Childish Notions of God

Addressing Atheist Misconceptions

Introduction

Since my recent conversion experience, I’ve been diving into topics like Catholicism, Christianity, and the concept of God on my YouTube channel. Since I started talking about these things, I’ve noticed a lot of atheists popping up in the comments. And honestly, many of them have been demonstrating what I can only describe as a very childish, juvenile conception of what God is. You know the type—your old-school Reddit atheists, the scoffers, the skeptics who are always going on about how it’s irrational to believe in a “magic sky daddy” or some kind of super-powered entity floating around in the world. People like Richard Dawkins and other popular atheists often exemplify this mindset, and it’s something I want to unpack in this essay.

These critics seem to think God is just another creature, like Zeus or a fairy—something you could point to in spacetime if only you had the right telescope. But that’s not what classical theism is about, and it’s not what Catholics believe about God. I’ve been presenting philosophical arguments for God—think Aquinas-style reasoning, like arguments from contingency and cosmological arguments. These aren’t fluffy stories; they’re grounded in premises that flow logically from self-evident axioms to solid conclusions. Yet, the responses I get from some atheists reveal they’re stuck on a simplistic level. So, let’s dive in and clear up these childish notions of theology.

Philosophical Arguments, Not Fairytales

I’ve spent time on this platform and YouTube laying out arguments for God that aren’t about blind faith—they’re purely philosophical. Take the idea of a necessarily existing Prime Mover, an all-perfect, all-good being who’s the fundamental ground of reality itself. This isn’t some guy in the clouds; it’s the transcendent conception at the heart of classical theism. God isn’t just another thing in the universe—God is being itself, Existence itself, pure Being.

But here’s what I keep hearing from these atheists: “Where’s the evidence? Show me the empirical proof for this ground of being! Where’s the data for existence itself?” I had someone literally ask me, “Where’s the evidence that the ontological ground of being exists? Can you point me to it? Why do you believe in such a thing?” Statements like that just scream a childish understanding of theology. They’re treating God like a physical object—an entity you could measure with a ruler or spot with a microscope. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

This reaction also betrays a deeper assumption: a kind of empiricism, verificationism, or logical positivism—call it scientism if you want. It’s the idea that we can only know reality through physical measurement devices—thermometers, telescopes, whatever. If you can’t detect something with your five senses or build a protocol to measure it, then it doesn’t exist, and we can’t know it. But let’s flip that around: how do they know that principle is true? Can they point a telescope at the claim that “we can only know reality through physical measurement devices” and see it shining back at them? Of course not.

The Self-Defeating Trap of Empiricism

That principle—the one saying all knowledge comes from empirical measurement—isn’t something you can prove with a physical tool. You can’t weigh it, scan it, or photograph it. It’s a truth of reason, a philosophical claim. So, these atheists are fine with some kinds of philosophy—they’re okay with their own assumptions bottoming out in intuition or logic. They just don’t like it when theology does the same thing. When they demand empirical evidence for God’s existence, they’re showing they don’t get the level of discourse we’re operating on. They’re assuming God is just another entity in spacetime, something we could tag and track like a proton or a planet.

To use a crude analogy, it’s like a wave in the ocean asking for empirical evidence that the ocean exists. The wave wouldn’t exist without the ocean—it’s the very ground that makes the wave possible. God is similar, but on a grander scale. God isn’t just an ocean of water; God is an ocean of Being, of pure Existence. God is the ontological ground of reality itself, the foundation of spacetime. But here’s the kicker: the ground of spacetime isn’t inside spacetime—it’s beyond it, transcendental to it. So, asking for empirical evidence within spacetime for the ground of spacetime is incoherent. It’s a category error. You’re not grasping what we mean when we say God is the ground of being.

God Isn’t Just Another Entity

Let’s break this down further. Inside spacetime, you’ve got all these entities—quarks, electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, stars, trees, rocks, photons, light waves, you name it. These are objects, things that exist. And they’re contingent—they could exist or not exist. That tree over there came from somewhere; it might not have grown. Something caused it to be. The same goes for everything in the physical cosmos. Now, imagine we’re good little scientists, cataloging every single entity in the universe—every quark, every galaxy. We make our list, and it’s exhaustive. Would we get to the end and say, “Oh, there’s God, just another item on the list”? No. That’s a total misconception.

God isn’t another type of entity. God isn’t a creature like Zeus or Santa Claus or a fairy. Those are limited beings—powerful, maybe, but still finite. Zeus, for instance, might be a god in mythology, but he’s not Athena. He’s got limitations; he’s not everything. To be Zeus, he can’t be something else, so his being is restricted. But God, as the prime mover, the ground of being, is the fullness of being. God underlies all contingent reality. If you ask, “Where did Zeus come from?” or “What created Athena?” you’re climbing a hierarchy of causes. You keep going up—where did that more powerful god come from?—until you hit a necessarily existing being that wasn’t created itself. That’s God.

Beyond Spacetime: The Eternal Cause

Think about the Big Bang. Science tells us spacetime began at a singularity. The equations of general relativity show that before the singularity, there was no space, no time—those came after. So, whatever caused the Big Bang must be outside of spacetime. If it’s outside of time, it’s not bound by time—it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It’s eternal. If it’s outside of space, it’s not constrained by spatial limits—it’s unlimited. That’s what we’re talking about with God: an eternal, unlimited being who isn’t just another contingent thing.

Atheists often trip over this. They’ll say, “Well, the Big Bang came from nothing.” But that doesn’t make sense—nothing can come from nothing. Or they’ll treat “nothing” like it’s something—a vacuum state, quantum foam, or an unstable void. But those are entities, things with properties. Pure nothingness wouldn’t have properties like instability or foaminess—it’s nothing! So, whatever caused the Big Bang wasn’t nothing; it had to have existence. And since spacetime came from it, that existence must be beyond spacetime—unlimited, eternal, necessary.

Existence Itself

This brings us to a big question: why is there something rather than nothing? The fact that existence exists is self-evident—we’re here, after all. But what is existence? If we catalog all the entities in the physical universe, is existence just one of them? No. Existence isn’t another contingent thing; it’s the necessary ground that makes all entities possible. It’s not an object you can detect with a measuring device—it’s what makes detection possible in the first place. That’s God: pure existence, necessarily existing, outside the limitations of spacetime.

So, when atheists demand empirical evidence for God, they’re missing the point. You can’t build a device to detect pure Existence because it’s the ground of being that allows devices to exist. It’s arrived at philosophically, through reason, not through lab experiments. And it’s not just an abstract concept—God, as the fullness of being, lacks nothing. That means God is all-perfect, all-good, because evil is a privation, a lack. If you lack nothing, there’s no room for evil—you’re wholly good.

A Personal, Willing God

More than that, God isn’t just some static principle. To create spacetime—to go from the eternal and infinite to the finite universe—requires a choice, an act of will. That means God has a mind, a personal intelligence, a divine consciousness. God isn’t a platonic form floating out there; God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being who willed the universe into existence. You’re not going to spot that with a physical instrument—it’s beyond the tools of science.

This is where the “where’s the evidence?” crowd shows they don’t get it. They haven’t wrestled with the philosophical implications of classical theism, from Aquinas to even Plato. The Neoplatonists talked about “the One”—a transcendent unity behind all the many entities of reality. Where did the many come from? They share existence, and that points to a oneness, an ultimate reality, the ground of being. The early Church Fathers saw this as akin to the Abrahamic God—not a distant deist creator who starts the universe and walks away, but a God who sustains reality, intimately close to it. Like the ocean to the wave, God doesn’t just cause spacetime—God upholds it, moment by moment.

Conclusion: Moving Past Childish Notions

At this point, I might be repeating myself, but I really want to drive this home. The atheists on my platform—like the popular “Four Horsemen” types, Richard Dawkins included—keep demonstrating these childish notions of theology. Not all atheists are like this—some engage with the arguments seriously and respectfully—but too many fall into this trap. They’ve got this ego complex, this prideful idea that believing in God makes you an idiot, that no modern, scientific person could possibly buy into it. Meanwhile, philosophers and theologians have been thinking carefully about this for thousands of years.

To dismiss that tradition as nonsense? That’s the sin of pride. And the irony is, when these critics open their mouths, they often show they don’t even understand what they’re rejecting. So, that’s my goal here—to clear up these misconceptions and push back against the juvenile takes.