What If God Is Existence Itself?

We enter a world we did not choose, live through circumstances we cannot fully control, and try to understand a reality larger than our knowledge. No individual understands Earth completely. Humanity still debates the nature of consciousness, the foundations of quantum physics, and why anything exists at all.

The possibility I want to explore is this: God is the fundamental reality within which everything exists—including matter, consciousness, space, and time.

On this view, every person, planet, thought, and event belongs to the same underlying existence. Beginnings and endings occur within that reality; the reality itself is not something born at a particular moment.

This proposal makes several substantial claims: that existence has a necessary foundation, that this foundation is one, and that everything—including time—depends on it. Each claim needs an argument. The history of philosophy offers several, while modern physics helps us examine some assumptions about the world those arguments seek to explain.

Avicenna and Leibniz approached existence through the distinction between what is contingent and what is necessary.

Something contingent could have failed to exist. A particular tree, person, or planet depends on conditions that might have been different. Something necessary, by contrast, could not have failed to exist.

A simplified argument proceeds from three premises:

1. Something exists.
2. Every contingent thing depends on something that explains its existence.
3. These dependencies cannot form a circle or continue indefinitely without a foundation.

If we accept these premises, we can follow the dependencies of an existing thing until we reach a foundation. That foundation cannot itself be contingent, because a contingent foundation would require something further to explain it.

The conclusion is that something exists necessarily.

The reasoning is conditional. A critic might reject the demand for an explanation and hold that reality simply exists as a brute fact. Another might accept an infinite chain of dependence. Someone else might argue that the physical cosmos itself exists necessarily, with no deeper foundation required.

These alternatives matter. “Necessary” does not automatically mean “divine,” and establishing some necessary foundation would not establish that there is only one.

Spinoza takes the argument further.

In his Ethics, he argued that God is an absolutely infinite substance, that no other substance exists, and that everything that exists is in God. His presentation follows a geometrical structure: definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations.

The word “in” matters. A wave exists as a form of the ocean. It has a recognizable shape and history, but its existence depends on the water composing it. This analogy helps express how particular things might be modifications of a more fundamental reality.

An analogy cannot establish the metaphysics. It can, however, make the proposed relationship clearer: individual things have their own characteristics while depending on a reality they do not exist apart from.

Calling the totality of reality “God” makes the statement that everything belongs to God true by definition. The substantive claim is that reality constitutes one necessary substance. Spinoza attempted to establish this through arguments about substance, attributes, and dependence. Those arguments remain debated. Read more about Spinoza’s account.

Eternity introduces another distinction.

Necessary existence concerns whether something could have failed to exist. Endless duration concerns how far time extends. These are different questions.

Spinoza understood eternity through necessary existence rather than through an immeasurably long lifespan. On the interpretation explored here, time is an aspect of reality, and the proposed foundation is not an object with an age.

This offers a way to understand “no beginning and no ending.” It could be compatible with a physical universe that has a first moment. It does not establish that the universe has existed for infinitely many years.

Change would still belong to this picture. Stars could form, organisms could evolve, and people could make decisions. The permanence of a foundation would not require every expression of it to remain unchanged.

Quantum entanglement gives us a concrete reason to examine our assumptions about separateness.

In 2017, researchers using China’s Micius satellite distributed entangled photon pairs to two ground stations 1,203 kilometres apart. Their measurements revealed correlations violating a Bell inequality—correlations exceeding what local classical models permit under the test’s assumptions. The original study.

Separated quantum systems can therefore possess a joint state that cannot be described as two independent states. Their relationship is part of the physical description.

This does not establish that the entire universe is one substance or one mind. Nor does entanglement allow controllable messages to travel instantaneously. Its relevance is more specific: the assumption that every physical whole can be understood entirely through independently described parts is inadequate.

The idea of an all-knowing God raises another question: what do we imagine knowing everything would involve?

One possible picture is a vast observer maintaining a continuously updated model of the world. A computational thought experiment makes the demands of that picture tangible.

Earth contains roughly 10⁵⁰ atoms. Imagine assigning one idealized two-state variable to each atom, represented by one logical qubit. Then budget one elementary quantum operation on every variable once per femtosecond—a millionth of a billionth of a second.

That chosen schedule would involve:

• 10⁵⁰ logical qubits.
• 10¹⁵ update steps per second.
• 10⁶⁵ elementary quantum gate operations per second, counted across the entire machine.
• Approximately 10⁷⁰ gate operations over 24 hours.

Even a hypothetical machine performing a billion billion—10¹⁸—of those operations every second would fall short of that aggregate workload by a factor of 10⁴⁷.

These figures describe the workload we chose. One two-state variable per atom leaves out most atomic behavior, and a femtosecond is an illustrative time step, not a universal clock tick. Different models, algorithms, and accuracy requirements could demand very different resources. The calculation is neither a proven minimum nor a complete design for simulating Earth.

Managing the actual planet would introduce further demands. A simulation evolves a model from supplied information. Monitoring requires measurements, and control requires physical mechanisms that produce changes.

Communication also takes time. Light needs approximately 43 milliseconds to travel a distance equal to Earth’s diameter in vacuum. A central controller could not receive instantaneous updates from every location. Distributed systems can respond locally, but entanglement does not provide instantaneous global commands.

The computational analogy therefore makes a particular assumption: that knowing reality requires a separate system collecting and processing information about it.

An immanent account of God proposes a different relationship: particular things depend on fundamental reality for their existence. That changes the philosophical question, but it does not automatically explain awareness, prediction, or control. A medium present everywhere would not thereby become an agent capable of knowing and directing everything.

Existence having a physical state and existence knowing that state are separate claims.

This is also where the question of divine attributes becomes unavoidable.

Gödel’s ontological argument approaches God through explicit axioms about “positive” properties. Within its formal system, those axioms and definitions imply the necessary existence of a Godlike being. Researchers have checked a version using theorem-proving software. The formal proof and its verification.

That achievement establishes a logical relationship between assumptions and conclusions. Whether the assumptions describe reality remains a philosophical question. Gödel’s Godlike being also cannot simply be identified with Spinoza’s substance without further argument; the two approaches begin with different commitments.

Consciousness requires similar care. We know that thought is closely connected to brain activity, memory, perception, and emotion. We still lack a complete explanation of subjective experience. That leaves a question to investigate, rather than an established route to universal consciousness.

Mercy, agency, justice, and karma would each require additional support. Actions having consequences does not establish that those consequences are distributed according to moral desert. A necessary foundation would not automatically be a morally concerned one.

At this point, a reader could reasonably accept some version of the argument and call its conclusion “Nature.”

That possibility deserves a direct response. If “God” adds consciousness, purpose, or moral concern, those additions must be defended. They cannot be supplied by the word itself.

But “God” can also express a religious interpretation of our relationship to fundamental reality: that we participate in something ultimate, depend on it completely, and may regard that relationship with reverence. This interpretation concerns meaning as well as explanation. It is not an extra result extracted from quantum experiments or computational estimates.

The thesis I am exploring is therefore specific:

There is one necessary foundation of existence. Everything—including space, time, matter, and minds—is an expression of it. Its existence does not begin or end within time. We call this reality God.

The unfinished philosophical work lies in establishing necessity, unity, and the relationship between that foundation and the things depending on it. Further claims about divine awareness or goodness would extend the argument beyond those foundations.

If this view is true, our lives belong to the reality we are trying to understand. Every observation, every thought, and every attempt to explain existence would itself be an expression of it.

That is the possibility worth examining: whether the reality containing us all has the necessary and unified character this view attributes to God—and what, if anything, follows for how we understand our place within it.