A Field Guide to the Divine

The Gods I do and don't believe in.

For years now, I’ve said that I don’t believe in God. But what does this mean? God, it turns out, is complicated. Like most things, putting God under the microscope is more confounding than one would like.

The following is my attempt to explain what I mean when I say I don’t believe in God. It is also an attempt to taxonomize what people mean when they say “God,” and an exploration of the gods I might, surprisingly, believe in. Along the way, I will offer some observations about the believers in these gods.

It is, admittedly, absurd to disentangle these gods from each other as I have done here. Most people believe in these gods in bundles and by degrees. Many of these gods have their roots in each other, like a complex forest ecosystem. This might render this whole exercise useless. Regardless, I will try.

As will become obvious to anyone reading this, I am not a philosopher or a theologian, and I don’t pretend to be. Theologians and philosophers might read this and find it sorely sophomoric, and I welcome their insight.

Finally, this article does not explain why I believe or disbelieve in certain gods. That falls outside the scope of this article and will have to be unpacked elsewhere.

Without further ado, here are the gods and their acolytes I have encountered in my travels.

The Confessor’s God

This is the God I actively do not believe in, and who I find extremely unlikely to be real. This God has a few defining characteristics, including:

1. He is personal, capable of relationship with humans.

2. He has will.

3. He cares about humanity.

4. He interacts with the natural world through miracles.

5. He is the omni-God: omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, blah blah blah.

This is, in other words, the God of Abrahamic faiths. More specific to my own Christian tradition, this God is a Trinity, the third person of whom physically came to earth, died on the cross, and was resurrected on the third day, not mythically or symbolically, but literally and physically. For other religions, this is a God who speaks through prophets, commands hosts of supernatural entities, authors holy books, and meddles in the affairs of humanity. I call this the Confessor’s God because believing in him is to confess belief in historic creeds and traditions of many world religions.

People are not stupid or evil for believing in the Confessor’s God. This might be obvious, but it’s important to clarify in an online landscape that so often resorts to cruelty. Some of the wisest, kindest, and smartest people I know are true believers in the Confessor’s God. I simply think they are wrong in much the same way they think I am wrong. Being wrong does not make one stupid, cowardly, or evil. It just means we are all doing the best we can with what our lives have given us.

Interestingly, when I proclaim disbelief in the Confessor’s God, I’ve watched many Christians get angry that I’m taking such a simple-minded or literal approach. Of all the reactions to my disbelief, this is the one that baffles me the most, because I’m not the one saying God is a trinity, was born of a virgin, and rose on the third day. These unambiguous claims are the henge of Christianity. I suspect that some Christians have this response because they are believers in the other Gods in this article without realizing it.

I believe that the Confessor’s God is what most self-proclaimed atheists mean when they say they do not believe. We are, after all, in a Western, Christian context, and it only makes sense that it would be the Abrahamic Gods under dispute. This enrages people who prefer a more expansive definition of God (both within and outside of Abrahamic religions), and they get annoyed when atheists seem unconcerned or clueless about their preferred version of the divine. In return, this ruffles the atheist’s feathers – they might see such uses of the word “God” as obscuring clarity. I’ve seen more than a few atheists completely resist the notion that there might be more concepts of God than the Western, Abrahamic, anthropomorphic one.

“Most people,” Atheists might say, “aren’t using the word “God” to describe the processes of nature or the universe, a Jungian archetype, or “the ground of being.” They mean an actual deity that created the world, performs miracles, and cares about us. That’s the God we don’t believe in.” And they are right. New Atheism is pop-atheism because it is a response to pop-theism. This is both why it is so successful, and why it is so limited.

I ultimately agree with the exasperated mystic: the God of the Western atheist and the Christian on the street is not the only God on offer. Not only that, this dispute, while important, is boring. It is the old killing field of atheists and theists over the centuries. There are stranger and more interesting geographies ahead.

The Storyteller’s God

Talk to some religious people, and you will notice a subtle shift away from the Confessor’s God. They don’t describe Jesus as a being who physically came to earth and was resurrected on the third day. They speak, with great awe, of Jesus as a story of self-sacrifice, ego-death, and rebirth. They venerate Jesus because the story of Jesus reveals deep truths about reality and how one ought to live.

This is the Storyteller’s God. The storyteller recognizes that humanity is a storytelling species and needs stories to survive. They often resort to agnosticism regarding the literal claims of the story while embracing the deeper human truths that the stories point to.

My friend Carrie Poppy describes this as “inner truth” in her TED talk on the paranormal:

I believe that there are two kinds of truth, and it’s taken me a while to get to this place, but I think this is right, so hear me out. I think that there is outer truth, and there is inner truth. So if you say to me, “There was a man named Jesus and he once existed,” that’s outer truth, right? And we can go and we can look at the historic record, and we can determine whether that seems to be true. And I would argue, it does seem to be true. If you say, “Jesus rose from the dead,” oooh, trickier. I would say that’s an outer truth claim because he physically rose or he didn’t – I’m not going to get into whether he rose or he didn’t – but I would say that’s an outer truth claim: it happened or it didn’t happen.

But if you say, “I don’t care if he rose from the dead. It’s symbolically important to me, and that metaphor is so meaningful, so purposeful to me, I’m not going to try to persuade you of it.” Now you’ve moved it from outer truth to inner truth, from science to art. And I think we have a tendency to not be clear about this, to try to move our inner truths to outer truths. Or, to not be fair about it to each other, and when people try to tell us their inner truths, to try to make them defend them by outer truth standards.

My former religion – nontheistic Satanism – was explicitly of this variety. I did not believe that Satan was a literal being and the personification of pure evil. I instead saw Satan as a powerful symbol that represented the ultimate outsider, the unbowed will, the resistor of oppression, and the advocate of the downtrodden. For six years, this story was the lifeblood of my existence, informing my daily life. Eventually, I confronted the limits of the story and had to expand beyond it, but it is hard to describe the significance this story had for me.

The Confessor and the Storyteller are, in my experience, frequently at odds. Flannery O’Connor summed up the Confessor’s attitude to the Storyteller when she said of the Eucharist, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”

If it’s all a story, the Confessor asks, then what’s the point? A story isn’t enough to get you through your darkest moments. A story isn’t enough to hold civilization together and keep the Barbarians at the gate. A story isn’t enough to make the travails of religious life worth it in the end. I think the Confessor often downplays the power of story, while the Storyteller oversells it. I spent close to a decade as a Storyteller, and I eventually confronted that, while necessary, the Storyteller’s God wasn’t enough. I needed more.

I obviously believe in the Storyteller’s God, because I believe in stories, and I often worry about what happens when people lose their stories. Secularization is a forest fire, not just demolishing the malignant species of perverse, ancient dogmas, but also the life-giving stories that we need to survive. What happens to a culture that loses its stories? I don’t know, but I fear we are finding out. This leads me to another God:

The Conservationist’s God

The Conservationist is an enthusiast of Chesterton’s Fence and believes it is dangerous to remove the old structures that have withstood the test of time and protect humanity from self-inflicted decadence and chaos.

It is often unclear to me what the Conservationist truly believes in. No doubt, many Conservationists are also Confessors, but not all. More often than not, the Conservationist seems to believe, as Daniel Dennett observed, in belief itself. If the West does not have a unifying belief in a deity that keeps them accountable, the Conservationist argues, what will protect us from civilizational threats?

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali famously converted to Christianity in 2023, it seems to me that she was converting to the Conservationist’s God. She described the many threats to Western Civilization, from Communist China to “the viral spread of woke ideology,” and observed that our modern tools are insufficient to defeat the onslaught:

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Do I believe in this God? In other words, do I believe in belief? Yes and no. I don’t believe that a return to old dogmas that pit humanity against one another is a viable future for the species. We will never put the pluralism horse back in the barn, and a reversal of secularism would be catastrophic for sexual minorities like myself who have found freedom through the steady march of Enlightenment values.

But I do worry that meaning-making structures and institutions are collapsing and that this has profound consequences for civilization. We can only move forward towards meaning-making structures that accept, rather than resist, our modern world. I don’t have an answer to this challenge, other than the observation that the Conservationist should not be blithely brushed aside. She is right that humanity might need the stability that religion provides.

The Shaman’s God

After I left leadership in The Satanic Temple, I had a vision. I was in that liminal, hypnogogic state between waking and sleeping, where dreams and reality collide.

I found myself lost in a vast, strange forest. I was frantically trying to escape the forest, frightened of the loneliness and strangeness of this new place.

I was led to a squat hut with a thatched roof, and it was here that I met the witch. Like her hut, she was squat, gnarled, and grotesque, but it was her face that will forever stay with me. It was a constantly shifting visage. One moment, she had the tusked face of a boar. The next, she would be human. It constantly evolved in this way, between human and animal.

When I asked her how to leave the forest, she told me that I didn’t need to: the forest was me and it was my home. As is the strange way of visions, I knew exactly what she meant: I didn’t have to escape the forest and find a new religious tribe and identity to marry myself to. Instead, I could let myself roam outside religious institutions for a while and make that wilderness my home.

For as long as I live, I will never forget that witch. She sent me on a path utterly different from any that I have been on before and thereby affected real change in my life. Instead of immediately attaching myself to another religious identity, I am religiously unaffiliated for the first time in my life, thanks to the witch.

This is the Imaginal Realm: an interstitial space of imagination where we encounter beings and deities that guide us and seem to have lives and insights all their own. This space is not physical, but rather (to use Joseph Laycock’s phrasing in Dangerous Games) it is an “annex to reality”, accessed by dreams, meditation, ritual, psychedelics, and shared religious experience.

The Imaginal Realm is as ancient as humanity itself. We have traversed this inner landscape and been guided by gods, spirits, and holy figures for as long as we have been human. These beings, therefore, are the Shaman’s God.

Modern Christian believers may not know it, but they, too, are often Shamans. A woman came through my checkout line at my grocery store and told me, with tears in her eyes, that she had seen Jesus that morning in a dream. “he was so beautiful,” she said. As a Christian, I witnessed many “healing prayer” sessions where an imaginal Jesus was invited into a trauma and spoke healing into that person’s life.

Our lives are altered by these encounters in the Imaginal Realm, and in that way, the Shaman’s God is real. The witch in the hut changed my life by instructing me to stay religiously unaffiliated. The woman at the grocery store had been impacted by her vision of the Imaginal Jesus.

I think it’s unlikely that the Shaman’s God has any existence outside of human consciousness, but that does not make it not real. In The Deathly Hallows, when Harry has a vision of King’s Cross Station and converses with the (spoilers) late Dumbledore, he asks, “Professor? Is this all real? Or is this just happening inside my head?” Dumbledore responds, “Of course it’s happening in your head, Harry. Why should that mean that it’s not real?”

The Philosopher’s God

When you hear people speak of God as “The Ground of Being,” the “unmoved mover,” the “universe itself,” or the answer to “psychophysical harmony” and “fine-tuning”, you have entered the vast realm of The Philosopher’s God. This God is not made known by creeds or divine revelation but rather reasoned toward from first principles.

There are some Philosophical Gods that I have no argument with. God as “ultimate reality”, the “ground of being”, “the universe” or “the laws that govern reality” are perfectly acceptable to me. For example, in his book Finding God in the Waves, science communicator Mike McHargue defines God in this way:

God is AT LEAST the natural forces that created and sustain the Universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains that naturally emerges from innate biases. EVEN IF that is a comprehensive definition for God, the pursuit of this personal, subjective experience can provide meaning, peace, and empathy for others.

I have no problem with this view of the word “God,” and I think it could be incredibly helpful for some Christians who are struggling to reconcile their ancient faith with modern science. Some atheists might throw tantrums over how such uses obscure and confuse but I don’t care.

However, if this was all the word “God” meant, then I would happily describe myself as a theist. Surely people know this - that when I’m saying I don’t believe in God, I’m not professing a disbelief in “the highest good” or “the laws of nature.” Obviously. I am professing disbelief in the popular God of the man on the street.

This gets at one of my grievances with the Philosopher’s God: it is often deployed in a Motte and Bailey by Confessors when their traditional gods are challenged. I can’t count the number of times I’ve asked for a coherent defense of the resurrection and I get an interesting but unobjectionable Philosopher’s God instead.

Other Philosophical Gods are sources of greater struggle for me. The God argued for by fine-tuning, consciousness, and psychophysical harmony are compelling but trickier. I agree that these arguments for God point towards mighty mysteries, and I find the problems they pose truly profound. But I stop short at saying theism is the answer to these mysteries. The word “God”, as a divine person that created the world, no matter how indescribable, feels too specific and laden with implications to even begin to express what I feel when I behold fine-tuning, the laws of nature, and consciousness. Theism is a shadow of what these colossal artifacts point to. I don’t even know what they begin to mean. Theism is a human concept, and whatever “breathes fire into the equations” of the universe, to use Hawking’s phrase, might be utterly stranger than anything we can comprehend.

I believe that Einstein adequately described the condition of humanity’s place in the universe when he wrote,

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.

I don’t know what wrote the books of the cosmos. I don’t know why; I don’t know how. We can call such a thing God, but we must avoid the temptation to use “God” to assuage our fear of alien mystery. Saying God did this does not remove the utterly frightful strangeness of our circumstance. Instead, I experience the deepest mysteries of the universe as cosmic Zen koans that hang in reality, as reality, and break my mind. These are, as Mary Oliver wrote, mysteries too marvelous to be understood.

Ultimately, I struggle to see how the Philosopher’s God offers proof of the deity the Confessor wants to defend. Arguments for God from cosmic mysteries, consciousness, classical theism, and so on, always fail to lead one to the Trinity or Jesus Christ. One can reason one’s way from the Confessor’s God to the Philosopher’s God, but not the other way around.

The Mystic’s God

While I disbelieve in the Confessor’s God, I wholeheartedly believe in the Mystic’s God.

The Mystic’s God is not a being revealed through dogma, miracles, visions, or creeds. Instead, it is understood through first-person union with reality in contemplative practice. The Mystic’s God is not attained by secret rites or ecstatic altered states of consciousness. Rather, it is uncovered as the fundamental nature of the present moment.

The Mystic’s God is present, timeless, borderless, and indivisible. It is simultaneously emptiness and fullness, blinding light and infinite darkness. It is also, at heart, non-dual. “The eye through which I see God,” wrote Meister Eckart, “is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” To encounter God in this way is to know that you are inseparable from God, reality, and consciousness. There is only unity: neither the seer nor the seen, but only seeing; neither the hearer nor the heard, but only hearing.

In the West, the depth, breadth, and transcendence of this experience are so profound that “God” often feels like the only word to describe it, insufficient though it may be. But this is a God that is all experience, devoid of doctrine, and it bears little resemblance to the Confessor’s God. It is closer to Buddhism’s conception of Emptiness and Advaita Vedanta’s Oneness.

Other dualistic experiences reveal hints of this God. The rapture of a sublime sexual encounter; the effervescent beauty of a concert; the reality-melting nature of a psychedelic trip; the night sky seen from a remote mountain: these all hint at the Mystic’s God, suggesting the ecstatic awe and immersive oneness with the All.

It is direct experience of this God that has forced me from avowed philosophical materialism into agnosticism. I consider it bad form to reveal the content of one’s mystical experiences, so I won’t divulge, but my meditation practice has pressed me up against the mysteries of being and consciousness. I do my best to take a restrained and agnostic approach to mystical experiences, accepting them as real experiences while practicing restraint about their metaphysics. But the force of these experiences has been so powerful that I cannot remain a committed materialist, and agnosticism is the best compromise I have between my skeptical, consistency-seeking brain and the authenticity of mystical experience. I’m now cautiously open to non-materialist hypotheses about the nature of reality and consciousness, like panpsychism.

Let’s return to Einstein’s parable. We are not merely child wanderers in a vast, incomprehensible library: we are little conscious bits of the library itself. High up on a shelf, in a nondescript pamphlet in an unremarkable and easily overlooked section, tiny lights of consciousness emerge. We, the library itself, gaze out into the endless stacks and can only marvel. We aren’t just made by the universe; we are the universe. We are children in this endless sky, incomprehensible to ourselves. This eternal present — this oneness, mystery, and transcendence — this is God.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below. If your comment is excellent, I might share it in an upcoming post.