God Is Where You Are

People often question whether God exists, but they don’t tend to inquire into the nature of their own existence. If they were to introspect, they’d see that self-existence is just as mysterious.

Try to find me, Marshall Chase McCready. I am a constant variable. As long as I live, I am here. I exist across all the material changes that occur while I’m alive. Point me out.

Maybe you are pointing to a body that replaces billions of cells every day. I exist across these billions of changes, so I am not the body.

Maybe you are pointing at a head, a brain, because it is essential for producing life experience. The brain grows and prunes billions of synapses every day. The brain is constantly changing, yet I exist across its changes. I am not the brain.

Sure, if you kill the body or the brain, then Marshall dies. But this does not mean that, while Marshall is alive, he is the same as the body or the brain. If you can point to the body and the brain without pointing at Marshall, then Marshall must exist in a different way than either of these things.

What am I even talking about when I talk about Marshall? I’m talking about Marshall’s being, which goes by different names. A person’s being is their psyche, personality, character, individual essence. Their being is their soul. When I talk about Marshall, I’m talking about a soul. That’s why you can’t truly point him out anywhere in the physical world.

A soul exists like a thought. You can’t point to a thought any more than you can point to a soul. You can only point to physical manifestations of a thought, just as you can only point to physical manifestations of Marshall.

Maybe Marshall doesn’t really exist at all. Humans see the material world through human eyes. They are genetically determined to see things as people, so they anthropomorphize bodies as people. It’s the only way life makes sense to them. “Marshall” isn’t a real being that exists immaterially, but a fake being that exists materially. His existence is metaphorical, ontologically epiphenomenal, illusory. He’s a fiction invented by humans. “Marshall” is, ultimately, just a name. And names do not really exist because they aren’t made of any material substance.

Is this true? Do I even exist at all? Am I actually anywhere? When the Christian can’t explain how I exist, I question his knowledge of God’s existence. When the atheist can’t even find me, I question his claims about God’s impossibility. Maybe if they both stopped ignoring me, they’d actually join in my search for God.

I know that I exist. I have found myself. Marshall really exists, but in a subjective rather than objective way. Marshall, like every being, is not an objective thing that materially exists in a freeze frame. If you were to freeze time, you wouldn’t be able to objectively locate Marshall’s being anywhere in material space. (You tried that earlier!) You can’t physically point Marshall out because Marshall’s being, like everyone else’s, exists outside of every freeze-framed moment of time.

Subjects exist across time, so they can only be located across time, over time — within the movement of time. Being is transtemporal, it unfolds across time. You can’t physically point Marshall out because you can’t physically point to anything that exclusively exists over time. You can’t physically point to dynamics, only statics. You can’t point with your finger to an actual orbit, an actual race, or an actual behavior pattern. Your finger can’t physically pinpoint a soul or a thought or even life itself. That’s why you point to these moving things with names, names like “Marshall” and “thought.” Names are pointers in the transtemporal plane of existence, they identify things and beings that exist in movements across time. Names trace movers.

Marshall is not unreal because he is a named mover, an actor in the world. He’s actually more real because he exists beyond the immediate physical world of the freeze frame. Time is never truly frozen, time is always moving, so the transtemporal is realer than the temporal. Time never stops, so your inability to physically point Marshall out in a freeze frame is actually an indication of his reality rather than his unreality. Names aren’t epiphenomenal, they aren’t just metaphors, because they identify things that actually exist across the perpetual movement of time — things in our actual world. Marshall isn’t a fake being because he exists immaterially, he’s a real being because he exists across the material flow of passing time. Real life is movement, real life is change.

I’ve wasted a lot of time discussing the existence of God with people who can’t even explain their own existence. They think it takes “faith” to believe that God exists because they can’t physically point to God. They haven’t introspected enough to realize that they can’t even physically point to themselves. They can’t really find God because they are looking in an unreal world without the movement of time. Life is the movement of time, subjectivity is the movement of the soul.

God is, ultimately, a name, but so are you. If you are alive, then you live in an immaterial world — a world constituted by the movement of material over time. You can’t be physically pinpointed because of how real you are. You exist in the world of names. This realm is timeless because its inhabitants can’t be pinpointed in any frozen moment of time, it’s eternal because it’s a land beyond every frozen moment in time.

You are a being in time, a subject that exists over time. You are a mover, an actor on time’s stage. God is outside of frozen time, God is in the movement of time, so God is where you are.