The Reality of the One

Dan is an Atheist. One day he proudly proclaimed, “There is no God.”

So I asked him, “Do you know everything?”

Looking at me weirdly, he answered, “No, of course not.”

So I said, “So what you don’t know might be God. Therefore you can’t rationally claim there is no God. The most you can claim is that you don’t know whether or not God exists.”

Dan quickly realized that Agnosticism is rational, while Atheism is not.

If reason is your guide, the most honest position is not atheism but uncertainty—the acknowledgment that you simply do not know.

And that, my friend, is where the pursuit of wisdom begins.

1. First, I must define my terms.

1) What do I mean by reality?

By reality I mean that which truly is—what possesses actuality in the fullest sense. The One truly is.

Without getting into it here, just know that it’s better philosophically to speak of the reality of the One rather than the existence of God. Most people don’t make that distinction, but it matters.

2) What do I mean by the One?

The One is the Transpersonal Rational Ground of Being.

– By Transpersonal I mean beyond individual ego or personal identity.
– By Rational I mean acting according to logic, order, and purpose.
– By Ground of Being I mean Being Itself—the ultimate reality from which all existence derives.

Please remember that the God of the Philosophers is not the God of popular religion, that is why I prefer using the Neoplatonic term “the One.” The Bible was written by Bronze Age peasants, not philosophers, so its portrayal of the One is bound to be crude, unphilosophical, and anthropomorphic.

Before we look at the evidence, let me answer an objection:

The diversity of religious views about God does not disprove God’s reality; it merely exposes the range of human projections onto the divine. Each culture interprets the ineffable through its own symbols, language, and experience. It’s only natural that people project personality onto the Absolute—our minds seek familiarity even in mystery.

While religion is often shaped by language, geography, and culture, the belief in an Absolute is not. It is nearly universal. The question, then, becomes why does this intuition persists across time and place.

Now let’s look at the evidence:

1. Design Argument

There is unmistakable design in the universe—and wherever there is design, there must be a Designer.

Even Richard Dawkins concedes that “the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design, as if by a master watchmaker.”

Evolution may describe how life adapts, but it does not explain the origin of the laws, order, and rational structure that make adaptation possible.

The design we see is not an illusion, as Dawkins insists. The profound order, rationality, and harmony woven throughout nature are not tricks of perception—they are evidence of an underlying intelligence at the very foundation of reality.

Further Proof

Consider the fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants. The gravitational force, strong nuclear force, and others are exquisitely calibrated to allow stars, planets, and life to exist. Shift any by even 1% and reality collapses—no atoms, no chemistry, no existence. This isn’t adaptation; it’s a pre-loaded blueprint demanding explanation.

Or reflect on DNA as digital code—life’s instruction set, encoding precise protein-building algorithms more complex than human software. Random mutations tweak it, but the origin of such specified complexity points unmistakably to intelligence.

Finally, ponder reality’s mathematical intelligibility. Why does the universe obey elegant equations our minds can actually comprehend?

As physicist Eugene Wigner marveled, this is “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”—as if reality were structured by a rational Mind for rational discoverers.

2. Cosmological Argument

Since the universe had a beginning, it had to have a Beginner. Now that Beginner was either Nothing or God. But you know what you get from nothing? Nothing. It seems more reasonable to hold that the universe originates from a transcendent source — whether understood as divine creation or as emanation from the One.

We know that the universe is expanding. And if we rewind that expansion, we go back to a singularity and the big bang. Who pulled the trigger on the Big bang?

Process philosophy sees reality as a continuous flow of interrelated events rather than static things. Everything exists in constant becoming, each event arising from prior causes and shaping those that follow—pointing to a necessary ground behind all contingent processes.

From that perspective we can say:

– Every effect, by its very nature, requires a cause.
– Everything within the cosmos exists as an event in process—arising, changing, and passing within the web of becoming.
– Every contingent event depends upon prior conditions for its existence.
– It follows that the totality of contingent events cannot be self-caused.
– Therefore, the ultimate cause of all contingent events must itself be non-contingent. That is, it must be necessary, self-existent, and the ground of process itself.

Another way of stating it is that the entire cosmos is an interrelated process of events. They are actions, not entities. But actions do not act by themselves, they need an actor. That Actor is God.

And we can go back to the idea that God is the first cause. And uncaused cause. God doesn’t need a cause, because God is not an event. God is the Ground of Being. The cosmos is an event. And events need causes.

Another way to put it is that events are contingent. Events require actors, actors are not contingent, they are necessary. There are no actions without an actor. And there would be no creation without a Creator.

3. Prime Mover

When Aristotle talked of an unmoved Mover, his point is simple: matter is inert. It doesn’t move itself. Anything in motion was put in motion by something else. But that chain of movers can’t go back forever, or nothing would ever move at all. So there has to be a mover that gives motion without needing to be moved — an unmoved, immaterial source. That’s what Aristotle meant by God.

4. Argument from Contingency

– Look—everything we see is contingent. You, me, stars, atoms, even the laws of physics and the whole universe? None of it had to exist. All of it leans on something else that could’ve been different.
– No single contingent thing explains itself—it’s all borrowed existence, resting on prior stuff that’s just as shaky.
– So the whole pile of contingent reality can’t explain itself either. It’s like an endless stack of “what’s holding you up?” No matter how big the stack, you’re still asking why the stack exists at all.
– Only a non-contingent reality cuts through that—a necessary being whose essence is existence itself. No leaning, no borrowing, pure self-sufficient Being.
– That’s what philosophy means by God: not some big thing in the universe, but Being itself, holding everything else in existence.

5. Nature’s Laws

Nature’s laws show purposeful design—steady rules and processes that build complex life from simple beginnings—requiring a smart Lawgiver as their starting point.

As Steven Hawkins noted, “The overwhelming impression is one of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws.”

And as Anthony Flew pointed out, “If you accept the fact that there are laws, then something must impose that regularity of the universe.”

The laws are written in a cosmic code that scientists must crack in order to reveal the message that is, in Charles Darwin’s words, “nature’s message, God’s message, take your choice, but not our message.”

Albert Einstein, who did not self-identify as a Deist, concluded, “The harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” This superior intelligence is God.

6. Moral Law

Moral law, as a firm rule that binds all thinking people everywhere, needs the same higher source, or it would be just personal opinions.

An intuitive truth is known by its universality across cultures and antiquity in humanity’s earliest wisdom traditions, as exemplified by the Golden Rule.

One has to explain why the golden rule is known not only in Judaism and Christianity, but parallel formulations are found in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and in ancient Greek, Roman, and Stoic ethics, as well as in some secular humanist and modern philosophical ethics that emphasize mutual responsibility and universal application.

7. Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

Consider this: there are 38 distinct arguments for God’s existence, grouped like this—six cosmological, three ontological, five teleological, two moral, one from consciousness, three epistemological, five experiential, four aesthetic and existential, three scientific and cosmic, three pragmatic and decision-based, four self-referential, and two additional variants. The sheer number and variety of these arguments provide cumulative evidence for God that overcomes the flaws in any one alone.

Conclusion

Throughout this discussion, multiple lines of evidence for God have been presented, whose cumulative force is sufficient.

Yet for those with a prior disposition against God—a kind of Deophobia—this sufficiency is never acknowledged; there never is enough evidence for them.

A mind closed in advance will not be persuaded, regardless of the strength of argument—“a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

While anyone is free to reject belief in God, at some point it must be recognized that the obstacle is not a lack of evidence, but a refusal to consider it.