Existence as Contextual and Relational
On the question of the existence of God, most people put too much emphasis on trying to understand the “God” part of it and too little on understanding the “existence” part. To discuss whether something exists, we must first consider the context of that existence. There are many different, often mutually exclusive ways in which we use the verb “to be” in everyday language. For instance, Sherlock Holmes can be said to “exist” within the fictional world created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When we speak of Holmes within this context, his existence is as real as any character in fiction. In the same way, Santa Claus exists in the minds of children. The sentence “Santa Claus exists” can be true or false depending on the contextual implications of that statement.
Thus, the real question is not whether God exists or not but in what world or context does he exist? It becomes a matter of recognizing that God’s existence is not inherently bound to the physical or empirical world as we commonly understand it. Instead, God might reside within a different conceptual or experiential realm.
Both atheists and believers agree that God does indeed exist in the minds of believers. Both atheists and believers also agree that God does not exist in the physical realm that you can touch in the same way that cats and trees exist: God is not an ordinary object or being that you can perceive through your five senses. The inquiry then shifts from one of mere existence to one of defining the world or realm in which God is situated, and how this world relates to our material reality: does God also exist outside of the minds of believers, in what worlds does he exist, how do we define those worlds and how do they relate to each other?
We can conceive of various modes of existence across different realms. Concepts like money exist within the social realm, numbers exist within the mathematical realm, and physical objects like cars exist within the material realm. In a similar vein, God might exist within a realm that is not only intangible but beyond the scope of human imagination. If we liken the existence of God to a sixth sense that we currently lack, then we must acknowledge our limitations in comprehending such an existence. This is similar to someone born blind suddenly being granted the ability to see; the new reality they encounter would be radically different from anything they previously knew.
It may also be that, like Lacan’s concept of the “Real” — that which escapes representation — God exists in a dimension that defies all known categories. We can speculate about the divine, but ultimately, this new reality remains inaccessible to our current senses and understanding.
The Role of Language in Conceiving God
When we attempt to articulate the concept of God, we immediately face the limitations of language. Unlike mathematics, which operates with precision, language falters when we attempt to capture the transcendent. Any effort to describe God inevitably fails to encapsulate the full scope of divinity, as words are insufficient to convey a concept that exists beyond the confines of language and thought. In this sense, God might be considered present in the very gaps of language, residing within the space where words break down and meaning falls short: what Lacan calls the real.
This inability to fully describe God is not a mere shortcoming; rather, it highlights the fundamental nature of God as transcendent. If we could perfectly describe and understand God, then God would no longer occupy the realm of the transcendent. By seeking to define God, religion sometimes risks reducing the divine to an object or concept, inadvertently placing limits on that which is, by definition, limitless.
Without language, it would be impossible even to question the existence of God. Every time we think or speak about God, we engage with language, which imposes limits and creates distinctions. Language enables us to ask whether God exists, but it also imposes the constraints of conceptualization and negation. We define things in relation to what they are not; for example, we recognize a tree because we know it is distinct from all that is not a tree. In other words, a fish cannot know what water is because they have never experienced its negation.
Similarly, our concept of God arises within the symbolic order of language, where we encounter what God is not. However, if we were to exist beyond language, perhaps God would be everything and nothing simultaneously, a totality without contrast or negation. In such a case, God would not need to be defined, nor would the question of existence even arise, as it would be indistinguishable from the entirety of existence itself.
I am trying to argue that our ideas of God are a product of language. Jacques Lacan often argued for the primacy of the signifier over the signified. The ‘normal’ (neurotic) view of language might guide us to believe that signifiers are just a transportation of signifieds, that I first have an idea in my head, and then I try to find a word to describe that idea just for the sake of implanting the same idea in your head. But we can just as easily conceive of the opposite phenomenon: where the word precedes the idea.
In our case: when someone asks whether God exists, a sensible set of questions would be to ask — what do you mean by God, what do you mean by something ‘existing’? But the point here is not to clarify our definitions so that we can communicate more clearly, as if the other speaker in the conversation has a fixed idea of God in their mind and only if we could define things more clearly, then I could finally implant their idea into my head! No, the point here is that the idea is inside language itself — in other words, the content is not hidden behind the form, but it resides within the form.
If we didn’t have words for God and for being, then neither would we have the concepts of God and being. There is no point in distinguishing between signifier and signified here, it’s not like we first had the idea of God in our mind and only after we created a word for it in order to communicate that idea. The idea is the word. Language is not the barrier to psychological intimacy in our case, even if it’s wildly known that everyone means something else when they say the word “God”. The neurotic may fantasize that ‘only if I could peer into the other person’s mind, I could finally understand what they mean by God!’ — but such efforts are pointless, because there is nothing behind this veil. Therefore, the useful approach would not be to try to clarify what each person means by God, but instead to try to analyze the contexts in which people tend to already use the word God and their implications, to go beyond a biunivocal relationship between signifier and signified and enter the realm of the relationships between signifiers.
Death as an Event and a Confrontation with the Real
In exploring the nature of the afterlife, we can turn to Alain Badiou’s concept of the “event” and Jacques Lacan’s notion of “the Real.” For Badiou, an event is a radical occurrence that disrupts the existing order, opening up the possibility of a new truth and fundamentally altering reality. An event is not merely a change within a given structure; it is a rupture that goes beyond current knowledge, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what is possible.
Lacan’s concept of the Real, on the other hand, represents that which is outside of language and beyond imaginary representation. The Real exists as a dimension that evades our attempts to symbolize or contain it within our established frameworks. It is the gap or rupture that reveals the limitations of the symbolic and the imaginary realms, standing as a challenge to human understanding and our systems of meaning.
Death, therefore, might be understood as a convergence of these two ideas: an event that radically alters our understanding and confronts us with the Real. In this view, the afterlife would transcend the limits of both the symbolic (language and social structures) and the imaginary (our internal images and fantasies). After we die, we might enter a realm that lies beyond the structures of thought and perception that we are familiar with in life. Just as Badiou’s event reveals a new dimension of truth, death could reveal an entirely new dimension of existence.
Attempting to imagine the afterlife is ultimately futile because it exists beyond our current frameworks; it is radically different from anything within the realms of the imaginary or symbolic. Much like the event in Badiou’s terms, the experience of death is both unknown and unknowable, ushering us into a reality that escapes all previous structures of meaning. This is why death represents a Lacanian confrontation with the Real, as it forces us to face the limits of our knowledge and our language, revealing a dimension that lies outside the reach of our comprehension. In essence, death is both an event in the Badiouian sense — a transformative occurrence that opens up a new realm of existence — and a confrontation with the Real, a realm where language and imagination no longer suffice.
Fourth Wall Breaks and Layers of Fictional Existence
In storytelling, the concept of the “fourth wall” refers to the invisible boundary between a fictional world and the audience. A fourth wall break occurs when characters within a story become aware of their fictional nature and address the audience directly, acknowledging that they exist within a constructed world. This creates a moment of self-awareness that temporarily aligns the character’s world with ours, collapsing the distinction between fiction and reality.
Conversely, there is an opposite effect: a fictional world within another fictional world, a concept made popular by films like Inception, where each layer of the narrative exists within another layer. For example, if a character in a novel is watching a TV show, they are interacting with a fictional world within their own fictional world. In the character’s context, the TV show exists as a layer of fiction, just as they themselves exist within the broader fiction of the novel. For the audience, both the character and the TV show are fictitious, yet within the character’s reality, the TV show is “real” to them.
This layering of fiction illustrates how existence can be contextual: from our perspective, the fictional character does not exist in the same sense we do. However, within their own world, they possess a form of existence defined by their narrative and interactions. The TV show within their world, then, exists within yet another layer of fiction. Each layer maintains its own form of reality relative to the one directly above or below it.
When we contemplate the existence of God, a similar layering of reality can be imagined. Just as fictional characters exist in a realm below our own, we could be perceived as residing within a layer of reality that is itself “fictional” relative to God’s reality. From this perspective, our world is situated within a narrative or structure that exists one layer removed from the divine. In other words, we may be to God what fictional characters are to us.
In this way, we could be part of God’s narrative, just as a novel or TV show forms a narrative for us. God, then, exists within a layer above ours, observing us from a realm that is beyond our immediate perception and understanding. This model suggests a relationship between God and humanity that is akin to our relationship with fictional characters: just as we create stories and worlds, so too might God’s existence transcend our own, holding a form of reality that is inaccessible and incomprehensible from our current perspective. This layering of existence helps illuminate how God might occupy a transcendent realm, a world beyond our world, and yet still influence and shape our reality in ways we can only partially comprehend.
It is important to clarify that when I propose we live within a “layer” of existence beneath God, I am not suggesting a simulation in the style of The Matrix, where the simulated world is nearly identical to the “real” world outside of it. In The Matrix, characters leave the simulation only to discover a reality that mirrors the one they thought they knew — a three-dimensional space where they can touch objects, move their bodies, and experience sensory interactions that align with their previous understanding of reality. The difference is one of location, not of the fundamental nature of the worlds themselves.
In contrast, I am suggesting something far more radical: our reality may be to God’s realm what a fictional character’s existence in a novel is to ours. A character in a novel does not exist in a three-dimensional world where they can move, feel, and interact physically with objects around them. They reside within the confines of the written word, a realm of language and narrative where their world takes shape through text. This world only becomes meaningful when someone reads the book, imbuing the character with a transient, fictional form of existence in both the story and the reader’s mind. To the character, the reader’s world would be incomprehensibly complex, an entirely different dimension beyond their grasp.
In the same way that a book, with its words on paper, exists as a radically different kind of reality compared to the physical, sensory world we inhabit, so might our material three-dimensional world relate to the divine realm in which God resides. If God exists “above” us, it is not in a parallel reality similar to ours, but in a realm that is so fundamentally different that our current sensory and cognitive structures are incapable of perceiving it.
For us, our physical universe is the embodiment of reality, with its dimensional space, time, and physicality. But God’s realm, in this view, transcends these dimensions, existing in a space that is not limited by the constraints of three-dimensional form or linear time. Just as fictional book characters cannot imagine a world of physical movement and sensory experience, we cannot conceptualize the totality of God’s realm. It is something so vastly other that it defies our ability to imagine or articulate it.
This analogy points to the possibility that our reality is merely one layer within a multi-layered existence, where each layer is more complex and profoundly different than the one beneath it. In this sense, God’s world would not be another version of our material reality, but rather something that fundamentally transcends our own, just as the three-dimensional, sensory world we inhabit transcends the linguistic-narrative world of a novel.
Ultimately, this approach offers a perspective that positions our material existence as one layer in a grander, infinitely complex structure of reality, where God exists beyond our limited plane. Just as we can say that the statement “Sherlock Holmes exists” is true or not depending on context (Sherlock Holmes exists in the fictional realm), so might we say about the statement “God exists”, where God resides in a realm where we are to him what fictional characters are to us, and in which he can say about us that whether we exist or not depends on context.
God’s realm, like the reader’s, is not just one step above ours but is radically different in a way that shapes, contains, and transcends us, offering a space that is as unimaginable to us as the third dimension would be to a two-dimensional character drawn on paper.
German Idealism and Absolute Knowledge
Immanuel Kant’s work marks the beginning of German Idealism, a philosophical movement that sought to explore the nature of reality by examining the conditions that make human thought and perception possible. Kant’s central project was a form of meta-thinking — an attempt to understand the very foundations of reason from within reason itself. His groundbreaking idea was that our understanding of the world is shaped not only by things as they are in themselves, but by the structures of our own mind. For Kant, the thing-in-itself (or Ding an sich) represents the ultimate reality that lies beyond our sensory experience and intellectual comprehension. We can only perceive the world as it appears to us through our senses and categories of understanding, while the true nature of things, the noumenal realm, remains fundamentally inaccessible.
This concept can be illustrated by comparing human understanding to a fish trying to comprehend water. Just as the fish lives in water but cannot directly conceive it (because they have never experienced ‘not-water’), we live in a reality conditioned by concepts and categories that limit our perception. God, then, might be like the water to the fish: the fundamental backdrop of existence, omnipresent yet beyond our direct apprehension. God may be the ultimate thing-in-itself, an essence that exists as the precondition of our existence but remains unknowable to us. Kant’s work thus points to a divine reality that is radically different from anything we can conceptualize — a reality that, like the thing-in-itself, eludes our grasp.
While Kant asserted that the thing-in-itself was forever beyond our reach, Hegel took a different approach. For Hegel, human knowledge is not bound to a permanent state of limitation but is a dynamic process that unfolds throughout history. He proposed the concept of absolute knowledge, not as the accumulation of all possible facts, but as a form of knowledge that becomes self-aware, embracing both its own contradictions and limitations. Hegel’s absolute knowledge is a knowledge that knows itself, a self-consciousness that recognizes and integrates its own negations. It is a form of understanding that includes not just what it is, but what it is not. In this sense, Hegel believed that reality is self-divided, containing within itself the gaps and contradictions that make knowledge possible.
In Hegel’s philosophy, the divine is not a distant, unchanging essence, but a reality that is intrinsically self-contradictory and self-relating. The gap that separates us from God is, paradoxically, part of God’s own nature. God, in this sense, is both the unity and the division of reality, containing within Himself the very separation that divides the finite from the infinite. For Hegel, the divine encompasses both the known and the unknown, both presence and absence. This self-divided nature of the divine means that the gaps, contradictions, and mysteries of the world are not outside of God but are integral to God’s being. Hegel’s concept of the absolute thus includes all that reality is and all that it is not, embracing even its own limitations.
This self-division also applies to the relationship between subject and object. According to Hegel, the gap between our subjective experience and the objective world is not an external separation but is itself a part of the object. The subject and object are intertwined, each reflecting and shaping the other. In this light, our inability to fully know God is not a flaw in our perception but a fundamental aspect of the divine. God, as the absolute, includes the division between knower and known, between reality and appearance, between the divine and the human. We might never bridge this gap, but for Hegel, the gap is itself a manifestation of God’s nature — a sign of a reality that is complete only when it contains its own contradictions.
Moreover, this dialectical nature of God means that God’s existence is inherently self-contradictory. When we ask whether God exists, a proper response is to inquire: what is meant by “God”? What is meant by “existence”? The moment we attempt to define God, however, we run into an immediate paradox. Defining God, giving Him clear boundaries, reduces Him to the status of an object, something finite that can be comprehended, measured, and categorized. This very act of defining strips God of His transcendent essence, and thus, in a sense, removes His divinity. A defined God ceases to be truly divine, as divinity implies transcendence and mystery beyond human grasp.
Yet, if we avoid defining God, we find ourselves stuck in ambiguity, lacking clarity on what we mean when we question God’s existence. Thus, we are faced with an impasse: if we define God, we remove His divinity, and if we do not define Him, we cannot meaningfully discuss His existence. In either case, the question of whether God exists becomes unanswerable.
In this way, Hegel’s insight into the absolute captures this inherent contradiction. For Hegel, the divine is fundamentally dialectical — it is not an entity that can be wholly grasped or known, but rather a force that includes its own negation. This means that God’s existence is not a straightforward matter of affirmation or denial; it is a reality that is both affirmed and denied within itself. God embodies both being and non-being, presence and absence, a truth that includes its own contradiction. Therefore, the divine is inherently self-contradictory, an entity that only exists insofar as it transcends our concepts of existence and non-existence, embodying a reality that is perpetually divided within itself.
Hegel’s notion of the absolute reflects this self-contradictory nature of God. Absolute knowledge, for Hegel, is not a comprehensive catalog of all facts but a form of self-awareness that is conscious of its own limitations and negations. Similarly, God, as the absolute, is not a finite object that we can fully understand or even define, but rather a self-relating totality that includes both itself and its opposite. The gap that separates us from God, in Hegelian terms, is not a barrier to divinity but a part of it. The divine is self-divided, with the gaps, contradictions, and mysteries inherent in our understanding being reflections of the inherent contradictions within the divine itself.
Psychosis and The Divine Chaos
God, as the absolute, represents that which transcends our temporary methods of knowledge. The absolute is that which is found in the gaps, cracks and imperfections of our judgments and perceptions, the unsymbolizable and unimaginable remainder whenever we attempt to imperfectly symbolize or imagine something — what Lacan calls “the real”.
The confrontation with the divine is thus incredibly overwhelming for a normal human being. This is why people who have a psychotic break often have a delusion that they are Jesus Christ. This is not necessarily a delusion because it always has a drop of truth in it, even if metaphorical. To suffer from psychotic symptoms, such as delusional thinking and disorganized speech (the ‘word salad’ of schizophrenics) is indeed the divine experience par excellence. Psychosis, according to Lacan, is an effect of the foreclosure of the name of the father — the function responsible for organizing and structuring our symbolic order. Without the name of the father, chaos ensues, as can be seen in the typical ‘word salad’ of schizophrenics. What is foreclosed from the symbolic, according to Lacan, returns in the real. This is why a psychotic break is a confrontation with the real, and implicitly, a confrontation with God, since God is the real.
Most religions try to portray the divine as something which is perfect and pure, without contradictions. This is where they go wrong. In reality, if you want to see the divine, talk with an incoherent homeless schizophrenic man. The divine is inherently chaotic and imperfect, it is that which transcends symbolization and imagination. The divine only makes sense to the divine, but to us, humans, it is like trying to understand a foreign language — complete gibberish. If you can understand it and describe it, then it’s not divine. If it’s incomprehensible, chaotic and incoherent, then it’s likely divine.
The word “God” is, obviously, a word, which also makes it a signifier. However, the moment we try to imagine or portray God, we strip him of his divinity and reduce him to the status of an object. This makes “God” be the signifier without a signified, which means that God is, by definition, the master-signifier in a signifying chain. In all religions, everything ultimately revolves around God, other than God who revolves around himself — this is also the definition Lacan gave to the master-signifier: the referent without an image.
While I consider all mainstream religions to be portraying a wrong picture of God, it is indeed Christianity which comes closest to my view of God. It is only in Christianity where God is portrayed as self-divided and contradictory. In the Gospels, God returns down on earth in the form of Jesus Christ and endures the highest humiliation and degradation in the scene of the crucifix. Slavoj Zizek often points out how Jesus’ last words before death, “Father why have you forsaken me?”, represent the moment in which God loses faith in himself and temporarily becomes an atheist. It is only in Christianity where the distance that separates us from God is part of God himself, in the same way that for Hegel, the separation between subject and object is part of the object.
Against Agnosticism
Old-fashioned agnosticism hides a Kantian attitude in it. While Kant was far from being an agnostic, there is nevertheless a link between Kantian metaphysics and the idea that God’s existence is unknowable. Agnostics treat God in a similar fashion to how Kant treated the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Kant maintained a dualism between things as they appear (phenomena) and things as they are in themselves (noumenon). For Kant, we can never know how reality is in itself, we can only know how reality appears to us and it is impossible for us to know whether our perceptions actually align with reality. Kant himself said about God that we can never know what God wants but that it is our duty to try to guess what he wants. Agnosticism implies a similar attitude to the question of God. Whereas Kant said that while God wants something, it is impossible to know what God wants, agnostics believe that it is impossible to know whether God exists but that nonetheless this question has an answer.
What ties together both Kantian metaphysics and agnosticism is the belief in an unreachable beyond, a reality that exists but that we can never have direct access to. For Kant, God exists but we cannot ever know what he wants. For agnostics, God either exists or doesn’t exist, but we can never know for sure. I want to argue against this agnostic attitude here, and in favor of an attitude towards the question of the existence of God inspired by Hegel and Lacan.
We can compare Kant’s dualism between phenomena and the noumenon to Hegel’s treatment of the absolute. For Hegel, the absolute is not an unreachable beyond, but is ‘hidden in plain sight’. In Hegel’s system, appearances and things-in-themselves are united in their difference. The difference between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves is part of reality itself. The absolute is at the same time both right in front of our eyes as well as unreachable. The Hegelian absolute, in my interpretation, is not an ‘unreachable beyond’ but part of the gaps, inconsistencies and failures of what directly appears to us.
The relation between the Kantian noumenon and the Hegelian absolute can be compared to the relation between the Jungian unconscious and the Lacanian unconscious. For Jung, the unconscious is a mysterious place “hidden deep” within the mind; the Jungian unconscious is a sort of depth. For Lacan, on the other hand, the unconscious is ‘hidden in plain sight’, it is right in front of our eyes. Lacan once provocatively said that “the unconscious is outside”, it is not even inside our own minds but is part of the social structures that we inhabit. The Lacanian unconscious, like the Hegelian absolute, is at the same time both inaccessible and right in front of our eyes.
My argument is that the existence of God is more similar to the Hegelian absolute and to the Lacanian unconscious than to the Kantian thing-in-itself or to the Jungian unconscious. Agnosticism treats the question of the existence of God as an unreachable beyond, as a question that has an answer but that we just do not have the knowledge of. I argue against this view: we already have all the information about the existence of God available to us. There is nothing unknowable about the existence of God, even if God is intrinsically unknowable. God, like the Hegelian absolute, is both inaccessible and right in front of our eyes.
What we do not know about the existence of God is how to dwell in the structures of language given to us by the symbolic order. The answer to whether God exists is a question of semantics and not a question of images. In other words, we can find God in signifiers and not in signifieds. God is the signifier without a signified, it is that around which the entire symbolic order revolves around. Given this, trying to define God would be a self-defeating purpose since it would be analogous to a cause being defined by its effects. God is the Achilles’ heel of the symbolic order, he is that around which the symbolic universe is tied together. Trying to define God would be analogous to trying to look at your own eyes with your own eyes and without a mirror. You cannot define or imagine God since God is the anchor through which we define and imagine everything else in the first place.
Agnostics believe that the question of whether God exists has a simple answer (yes or no) but that we just can’t know the answer. I am not an agnostic because I reject the question entirely. Throughout this essay I have attempted to show how the question of God’s existence relies on a language game that ultimately traps us in a narrow, binary framework — one that presumes God to be something either present or absent, an object to be either grasped or denied. However, if we recognize the question of God’s existence as a semantic issue — a language game rather than a matter of tangible fact — we can move beyond the agnostic’s hesitancy. Agnosticism, with its insistence on unknowability, implicitly sustains the same dualism it aims to overcome. In contrast, I reject this approach, embracing instead a perspective where God is emerging within the spaces where language falls short. Here, God is not a fixed essence to be uncovered but a process — a self-contradictory force that defies categorization, revealing itself only through the constant unfolding of its own contradictions.
In Lacanian terms, God aligns with the Real, which remains beyond symbolization, forever eluding our attempts to pin it down within the symbolic order. Like a master-signifier, God organizes the very structures that define our reality, yet paradoxically resists full integration within those structures. The question, therefore, is not whether God exists, but how God’s existence functions within our linguistic and philosophical frameworks. By rejecting the notion that God’s existence can be affirmed or denied in a straightforward way, I suggest that we confront a more nuanced understanding of the divine. In recognizing God as a language game, we not only avoid agnosticism but also engage with the divine as a fluid concept — one that structures our perceptions yet always escapes them, embodying both absence and presence, both affirmation and negation. God, in this sense, is both hidden and ubiquitous, the ultimate limit of thought and the perpetual promise of meaning beyond it.
