The Failure of Definitions
Almost every argument between a believer and an atheist breaks down before it even begins, because the word God is left undefined. One person imagines a bearded old man in the clouds, another imagines an impersonal cosmic force, and the third imagines nothing at all. We then argue endlessly about these caricatures. If we cannot first agree on what “God” even means, then the debate itself is a waste of breath.So let us start, not with doctrines, but with definition.
A Minimal Definition of the Divine
When I use the word God, I mean that which is ineffable, indescribable, ephemeral, and eternal.
Ineffable / Indescribable:
Every human being has experienced moments so profound they cannot be reduced to words. Love, awe, ecstasy, beauty, grief, and transcendence — these moments escape language. They resist capture. If God is anything, He is the ground of that which cannot be contained by language.
Ephemeral / Without Form:
The divine cannot be held or measured. It does not sit in one place, take one shape, or answer to our categories. Just as light is both wave and particle, reality itself hints at dimensions beyond our comprehension. God is not a thing among things but Being itself, form without fixed form.
Eternal / Beyond Time:
The surest test of the divine is timelessness. We all know this experience: standing under the stars, holding a newborn child, losing yourself in music or in love. In such moments, time vanishes. Hours pass as though they were minutes. Eternity is not a distant future — it is the ever-present now that sometimes breaks through and takes us out of the clutch of the clock.
By this definition, God exists. Not as a projection or a guess, but as a shared human experience.
The Universal Experience of the Eternal
This is not a matter of faith, but of recognition. The atheist has known God, even if they refuse the name. They have stood outside of time. They have loved and been loved. They have been overwhelmed by beauty or struck dumb by awe. They have touched the eternal.
To call these experiences “just brain chemistry” is not an argument but a reduction. Yes, neurons fire — but neurons also fire when you speak, when you paint, when you grieve, when you write equations. Chemistry does not erase meaning; it is simply the medium through which meaning manifests. The reality of love is not negated by oxytocin, any more than the reality of music is negated by vibrations in the air.
Projection or Reflection?
Here lies the turning point. The skeptic insists: “You are just projecting human categories onto the universe.” But that critique assumes the arrow of causation points one way: from man to God.
I argue the reverse: it points from God to man. We did not invent love and paste it onto the heavens. We experience love because it participates in the eternal. We did not invent joy and project it upward. Joy is a spark of the divine, mirrored in our finite lives. Our emotions, our ecstasies, our awe — they are reflections of something deeper, not inventions of something false.
This is the meaning of Genesis when it says we are made in the “image of God.” Theology is not projection but reflection.
Why This Definition Makes Sense
By this definition, God is not a hypothesis in competition with science. God is not a rival explanation for thunder, lightning, or galaxies. God is not a stopgap for ignorance. God is the name we give to that dimension of reality which is timeless, boundless, ineffable, yet undeniably experienced.
When science measures, it tells us how things work.
When philosophy interprets, it tells us what things mean.
When spirituality awakens, it tells us that some things cannot be captured at all, only lived. God belongs to that third category.
Why Denial is Self-Defeating
To reject this definition of God is, in essence, to deny one’s own experience. You can deny creeds, deny scriptures, deny institutions — but you cannot deny that you have known moments of timeless love, awe, or transcendence. To deny that is to deny your own memory.Thus, the only meaningful debate is not “Does God exist?” but “What do we do with the God we already know?”
The Bridge to Theology
From this definition, the Christian claim becomes intelligible: if God is timeless love breaking into time, then Jesus is the embodiment of that eternal love within history. The ineffable takes form, the eternal enters time, and the unnameable becomes nameable. Christianity is not a myth imposed on reason but the extension of this minimal definition into a concrete life.
Closing Word
God is ineffable. God is ephemeral. God is eternal. Every human being has already encountered Him in the timeless moments of love and awe. The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we will recognize what we have already touched.This is not theology as speculation but theology as memory: the memory of eternity pressing itself into time.
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