The statement “God exists” sounds reverent, yet it quietly diminishes what it claims to honour. Existence is not a neutral category. It is a condition. To exist is to appear within time, to persist across duration, to occupy a framework where before and after apply. Existence implies location, sequence, and limit.
God, if the word is to mean anything absolute, cannot be confined to such a framework.
To say God exists already places God inside something else. Time becomes the container. Space becomes the stage. Existence becomes the rule God must obey. That framing does not exalt God; it reduces God to an object among other objects, distinguished only by scale or power.
A more precise statement unsettles most theists:
God does not exist.
Not because God is absent, unreal, or lacking. Quite the opposite. God is beyond the category of existence altogether. Existence belongs to the realm of manifestation. God is not a thing that manifests; God is that by which manifestation is possible at all.
Existence requires time. Something exists now, or then, or for a while. God, described as eternal, cannot be stretched across moments. Eternity is not infinite time; it is the absence of time. When time disappears, the verb “to exist” loses its footing.
Yet the paradox deepens further.
Non-existence seems to offer an escape. If God does not exist, perhaps God is non-existent. But non-existence remains a conceptual category. It can be named, contrasted, negated. It operates within the same logical field as existence. Both rely on distinction. Both appear only where something can be opposed to something else.
If non-existence is conceivable, it already participates in being. A possibility that is truly nothing cannot even be held in thought. The moment non-existence is entertained, it has already entered presence.
Here the framework collapses.
God, said to be beyond existence, must also be beyond non-existence. Whatever transcends both cannot be limited by either. Existence and non-existence become expressions rather than boundaries. Time and space arise as localized conditions within something that never enters them.
And this includes belief itself.
To hold a belief about God’s existence, to deny it, or even to question it, must occur within existence. Belief requires a thinker. Thought requires duration. Opinion requires perspective. Every stance taken for or against God is already operating inside the very field it attempts to define or negate. The debate itself belongs to manifestation.
The claim “God exists” is therefore not wrong ; it is partial. It refers only to the aspects of reality that appear within time and space: galaxies, minds, causes, effects, events. These are not separate from God, but they are not the whole either.
God is not an entity within existence. Existence is an activity within God.
Once this is seen, the opposition between theism and atheism dissolves. The atheist rejects a God who exists as an object. The theist defends that object. Both remain bound to the same assumption: that God must exist to be real.
Reality does not require existence as a predicate. Existence is something reality does, not something it is.
Nothing stands outside this. Nothing escapes it. Nothing contradicts it.
Existence is all there is; and what is cannot be reduced to existing.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 