The Existential Impulse

What drives our quest for spirituality, meaning and God?

What separates Homo sapiens from all other living things is our existential impulse. It’s my contention that this meaning-seeking instinct governs virtually everything we do, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s what gave birth to God.

I am not a Christian, even though from time to time I write about Jesus. I am not an atheist, even though I reject virtually every religious conception of God. Not that it matters, but I find it interesting that Jesus would technically qualify as an atheist for the same reasons I would, given our shared non-belief in the God of religious reasoning. I can ascribe significance to Jesus without being a Christian because I don’t believe Jesus ever had Christianity in mind.

The depth of my reasons for not being a Christian are equaled by my reasons for not being an atheist. It’s not just that I find religion’s view of God untenable, it’s that I view the entire construct of God and the question of God’s existence to be absurd. The very question, “Does God exist?” assumes that it is rational to take “God” as a noun and discuss if such a thing is real or not.

All iterations of “God” ultimately share the same noun-problem.

polytheism: gods-as-supreme-beings

deism: god-as-supreme-being, uninvolved in the world

theism: god-as-supreme-being, involved in the world

pantheism: god-as-supreme-being and world as one

panentheism: god-as-supreme-being in and beyond the world

atheism: nonexistence of god-as-supreme-being

No matter how you slice it, whenever the term “God” is used it is identifying a special thing that is distinct from everything else. Even if you identify “God” as a verb, unfolding process, ground of all being, there is still something different, special and distinct called “God”. That’s why it gets it’s own word.

A “tree” and a “rock” are two different words because they identify two distinct things. Likewise, “God” and the “world” are two different words because they refer to two different things. Otherwise, you would just say “world”. But because there is this other special thing we are also referring to, it get’s its own word - “God”.

The problem with sticking the words “God” and “world” together is that you can verify the existence of the thing we are using the term “world” to identify, but you can’t verify the thing we are using the word “God” to reference. You don’t need faith to know there is a world, but you do to believe there is a God.

I’ve written a lot on the subject of “God” and I’m not going to re-hash all that here. A few notable articles I’ve published on the subject include:

• The Either/Or Problem with God

• The Post-Religion "God" Dilemma

• Which "God" should you believe in... or none of the above

• Not Religious and Not Atheist

• Is there a God beyond God?

• Theology's House of Cards

• Why we need a radical theology to survive and thrive.

• Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater (or should you?)

• Unbeliever: The Post-Religion Move to Agnosticism and Atheism

Post-Religion Spirituality

In 2021 I founded the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality (CNRS). In my view, “spirituality” is an innate instinct of human beings. In the evolutionary process our species acquired a psychological feature, which I call the “existential impulse”. This impulse seeks and projects meaning upon the lived human experience. In my view, this instinct grew out of necessity and became central to our survival as a species. I discuss this in more detail in my series on the evolution of religion.

In a nutshell, there are three givens to human existence that especially trouble us:

Human mortality - we all die

Human groundlessness - we don’t know why we are here

Human insatiability - we are never satisfied

Each of these trigger our existential impulse, demanding resolution. The religious imagination staved off these troubling features to the universe, until it didn’t. I discuss all of this in a recent six-part series, “The Great Reconstruction”:

• Part One: Everything is not okay... but life is the greatest good

• Part Two: What if the meaning of life is... life?

• Part Three: Is the world worth saving?

• Part Four: In Search of Existential Health in a Defective World

• Part Five: Put Down Your Holy Grail and ToE and Grab a Shovel

• Part Six: Is the metasolution for the metacrisis... inner anarchy?

How does our existential impulse operate? A few examples of the existential impulse is our capacity for experiencing (as well as and our need and desire for):

• a felt sense of value, meaning and significance to our existence (“I matter”)

• a trustworthy and coherent narrative and blueprint for understanding and living life (“this makes sense”)

• longing for perpetual becoming, extending outward upon an infinite field of possibilities and potentialities

• participation in a reality or story that transcends our individual self (“it’s bigger than me”)

• experiences of joy, love, beauty, purpose, and profundity at our point of contact with the world (“life is good”)

• resiliency with life’s vulnerabilities, uncertainties, complexities, ambiguities and difficulties (“we can do hard things”)

• an internalized solidarity and symbiotic relatedness with all living things (“we’re all in this together”)

Not all living things share this existential impulse. My dog doesn’t fret over his life’s meaning, and the trees in our front yard are not experiencing a lack of joy and love. There’s a reason why human beings created the idea of “God” and not dogs and trees. It’s of no use to them and it’s everything to us. Religious imagination, and the systems and structures that propagate it, fashioned “God” to be the master-signifier that could satisfy our existential impulse.

An interesting question one could ask is:

Were we created by God with an existential impulse or did we create God out of our existential impulse?

That God is a product of our existential impulse is bolstered by the fact that God conspicuously resembles the human being, albeit a supreme edition. The anthropomorphic nature of God found in religion is a bit suspicious. Had dogs or trees acquired the existential impulse, God may have had four legs or a trunk with branches. Over time, our human conception of God has evolved alongside our growing knowledge of the universe and the nature of reality. Modern science and quantum physics made short-order of the theistic God, in favor of the pantheist and panentheist iterations.

It’s very difficult for modern science and religion to stay in their respective lanes because too often they are positing a similar explanation for the nature of reality, but building it upon different assumptions and using a discrete language to portray it. People have tried to synthesize religion and science, such as Baruch Spinoza (who I discuss here), only to draw the ire of both.

Any human conception of God is determined and limited by the machinations and structures of the mind, and the need to satisfy our existential impulse. I am always surprised by those who challenge this assertion. All theology is subjective and projective.

For example, religious people tend to begin with the a priori assumption that we have a “soul”. Some views suggest the soul and mind are interconnected, while others propose they are separate entities, with varying degrees of interaction. Of course one could just as easily claim that the soul is also a creation of the existential impulse, namely the need to fashion a transcendent and eternal component of the human person that makes perfect peace and harmony available now and the promise of immortality for later.

Upon further examination, the entire question about the existence of God seems a bit absurd. “God” is a word we chose to identify the ultimate referent or existential master-signifier. The fact that the word “God” exists is not evidence that it directly corresponds to an objective reality in the universe. The term “God” depends upon countless other words for definition and description, all of which are part of a linguistic system we created and has no stable or absolute underpinning. We can thank Jacques Derrida for helping us face these facts, which I explicate in this article.

An attempt to prove the “existence of God” is a house of cards. It’s not my intent for that statement to be an assertion that something we would call “God” does not exist. My point is that trying to substantiate this claim outside of faith is not possible. For even the very words we use to discuss it are not grounded in a permanent foundation. One could ask if there is a God that exists independently of our mind, human language and our existential impulse. It’s a question with no definitive answer.

Friedrich Nietzsche, through a character in his writing, announced “God is dead”, which I discuss in the article, The Perfect Murder. Nietzsche’s point was that the theory of Darwinian evolution no longer necessitated the belief in “God” to explain the origins of life or the existence of the universe. What Nietzsche didn’t quite understand (at first) is that people believe in “God” because of the existential impulse, and theorizing the universe based on said-God was simply the window dressing. Science’s understanding of the universe doesn’t comfort the existential impulse, which is why the next move often involves wrapping a more scientific framework around “God” to keep God going.

Another question that could be asked is:

Can a meaningful spirituality adequately address the human existential impulse, with or without “God”?

A person’s way of experiencing or cultivating spirituality may involve religion and belief in God or not. The term “non-religious spirituality” has its problems, but I use it to refer to engaging with one’s existential impulse, free from the mindsets, beliefs and structures of traditional religion. It’s not that I think all religion fails this impulse, even though much of my professional work involves counseling people who were deeply damaged by religion.