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One of the favorite taunts of the New Atheists is that religious people believe in an “invisible friend.”
They are implying, of course, that religion is little more than a pathetic exercise in wishful thinking, a reversion to childish patterns of projection and self-protection. It is well past time, they say, for believers to grow up, leave their cherished fantasies behind, and face the real world.
In offering this characterization, the New Atheists are showing themselves to be disciples of the old atheists such as Feuerbach, Marx, Comte, and Freud, all of whom made more or less similar observations.
I’m writing here to let atheists know that I think they’re right, at least about God being an invisible friend. Where they’re wrong is in supposing that surrendering to this unseen reality is de-humanizing or infantilizing.
The invisible world
First, a word about invisibility. It is an extraordinary prejudice of post-Enlightenment Western thought that visible things — empirically verifiable objects and states of affairs — are the most “real” things around.
For centuries prior to the Enlightenment, some of the very brightest people thought precisely the opposite. Most famously, Plato felt that the empirical world is evanescent and contingent in the extreme, made up of unstable objects that pass in and out of existence; whereas the invisible world of forms and mathematical truths is permanent, reliable, and supremely beautiful.
You can see two apples combining with two oranges to make four things, but when you grasp the principle that two plus two equals four, you have moved out of the empirical realm and into a properly invisible order, which is more pure and absolute than anything that the senses could take in.
I’m not denigrating the material world, as Plato and his followers often did; I’m simply trying to show that it is by no means obvious that the invisible can simply be equated with the fantastic or the unreal.
God’s invisibility
Now to God’s invisibility. One of the most fundamental mistakes made by atheists is to suppose that God is a supreme being, an impressive item within or alongside the universe.
As David Bentley Hart argued, the gods of ancient mythology or the watchmaker God of 18th century Deism might fit such a description, but the God presented by the Bible and classical theism has nothing to do with it.
The true God is the reason there is something rather than nothing, the ultimate explanation for why the world should exist at all. Accordingly, he is not a being, but rather, as Thomas Aquinas put it, ipsum esse subsistens, the sheer act of to be itself.
But all of this must imply God’s invisibility. Whatever can be seen is, ipso facto, a being, a particular state of affairs, and hence something that can be placed in a genus, compared with other finite realities. The visible is, by definition, conditioned — and God is the unconditioned.
In affirming God’s invisibility, I am not placing limits on him, as though he were a ghost floating above physical objects. The invisible God is he whose reality transcends and includes whatever perfection can be found in creatures, since he himself is the source and ground of creatureliness. Anything other than an invisible God would be a conditioned thing and hence unworthy of worship.
Being friends with God
But is this invisible God my friend? One of the most important spiritual and metaphysical observations that can be made is this: God doesn’t need us. He needs nothing.
And yet the universe, in all of its astonishing complexity and beauty, exists. Since God could not have made it out of self-interest, it can only follow that he made it out of love, a desire to share his goodness.
Though there is always the danger that this sort of language will be misconstrued in a sentimental way, it must be said: God continually loves the universe into existence. Thus, God’s fundamental stance toward all finite things is one of friendship.
Can’t we hear an overtone of this in Genesis’ insistence that the Creator, looking with infinite satisfaction on all he had made, found it “good, indeed very good”?
The role of human beings within God’s good creation is to be the image of God, reflecting the divine goodness into the world and channeling the world’s praise back to God. In a word, human beings are meant to be the friends of God par excellence.
Is any of this de-humanizing? It would be, if God were a supreme being and hence a rival to human flourishing. But the unconditioned Creator, the invisible God, is not a rival to anything he has made. Rather, as St. Irenaeus put it, Gloria Dei homo vivens (the glory of God is a human being fully alive).
So is God my invisible friend? Guilty as charged — and delightedly so.
Fr. Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and is the rector/president of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. Learn more at www.WordOnFire.org