On Which “God” Do We Disagree About? A conversation with religious iconographer and public speaker Jonathan Pageau

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When he was 5 years old, my son looked up to me after a bedtime story, and asked me:

“Dad, does God exists?”

If he hadn’t added the “s” at the end, I might’ve taken it as a boilerplate question, and given him a generic answer.

But the mistake made the question feel more real.

And that much more terrifying to me.

The best I could come up with in the spur of the moment was:

“Yes. But in a story. God exists in a story.”

Feeling that wasn’t enough, I did the unthinkable.

I compared God to the Incredible Hulk.

“For example, does the Hulk exist? You can’t meet him out there in the street. But you can read stories about him. You can learn something from his adventures. You can apply some lessons in your life. So, of course, the Hulk exists. But he exists in a story.”

I took his long pause and lack of follow-up questions as a good sign.

I was out of the woods – at least that night.

But somehow, I could tell he wasn’t fully satisfied.

Somewhere, the mystery persisted.

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It’s been nearly 150 years since Nietzsche’s famous proclamation that “God is dead” (and that we, humans, have killed him).

People have used the phrase to suit their preferences: atheists take it as “finally, and good riddance”; believers see in it the peak of human arrogance.

Both miss the point he was making.

Though an atheist himself (he said humanity would eventually be invigorated by “a new dawn”), he thought most atheists didn’t understand the enormity of the act they had committed.

“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” he wrote. “Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?”

To fill this terrible void, he predicted that European leaders would invent absolute political ideologies, while most people would drift into nihilism:

“How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?

Since then, many of his predictions have come true – from the secular ideologies responsible for the death of tens of millions in 20^th-century wars to the rise of a full-blown meaning crisis in the West.

What he didn’t foresee is that outside of Europe – most notably in America - atheism would simply not catch on, and would actually be declining in the 21^st Century.

In America, belief in God persists despite a decline in organized religion: People typically still believe there’s a higher power, but not as described in Scripture.

Atheists who see in this only stubbornness and ignorance must contend with a large body of psychology research showing that faith and religion positively contribute to well-being: Oxford University’s 900-page “Handbook of Religion and Health” reviewed 326 articles on the relationship between health and religiosity, finding that 79% of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1% reported they were less happy. A study covering obituary data from 42 US cities found that the religiously affiliated lived, on average, 5.6 years more than the non-religious. It’s entirely possible this is, at least partly, a result of the community bonds, and the cognitive benefits of religious practices, but the phenomenon remains: faith brings measurable benefits. It turns out that reports of God’s death may have been greatly exaggerated.

But where can rational, scientifically-minded people who cannot “find God” in a material universe go from here?

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My guest in this episode of the podcast – religious iconographer and public speaker Jonathan Pageau – is at the forefront of a different way of thinking about these questions.

We did this one in Montreal, on the heels of his multi-city tour with Jordan Peterson (one of the first things he told me, to my surprise: “I still wouldn't say Jordan is a Christian. I don't think so. Maybe? It's hard to know.”), and it was easily one of my favourite conversations on the topic.

To Jonathan, those trying to simplistically “find God” – either to commune with him or to deny his existence - are mistaking different levels of reality: “I'm not going to find God. God is not a phenomenon. You know, I can't find him. He's not hiding under a rock. Like, that's not how it is. He's actually that which brings all the phenomena together.”

In this conversation, we discuss the transcendent power of art, what Walter White got wrong, and how meaning is central to the act of perception itself.

You can start with this clip, on how political activism is turning into a bad substitute for a relationship with the transcendent.