On God

The first principle

Caption: A surfer navigates the conference of difference $\{\Delta\}$ of wave, wind and gravity—an AI visualization of the dynamic process that governs all existence, courtesy of Nano Banana.

Introduction

God is the one thing that needs no other thing to exist. This is the simplest definition of a 'first principle': 'the fundamental reality from which all else is derived'. Yet this bedrock concept has been the most contested idea in human history. We have named it Dao, Dharma, and God; we have envisioned it as a personal Creator, an impersonal Absolute, or a cosmic law. This article argues that the Gospel of Being cuts through this ancient debate with a razor-sharp proposition: God is not a supreme being, but the conference of difference—the constant expression principal to existence itself.^[1]

Classical positions on the first principle

To understand the audacity of this idea, we must first survey the ideological battlefield it enters. The history of the first principle is a tale of two fundamental intuitions: is God a Something or a Someone?

The earliest voices, profound and ancient, insisted God was a 'Something.' In the fertile plains of the Ganges River Basin, the sages of the Upanishads identified not a deity, but the ultimate ground of reality: Brahman. This is not a personified god, but the highest universal principle—'That' from which the entire cosmos proceeds, and to which it all ultimately returns.^[2] As the Ultimate Reality, Brahman is the origin and cause of all that exists, the fundamental substrate and source of the universe itself.^[3]

This impersonal absolute was later philosophically refined as Saccidānanda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss), but its core Upanishadic definition is starkly ontological: the one, non-dual reality from which all plurality arises.

Around the same time, Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), who also taught in this region, took impersonalism further by rejecting any metaphysical first cause as unverifiable speculation.^[4] For him, the fundamental principle was not a being but the impersonal, relentless process of cause and effect known as Pratītyasamutpāda, or Dependent Origination.

Centuries later, a powerful counter-voice emerged. In Persia, Zoroaster proclaimed a cosmos built on a moral foundation. His Ahura Mazda was an uncreated, benevolent person—a divine will engaged in a cosmic war against a separate force of destruction. This was a revolutionary framing of the first principle as a conscious, good Creator.

It is a striking historical fact that Abrahamic faiths share profound echoes with this Zoroastrian vision. The architecture of their cosmic vision includes: a supreme good God opposed by a powerful spirit of evil; a final judgment where the righteous are resurrected and the wicked punished; and a rich world of angels and demons. For many, the historical context—the crystallization of these Jewish ideas during the Persian period—makes the case for 'influence' compelling.^[5] For others, the evidence remains intriguing but circumstantial.^[6] This very debate underscores the power of Zoroaster's idea: a personal God of good, standing against defined cosmic evil, is a paradigm so potent it would come to dominate the Western religious worldview.

The Greek philosophers, from the Pre-Socratics to Aristotle, sought an arche, a first principle. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover was the logical culmination: a necessary, eternal, and purely actual first cause of all motion and being.^[7]

Yet this was a cause of a profoundly impersonal kind. The 'Unmoved Mover' is not a creator as in a being who wills the universe into existence from nothing, but an uncaused cause who imposes order and purpose upon eternal, pre-existing matter. In this context, the First Principle is the source of the Universe's cosmic order—not of its raw existence.

This parallels early views in Abrahamic faith who described God's construction of the universe as creatio ex materia—creation out of matter. Over time, this transitioned to the more radical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing if only to assert God's absolute sovereignty over creation. It is this revised doctrine that became a cornerstone of classical theism across all three Abrahamic faiths, explicitly articulated in texts like 2 Maccabees, the works of Theophilus of Antioch, and the Qur'an.^[8] This was the ultimate 'Someone': a volitional, relational entity, now understood as radically transcendent and ontologically distinct from creation.

The tension between these views (Someone vs Something) was reframed in the early modern period. Baruch Spinoza, with breathtaking audacity, declared Deus sive Natura—God or Nature.^[9] For Spinoza, God was the single, infinite, necessary substance of which all things are mere modes. This was a God who was immanent, deterministic and utterly impersonal, deliberately blurring the line between Creator as Someone vs Creator as Something.

By the 19th century, the very concept of a first principle was under siege. Scientific Naturalism, with theories like the Big Bang, proposed a physical origin story that rendered a metaphysical God unnecessary for many. And from the abyss, the nihilism popularized by Nietzsche declared that the 'death of God' left a universe devoid of any intrinsic purpose or foundational truth. The symposium of the ages, instead of synthesizing, had instead devolved into a cause for hope on the one side and hopelessness on the other.

Current flashpoints

This historical divergence has crystallized into a set of modern, unresolved tensions that define our contemporary understanding of the divine. Is the Ultimate Reality a cognitive being in which to relate to, or a metaphysical principle, force, or ground? Is it entirely separate from the cosmos, or intimately woven into its fabric? The ancient 'Problem of Evil' remains a formidable logical obstacle. For example, how can an all-powerful, all-good God coexist with the rampant suffering in the world? Meanwhile, modern science presents both a challenge and a potential partner—can the Big Bang or quantum field theory be reconciled with, or even replace, metaphysical first principles? And underpinning it all is the existential horror of Nihilism: if there is no discernible first principle, are we left adrift in a universe without inherent meaning?

How the Gospel of Being sees God

It is into this cacophony that the Gospel of Being speaks, not with another shout, but with a quiet, logical re-calibration. Its model is a radical departure that reframes the terms of the entire debate.

The Gospel of Being defines God not as a perfect: 'complete' being (an irrational construct), but rather the constant expression—the conference of difference—Principal to being. In terms of the Gospel of Being, God is not an entity within the system of existence, but the metaphysical process primitive, Principal to it.^[10] This is not a God of substance but a God of process that transforms substance—hence God the Creator.

The core of this ontology is a deceptively simple proposition:

All existence is a conference of difference, a 'condition of bearing together' transforming the 'condition of bearing apart'.^[11]

Simply put, the conference of difference $\{\Delta\}$ is the process primitive, the Gospel: 'God spell' that casts existence $\exists$. Genesis (the process of generating) is not a singular event frozen in some primordial past but rather the perpetual conference of difference that functions to transform existence. Every perceived moment, every transformation, is a local instance of this fundamental, relational activity.

In this ontology, the traditional divine attributes of the Trinity are re-framed as consubstantial modalities:

• conference of difference $\{\Delta\}$ as cause;
• existence $\exists$ as effect;
• ontological totality itself $\exists = \{\Delta\}$ as essence.

These three primordial modalities correspond directly to the traditional divine attributes, which are redefined as follows:

• God's omnipotence: as the 'condition of enabling everything' (Koan 40.2);
• God's omnipresence: as 'caused to go before everything' (Koan 40.3); and
• God's omniscience as the 'condition of realizing everything'—both the act of knowing and the act of making real' (Koan 40.4).

To be created in God’s 'image', then, is not to bear a physical or psychological likeness. It is to be a participatory expression of the conference of difference. The existence of every being, its very 'condition of being' is a localized reflection of the Principal’s functional ethic (Koan 40.5). And God’s perfection: 'completeness'—it lacks nothing required to declare being, thus enabling the endless, dynamic transformation of existence itself (Koan 40.6).

Convergence and divergence

This model does not emerge in a vacuum; it engages in a sophisticated dance with the traditions that preceded it, finding points of agreement and radical departure.

It converges with Zoroastrianism on the concept of a cosmic creative principle. However, it diverges fundamentally by rejecting a metaphysical dualism where good and evil are separate, co-eternal substances. In the Gospel of Being, the dynamic of opposition is not denied—competition: 'the process of petitioning against' is a real and potent expression of the conference of difference. Yet, this is not the primary creative mode. The system grants ontological priority to co-petition: 'the process of petitioning together', which synergizes difference to generate new ability, whereas competition often seeks to eliminate it. Thus, the Gospel of Being does not ignore the reality of conflict but frames it as a specific, often less optimal, instance within a monist framework governed by a singular, process primitive.^[12]

It finds deep convergence with Eastern traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism in its commitment to an impersonal, non-dual ground of being. However, it diverges by providing room for an explicit ontological construct ('God') and a precise, almost mathematical formalism $\exists = \{\Delta\}$ for this ground, moving beyond apophatic description or phenomenological observation.^[13]

It converges with Ancient Greek philosophy by understanding the First Principle as an impersonal, foundational cause. Yet it diverges on the fundamental category of this principle. For Aristotle, the 'Unmoved Mover' was a substance-primitive—a static, purely actual being whose nature is self-contemplation.^[14] For the Gospel of Being, the 'Unmoved Mover' is a process-primitive—a constant expression whose ethic: 'character' is the conference of difference. If Aristotle’s 'Unmoved Mover' is the ultimate noun; the Gospel of Being's, 'Unmoved Mover' is the ultimate verb.

The Gospel of Being's relationship with Abrahamic Monotheism is one of the most dramatic. It converges on the idea of God as a transcendent source distinct from creation. But it diverges radically by ejecting the personal, volitional deity in favor of a universally observed process primitive: the conference of difference. For the Gospel of Being, God is literally creation: the 'process of creating'. Creation is not what God does, it's what God is.

With Spinoza, it converges on a monistic framework where God is immanent cause. But it diverges crucially by re-conceptualizing God, not as a static substance, but as a condition: 'process of declaring together' defined by the conference of difference functioning as Creator.

Finally, it diverges fundamentally from Modern Naturalism and Nihilism by affirming a positive, necessary ground of being. But it surprisingly converges with them in rejecting supernatural intervention, while offering a robust metaphysical alternative to pure materialism.

Take-away

So, what are we left with? The search for 'God' is ultimately the search for the First Principle—that which originates all existence. The Gospel of Being identifies this not as a supernatural being, but as the very process primitive of existence itself: the conference of difference in which the 'condition of being' that is existence itself is expressed: 'pressed out'. This is the God of reality, the God that functions to adapt, evolve and transform all existence.^[15] Hence, there should be no surprise that the literal ethic: 'character' of God is observed everywhere—as of course it would have to be for God the Creator: 'that which creates'.

The existential implications are profound. We are not subjects of a distant king, but participatory expressions of the process primitive itself—literally in God's image: 'expression'. Our acts of creation, our thoughts, our very relationships manifest through the conference of difference. Thus God, as cause to existence is not some transcendental being to whom one must offer prayer as much as the first principle by which all prayers are to be answered. This reframes the very concept of divine will. This is not a god who asks for the adherence of followers, for why would an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God need ask of anything when they as God define the process of everything.

This may not be the God we want—it does not exist as a supreme being or guarantee some idealized cosmic justice—but it is the God we must have to exist, the God we are part of and the God we cannot avoid or ignore. The Gospel of Being offers a foundation for purpose and meaning, not in a promised afterlife but grounded in the very 'condition of being' that is existence.^[16]

The Gospel of Being

by John Mackay

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