which all things stand and the things that stand upon it.

What our old religions sometimes call "the fall of man" is a metaphorical way to describe this experience of being separated from this God, the longing I experience, which must necessarily be illusory because in reality it's impossible for me to be separate from God at all.

That, at least, is the way the story goes. Next chapter next week.