Can God Exist? A Biblical-Theological Approach to God's Being

The argument contends that God does not exist in the creaturely sense because existence implies origination, contingency, and temporality—conditions that belong only to created things. God, by contrast, possesses being that is self-sufficient, uncreated, immutable, and impassable. The divine name “I AM” reveals not an existing entity among others but the source and ground of all being itself. To speak of God as “existing” places him within time and space, creating a categorical error that subjects the eternal to the temporal. Scripture distinguishes the Creator from the creature, showing that all things which exist do so contingently, while God simply is—beyond change, beyond space, beyond time. Even ancient cosmologies, such as Dante’s vision of creation enveloped in divine reality, echo this truth that everything is held within God’s being. Whereas creatures begin and may cease to be, God neither begins nor ends; his reality is necessary, not contingent. Thus, the answer to whether God can exist is no—God cannot exist as created things do, for he must simply be, the very foundation of all existence.

TRANSCRIPT:

I’ve been watching online apologetics videos again, and I came to this question—it’s based on the cosmological argument: can God exist? Now, I want to be clear that the question a lot of apologists, especially in classical apologetics, are answering is, “Does God exist?” But I think that preceding that question is whether God even can exist. Within what does exist, does it make sense to even say that God could, or has the ability to, exist?

My thesis in this video is actually that God does not exist, not in a creaturely sense, in the way that we usually use the word “existence.”

Clarifying “Existence” vs. “Being”

The reason that God doesn’t exist is not because he isn’t. It’s because God is, and we’ll unpack that as we go. If that sounded a little obscure, we’ll unpack these ideas as we go through this. Existence in modern English assumes origination; it places something within the created order. Existence requires contingency. You might argue with that definition, and I would just say that whenever you’re reading or listening to anybody, you have to work within the terminology and the definitions they use. Otherwise, all you’ll end up with is misunderstanding. So this is how I’m using “existence,” and I think it’s the most natural way to use the word—to say that things that exist have origination. They are creaturely because they’re part of the created order.

God is not contingent on temporal or created things. In Exodus 3:14, God chooses to identify himself using the verb “to be”—“I AM.” That’s how he first reveals himself to Moses. God is seen as one who simply is—not in the sense of being basic, but in the sense of divine simplicity. He is apart from creation, apart from time, apart from any sort of existence that we as creatures can perceive. God still is. Therefore, saying that God exists in a creaturely sense creates a categorical distinction; it’s a category error, technically speaking.

When we look at things that exist, they exist necessarily because of existence—that’s one category dealing with creaturely things, things that are material, that have a material essence—versus the thing that is God himself, who has a non-material sense of being. I want to clarify some terminology here. I’m going to try to use “existence” and “being” distinctly—“being” being the word that comes from “I AM,” the verb “to be.” To say “existence” is to refer to things that exist as having a source.

The cosmological argument—there are lots of versions—but fundamentally it says that everything is composed of energies that come from a prior source. If we have a prior source for an apple tree, then that apple tree produces apples. If you have an apple, then you can say there must exist an apple tree. But in order for there to be an apple tree, there must previously have been an apple. So then we say, well, there was an apple—and you go back and say, if there was an apple so that we could have an apple tree, then there must necessarily be an apple tree that precedes the apple that precedes the apple tree that precedes the apple. I don’t suppose, for purposes of this video, that it’s important to distinguish between hierarchical and linear models of existence, but we are tracing back elements throughout time.

In biblical theology, Adam comes from the dust of the ground, and God forms him out of the dust of the ground. In some sense he has, as his preexistence, both God himself, who forms him, and the dust—which we’re told exists because of God, because of Christ. The dirt comes from Christ; the formation, the activity of God, precedes Adam’s existence. He doesn’t receive life until the breath of God is breathed into his lungs, so he receives life by the Spirit of God to animate him. However you trace those lines backward, every line of thinking in Adam’s source goes back to God himself. Adam exists because Adam has existence in God.

Adam also has being, but Adam is not in the same way that God is. God is in a self-sufficient, sustaining way, distinct from all creation. When we talk about existence, we’re talking about beings that have existence contingent upon creation, versus God who has non-contingent being—uncreated. He is, you could say, atemporal, without temporality; he’s not bound by time. I’ve often said this: if God is bound by time, then God is not God; time is God. God is not one being among other beings, because time also “is.” But time has existence in a way that God does not.

If “exist” means to come into existence or to exist within creation, then God himself does not exist. God merely is, even though everything else in existence—even fundamental philosophical categories like material and spiritual, and ideas like temporality—are contingent. Therefore, they exist in a way that God simply is.

Creator–Creature Distinction

What we’re talking about here is what’s classically referred to as the Creator–creature distinction. These are two separate categories, not a spectrum or hierarchy. Creatures are derived and dependent. They exist within certain superstructures—within time and within space. Creatures are temporal, and creatures are also mutable, meaning they are changeable. I don’t claim to be a scientist, but I tend to see and agree with certain scientific ideas, and time seems to have a physical reality to it, at least as I understand it. Therefore, time can be relative to other physical forces. Just because your clock ticks away in seemingly stable increments doesn’t mean that time has perfect stability as it interacts with other physical realities. That actually tells us that time itself is temporal. We could even say that time is mutable. “Mutable” comes from the same root as “mutate”—it means something that can change.

Creatures—and I’m using that word broadly to include everything that belongs to creation—are also passible. That means they can become impassioned; they can experience emotion or be altered by external forces. You might think, “Well, time doesn’t have emotions,” but consider that both time and space can be affected. For example, if you start moving furniture into a room, that room has a certain amount of space, and you can’t fit everything into it. If you were to (ridiculously) put all your furniture in a vacuum, you could technically fit more in because space itself is mutable—it can change. In a similar way, time can be altered by other physical realities because time itself is mutable; it can change.

God, however, is the Creator. He is underived and independent. He does not come from any source. He is atemporal—not bound by time. He is immutable—unchanging. Scripture tells us this in several places, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. Because of his immutability, he is also impassable. That means he does not perceive things happening within the created order in a way that causes him to react differently. I wrote about this most recently in my book God-Shaped Prayer, as we reflected on God’s impassability and how that affects our understanding of the purpose and power of prayer as we practice it.

So there is a Creator–creation distinction that’s crucial here. Because God does not exist within creation, he does not undergo change (immutability), nor can he be acted upon (impassability).

The Divine Name: “I AM”

Okay, let’s talk about his being. I want to talk a little bit about that. The name “I AM”—you presumably know the story—Moses at the burning bush. “Who is it—who is it that I should say has sent me?” as Yahweh, God, appears. Stephen says, as an angel in the bush. He says, “Who should I say sent me?” and God responds, “I AM WHO I AM.” He doesn’t say something like, “I am one who exists,” or, “I came to be and therefore I am,” or something like that. He doesn’t say anything like that, because God does not exist alongside other beings.

You have to understand what Moses was asking—just to put it in sort of a modern parlance. This wouldn’t have been the gods he would have been referring to—Egyptian gods most likely—but you can almost think about Greek mythology and say, “Oh, there’s a divine being in this bush that’s speaking to me. Who should I say has sent me? Is this Zeus? Is this Athena? Is this Ares? Is this Uranus? Is this Gaia?” Referring to the different gods of the Greek pantheon and back to primordiality and whatnot. That’s kind of what Moses was asking—on what level—he’s thinking of a hierarchy of divine beings that exist in the cosmos, and he’s asking, “Which one of these gods is it?” The problem is that when you study the mythologies of the ancient cultures—whether it’s Egyptian mythologies or Canaanite mythologies, Ugarit and whatnot, or the Greek mythologies, probably more common to us in the Western world—what you find is that most of the gods actually have existence.

We actually have some warrant for this type of apologetic work as we reflect on this. If you read Genesis 1 in the Hebrew—Michael Heiser has done some good work on this—it says something like, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void.” But if you go to the Septuagint, which is a collection of Greek texts from probably the second and third century BC—the Greek translations of the Hebrew text—and you read Genesis 1, it says much like what you read in English translations today, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It changes some of the tenses of those terms and some of the mode of them. So what you’ve got is, “God began to create the heavens and the earth.” And it’s interesting because if you read it in Greek, what it says is, “In the beginning, God created Gaia and Uranus.”

That’s what’s kind of interesting there. It’s sort of an apologetic shot. Gaia and Uranus are the Greek words for “earth” and “heaven,” and yet they are also the names of the primordial gods of the Greeks. What the translators of the Septuagint are doing is, first, they are trying to translate Genesis 1 as accurately as they can into the Greek—because Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, and training in righteousness so that the man of God can be thoroughly equipped for every good work. So that’s all true. But what they’re also doing—and I realize Paul doesn’t say that for hundreds of years later, but it’s always been true that Scripture is divine revelation—is indicating that the God of the Bible, the I AM, Yahweh, the God of the Bible, preexists even the material gods, the creaturely gods of the pagans. The pagans don’t really have an answer for why Gaia and Uranus exist.

In fact, some people speculate that at Mars Hill, when Paul is there at the altar to the unknown god and he kind of equates Christ—or Yahweh—with the unknown god, there’s good reason to believe Paul was saying that this altar exists because your philosophers have picked up on this: if Gaia and Uranus have material existence, then there has to be a higher sort of— in a hierarchical sense rather than a linear sense—Creator than even them. And so when God says from the burning bush, “I AM WHO I AM,” he identifies as the one who is, the one who has being. It’s fascinating because what he’s kind of saying is, “Tell them the one who simply is has sent you,” rather than saying, “Oh, well, it’s this god or that god or whatever god.” He’s identifying, in that phrase, a sense of being that defies existence itself.

So the name indicates self-subsistent being, we would say, or the attribute we refer to as God’s aseity—his self-subsistence—that he doesn’t exist within creation because he transcends creation. It’s actually not even right to say that he transcends the creation because, in a sense, all creation is actually God condescending to the creation. To say “transcends” is almost like to go beyond it, but he just is, in his being, beyond it, and then he condescends in creation. There are some limits to our human language. It would be weird to say that “God existed,” because that almost implies that he doesn’t exist anymore. This is one of the reasons I think the language of existence doesn’t perfectly fit. That’s why I like speaking of God as having being that transcends existence. That’s actually a better way to understand this.

It is true that, if you’re going to use the word “exist” for God, you could say that God will exist in the sense that in the future—however much future humankind has, whether that be thousands or tens of years—God will exist. God is not going to cease to exist, and so he will exist. But even that idea of “will exist” almost seems to have this connotation that, in some way at least, God doesn’t currently exist. Or even if we want to say that “God is existing,” we have to ask: is that technically true?

Atemporality and the Limits of Tensed Language

Well, perhaps not. If this concept of existing is tied to temporality, then anytime we use that language, we’re suggesting a time when God does or does not exist. And by doing that, we place God back under time—and if that’s the case, then time becomes God, not God himself. We need to place God on the correct side of the linear progression of reality, meaning it’s not even right to say that God pre-exists. If you think about it, there is no such thing as “pre-existence” for God. God has being entirely apart from existence.

I think this is important, and it’s probably a good time to explain why. When we talk about apologetics, one of the main arguments atheistic thinkers bring up is, “Well, if God has to pre-exist all creation, then where did God come from?” And when you think about it, that argument is juvenile—but it’s built on the assumption that existence automatically implies temporality. If we place God under time and say that he “pre-exists,” then we have to think of him materially. We end up putting God in the position of a creature, as though he were a being within the temporal, spatial world that we live in.

And so the atheist argues, “If God exists in that way, then something must have created him.” They try to turn our own logic against us, but that isn’t even the way God is described in Scripture. God is not described as having existence but as having being that transcends existence. He is not in time. He is not naturally in space. Therefore, these temporal and spatial categories simply don’t work to describe God’s mode of being. Even the word “pre-existence” is insufficient.

I realize that “pre-existence” is a theological term we use when we talk about phrases like “before the foundation of the world,” and that it affects how we think about soteriology, eschatology, and even ecclesiology. I’m not going to unpack all of that here. But the first step is to return to this main question: Can God exist?

To answer it, we need to differentiate between existence and being. Technically, no—God does not exist. Yet God is reality, and he has being. Creatures, on the other hand, both are and exist because they were created. We can also fail to be.

I think of Jesus’ words: “Do not fear the one who can kill the body, but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” The idea there is that being—whether spiritual, physical, or temporal—can come to an end. There seems to be a sense in which human beings are temporal. I don’t want to get into annihilationism or eternal conscious torment in this video, but you can look those ideas up on my website if you want to think through them further. The point is this: humans don’t necessarily have an eternal and immortal soul. Jesus seems to suggest that even our being can cease to exist.

Now, whether our being does cease to exist is a theological issue that needs to be worked out. Maybe that’s something you’re now questioning, and that’s fine—but that’s not the main point of this video. What I want you to understand is that everything in this world can die. It can die in every sense, so that even what we think of as the immortal part of us could cease to exist.

Necessary Being vs. Contingent Existence

And that’s what it means, as creatures, to have existence—that we have a necessary beginning and even a potential end to our being. God does not. God is not like that. There is no beginning, and there is no possibility of an ending. God is not like Chronos, who can be killed, or like Zeus, who could theoretically be dethroned within the pantheon. God is not like these other divine beings or gods.

This creates an issue in classical theism, because when we talk about the cosmological argument for God, we’re dealing with contingent beings that require a cause. There’s a sense in which, even in apologetics—even as the one defending the faith rather than the one attacking it—we sometimes imply that God has a kind of “existence” that introduces logical fallacies into our language. We can end up speaking of God in creaturely terms. It’s better to say that God’s being is an ontological reality rather than an existence.

That might even point us to the ontological argument for God—that if the greatest conceivable being is possible, then that being’s non-existence is impossible. If we can imagine a being so great that everything that exists exists contingently upon the one who simply is—the greatest possible being—then there can be no existence apart from that being.

So if, as a Christian, I think of God as though he were like Zeus—one who could theoretically be dethroned by another god—then I’m thinking too materialistically about who God is. In that case, he wouldn’t be the greatest conceivable being, and it would make sense to be confused when someone asks, “Who created God?” We might shrug and say, “Well, I just trust the Bible,” but that confusion comes from thinking of God in creaturely categories rather than as pure being.

Actually, I think the way God identifies himself in Scripture—as “I AM”—and the way other narratives unfold, support this truth. The Bible teaches it, though it does so using human categories so that we can grasp the idea. That’s why we have to tease out these distinctions carefully. God is an ontological reality, meaning that all that exists can only exist based on his being.

Therefore, God not only is, but also must be. Returning to the question, Can God exist?—the answer is that not only can God not exist, but he must be. I know that sounds confusing, but the distinction is important: God cannot exist in the creaturely sense, and yet he must be. Meanwhile, creatures, in every sense, can never be without first existing.

God’s Being and Dante’s Cosmology.

Okay, and I’m not—this isn’t some modern thing that I’m coming up with, by the way. This idea exists in all sorts of ancient cosmologies as the Hebrews and others began to think about who God is. My favorite example—and it’s not modern, though perhaps not as ancient as it could be—actually comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy.

If you study Dante, you find that most of The Divine Comedy is an allegory for human life. It begins in Inferno, where Dante—guided by Virgil—must descend through hell. There’s that famous idea that “you have to go through hell if you want to get to heaven.” And that’s what Dante does: he journeys downward, reaching the end of himself, and only then can he begin to ascend toward purgatory.

It’s clear that Dante intends this as an allegory for life, because he encounters the Pope—alive in his own day—in hell. That encounter is symbolic of Dante’s critique. He’s writing The Divine Comedy as a polemic against certain Catholic accretions, the developments in the church that he saw as corruptions of the true faith. By Dante’s time, the Catholic Church had instituted three major doctrines that he viewed as distortions: the papacy, purgatory, and indulgences. These are the same teachings that the Reformers would later challenge several hundred years after Dante’s time.

So when Dante encounters the Pope in hell, he’s making a statement. He’s saying that we must move past the magisterium of the Catholic Church—that we cannot be submitted to one who alters orthodox and historical Christian faith. In other words, Dante is confronting his “demons,” so to speak, dealing with what he sees as spiritual corruption before he can begin the journey upward.

Once that descent is complete, he can now live his life. In Catholic theology, purgatory is often understood as the process of working off the remaining debt for sins committed in life. I’m not a Catholic theologian, so forgive me if I generalize a bit, but purgatory in that framework is an intermediate stage of purification before entering heaven. For Dante, though, that doesn’t require inventing an afterlife category called purgatory. Instead, purgatory symbolizes what happens in this life. Once we have come to the end of ourselves and recognized not only our personal sinfulness but also the sinfulness of the world around us, we begin to live differently—to strive for the good.

Purgatory, for Dante, isn’t a place where one suffers for sin but where one performs the good necessary to ascend. It represents the Christian life itself—the sanctifying journey we live here and now. As Dante ascends through the seven realms of purgatory, he eventually reaches the first ring of heaven—Paradise, Dante’s Paradise.

And paradise, I believe, for Dante, is part of the life we live now. There’s a sense in which, as we grow theologically and spiritually and overcome many of the habits of the flesh, we begin to live in what could be called a foretaste of paradise. We’re not talking about Christian perfectionism here—although, perhaps, one might argue that Dante presents it that way—but rather about a period of life marked by spiritual faithfulness to God. I wouldn’t claim to have accomplished that, but I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced glimpses of it, and I continue to pursue it.

In Dante’s vision, we are meant to ascend through these rings of heaven. What’s beautiful is how the cosmology comes into play. Having descended through hell and ascended the mountain of purgatory, Dante now moves upward—further up and further in, as C. S. Lewis would later describe it—into paradise itself. He moves deeper and deeper into the presence of God until he reaches the end, where there is a great gate or door. Beyond it lie the rings of the Paradiso, the heavenly spheres that represent the dwelling place of God.

At the end of The Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that God is the being who wraps all things. If you look up “Dante cosmology” and view the images, you’ll see how he depicts it: where once there was a three-tiered universe—heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below—now, at the end of the journey, all things are encircled within the essence of God himself. The atemporal, aspatial being of God encompasses everything.

At the very least, this reflects the purpose of apologetics in one of its most basic forms. The cosmological argument for God isn’t meant to prove that Jesus is Lord; it’s meant to demonstrate that there is a force or being beyond existence itself. That’s precisely what Dante encounters at the end of his journey—that everything is wrapped in God and nothing lies outside his sovereign domain.

So while Dante preserves the hierarchy of heaven, earth, and the underworld, he transforms it into a picture of human life—one that culminates in the encounter with the being of God, who is beyond even our own existence.

Biblical Idioms to Guard the Category Distinctions 

And I think we get that. You might say, “Okay, that’s Dante—but what about the Bible?” No, Dante’s not the Bible, but we can see some of these ideas reflected in Scripture. Paul says that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God,” and John says in John 1:18 that no one has seen God, and in John 4:24 that “God is spirit.” When John says that, he doesn’t mean that God is spirit in the same way that the Holy Spirit is spirit within the temporal and spatial sphere. He’s pointing instead to the otherness of God—to a kind of being that is beyond existence as we understand it. These are terms meant not to convey creaturely qualities but to deny them.

Even in the ancient Hebrew context—and certainly in the early church as reflected in Paul and John—God was never to be conceived of the way the nations conceived of their gods. Israel was not to think of Yahweh as being in any way like Baal. Within divine council thought, Baal is a created divine being who has rebelled against Yahweh, whereas Yahweh is not a creature at all but wholly distinct in his being.

Scripture, I think, makes this distinction deliberately. The biblical authors are far more intentional and theologically precise than we often give them credit for. They go to great lengths to avoid saying that God “exists” in the creaturely sense we understand existence. Instead, they describe God as the supreme, self-sufficient being.

This is where some philosophical errors need to be rejected—especially among atheists and even certain theists who treat God as merely the highest being within a hierarchy. That kind of hierarchical thinking isn’t always helpful. Even when we talk about the divine council—God as King and the council as spiritual or even, eventually, physio-spiritual humans who share in that dominion—we have to remember that God is not merely at the top of the hierarchy. He is of a completely different category of being.

To use the language of Genesis 1, God grants dominion to the council and to humanity, but his own nature is not one of delegated rule or derived existence. His being stands utterly apart.

Conclusion: Speaking of God

Okay, so that, I think, is the narrative the Scriptures put forth. But we should not see God as being “king” over his divine council in the sense that if one of those divine council members—say, the serpent or Satan—decided they wanted to be supreme, there would be any real possibility of dethroning God. The idea itself should strike us as absurd. The creature cannot dethrone the one who exists apart from existence. The whole point is to show that Yahweh is not like the other gods. Yahweh is not like the elohim, because he is not even a member of that category.

There is a categorical distinction—not just between the physical and the spiritual, between humans and the divine beings—but even between the spirits themselves and God. God is of an entirely different order. Because of that, we have to reject certain philosophical and theological errors that try to treat God as if he were simply the greatest among beings. We must understand that God does not have existence in the way that other things have existence.

And that’s important, because the atheist often demands empirical proof for the existence of God. But the whole idea of empirical proof already assumes creaturely existence—something observable, measurable, temporal. You cannot have empirical evidence for a non-existent being in that sense. Don’t conflate existence with being. God has non-existent being.

So we say that God is, even if God does not exist. And to the question, Can God exist?—the answer, fundamentally and importantly, is no. Creatures exist. God does not exist. And yet, God is in every way that truly matters.

I hope this makes sense. I’ll drop some links to related ideas in the description. Feel free to send questions or leave a comment if this was a big idea for you—just write “big idea” in the comments—and tell me what you think. Can God exist?