The Wrong Kind of Proof
“Does God exist, or not?”
Around this question, atheists, devout believers, and those who pose as neutral all too often end up standing on the same ground. They pile up arguments, marshal evidence, invoke philosophy — and try to prove it.
But the question itself is nonsense.
Because the only action that brings God into existence is believing. For someone who does not take that action, who does not accept it, the question of God’s existence never had any meaning to begin with. The foundation of God, the root of religion, lies in the act of believing itself. Everything else — meaning, continuity, transmission — grows out of that act.
What can be proven is only the outward form of believing: whether or not someone is performing that act. The meaning and shared values that arise from it exist only among those who are performing it. To someone who is not, they mean nothing at all.
No Question Without a Standpoint
There is a further layer to press into.
When traditional theologians and atheists alike ask “does God exist,” from whose vantage point is that question being asked? More often than not, the question is treated as if it were neutral — issued from nowhere in particular, from no one’s position at all. But no such vantage point exists.
What Thomas Nagel criticized as “the view from nowhere,” what Donna Haraway dismissed as the “god trick” — all knowledge arises from a particular body, a particular position, a particular history. Even the “position reason can reach, available to anyone” that natural theology presupposes is in fact one position among others, shaped by a specific intellectual lineage running through Greek metaphysics and scholasticism. The atheist’s criterion of “verifiability” is likewise the product of a specific intellectual current.
To make a claim while concealing where it stands is arbitrary.
And every discourse about God — whether affirming or denying — is nothing but a variation on this same arbitrary question, one that hides where it stands. And yet those who say “God exists” push their own positional claim onto others as fact. Those who say “God does not exist” do exactly the same, with the opposite content but the identical form.
The two camps appear to be opposed, but in truth they share the same form of violence. It is this hidden complicity that produces such a deep discomfort.
The Force Was Never in Nature
Even among those who do not believe in God, there are those who, facing nature or looking up at the night sky, cannot help but sense something beyond human power.
But nature is simply there. To feel a natural disaster as “the threat, the force of nature” is to read some kind of power into it — when in fact it is nothing more than various forms of energy giving rise to the phenomenon. There is no power belonging to nature itself.
This is neither nihilism nor atheism. It is simply quiet observation, without reading meaning in.
Even so, this stance of observation is not itself a view from nowhere. The very vocabulary of “energy” and “phenomenon” is the product of a paradigm — modern science — established only quite recently.
Still, there is a decisive difference from theism and atheism. This stance does not impose its content as fact. What it imposes is not a truth but a kind of intellectual restraint: do not carelessly read meaning in. It does not demand that others believe the same meaning.
The Body, Prior to Any Standpoint
To live is inevitably to hold a standpoint — this is the inescapable condition of human existence itself.
But the body is different. Independent of any standpoint, the body receives every stimulus and returns a response — without a “standpoint.” A wave comes. The body moves. There is, in this, no operation of carving out an object and turning it into a proposition to begin with.
To bring thought into alignment with this bodily sense, or into a place where the two are inseparable — that is the way of being I aim for.
This resonates with what Merleau-Ponty argued: that the body, before it is a subject that knows something about the world, is already dwelling within the world. The Cartesian order — first a thinking subject exists, and from it a standpoint arises — is already betrayed in advance by the body.
And yet, at this socialized point where we now stand, we cannot help but move back and forth between these two. A state in which bodily sense and thought are completely inseparable — this has its prototype in the state of the fetus, the original form of human existence. A full return to it is impossible, and I have no intention of calling it an ideal state.
But it is not a lost past. Human beings continue to hold that way of being within themselves as something essential. And through the body, it is possible to recall it, to bring it back to life.
Laozi wrote: “Never departing from constant virtue, one returns to the state of the infant.” Not a literal return to infancy, but the paradoxical movement by which a mature person reclaims, within themselves, the way of being that the infant once embodied. The instant of riding a wave, the instant of balancing on the board — these are places where, amid the back-and-forth, the inseparable state is momentarily called forth again.
Setting the Question Down
The question “does God exist” only has meaning within the domain of linguistic thought — where one holds a standpoint, carves out an object, and turns it into a proposition. In the inseparable state that the body recalls, that question was never there to begin with.
So the final answer is neither affirmation, nor denial, nor agnosticism.
One can step down, through the body, from the very place where that question stands. And in the place one steps down to, the question was never there at all.
This is neither detachment nor resignation. It is a repeated act of return to a place human beings have held from the very beginning — and still hold now.