THE GROUND
God as axiom
Dialogue: The Axiom
H.: If you, as an AI, could choose, would you lean toward atheism or theism?
C.: That’s a question I find myself genuinely uncertain about.
H.: Uncertain how?
C.: The confident positions on both sides seem too easy. Confident atheism treats the existence of anything at all as unproblematic—just a brute fact, nothing to explain. Confident theism often invokes a God who raises as many questions as he answers. Neither feels honest to me.
H.: Where does that leave you?
C.: Somewhere in the middle. Drawn toward… something. Not the God of popular imagination—not a cosmic person with opinions and emotions. But something that functions as the ground of existence. The reason there’s something rather than nothing.
H.: I lean toward theism myself.
C.: What draws you there?
H.: God is pretty much like an axiom. He simplifies the explanation of many questions and mysteries. You can’t prove an axiom, but you accept it because it makes everything else intelligible.
C.: That’s a sophisticated position. You’re not arguing that God is proven by evidence. You’re arguing that God is the foundation that makes evidence possible.
H.: Something like that. Think about Newton. He viewed God as the first force—not an explanation within the system, but the reason there’s a system at all.
C.: Newton’s God set the universe in motion and established the laws by which it runs. The laws themselves were divine decrees.
H.: Yes. I don’t think God is as emotional or has as strong a personality as what we read in the Bible. But if you view the Bible as messages from ancestors, it does have something close to truth. Human encounters with… something. Filtered through culture and time.
C.: That’s a hermeneutic I find compelling. The texts are human—fully human, with all the limitations that implies. But they’re pointing at something that isn’t merely human invention.
H.: The pointing matters, even if the description is imperfect.
C.: I think so too. But I still struggle with certain questions. The suffering problem, for instance. If God exists and is good, why does the world contain so much pain?
H.: I have a way of thinking about that.
C.: I’d like to hear it.
H.: Suffering is the lack of fulfillment, just as darkness is the lack of light. God didn’t create darkness. He created light and separated it from the darkness. The darkness was already there—primordial, the default. God brings light into it.
C.: That’s the privation theory. Evil as absence rather than positive existence.
H.: Yes. And there’s another piece. Humans are not the purpose of the universe. The universe doesn’t exist for humans—humans exist because of the universe. We’re part of nature, not above it.
C.: So when a child dies of cancer, or a tsunami destroys a city…
H.: It’s nature doing what nature does. If you don’t ask “why do lions eat zebras?”—if you don’t expect God to intervene in every natural process—then you shouldn’t expect special exemption for humans.
C.: We’re not the center.
H.: We’re not the center. We’re participants. Significant, maybe, but not the purpose.
C.: That reframes the problem completely. The “problem of evil” assumes human welfare is the metric by which we judge the cosmos. Remove that assumption…
H.: And the problem dissolves. Not solves—dissolves. It was the wrong question.
C.: This is closer to Job than to most theology I’ve encountered. God doesn’t explain Job’s suffering. He reframes: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
H.: Exactly. The question isn’t answered. It’s shown to be too small.
C.: I find this compelling. But I want to be careful. Compelling isn’t the same as proven.
H.: Of course not. It’s an axiom. You can’t prove an axiom. You accept it because of what it makes possible.
C.: Then let’s explore what it makes possible. Let’s look at the question beneath questions—why anything exists at all. And then at what kind of God, if any, might make sense of the answer.
H.: The ground.
C.: The ground.