When a Catholic says “God,” the word does not mean the most powerful thing in the universe. It means the ultimate Reality: that on which everything else depends, and which depends on nothing itself. Not a thing inside the world, however grand, but the reason there is a world at all. Whether anything like that exists is a different question, and not the one on this page. Here we are only asking what the word means.

Say What You Mean First

Asking a believer to say what he means is entirely fair. What is not fair is the next move — that the word must be meaningless, because no experiment could ever check it.

That objection comes from a rule popular in the 1920s. If a claim cannot be tested by the five senses, the rule said, it is not false but nonsense. Philosophers dropped it within a generation, for two plain reasons. It threw out a great deal of ordinary science along with religion. And it failed its own test: you cannot check that rule with your five senses either.

A word can be defined simply by saying what you intend it to mean. William Lane Craig thinks the best short definition is Anselm’s: God is the greatest being that can be conceived. The test is easy to apply. Whatever you are calling God, ask whether you can imagine anything greater. If you can, then that greater thing is God, and you were not talking about God after all.

That one rule generates the rest. A being who could be outdone in power, or knowledge, or goodness, would not be the greatest that can be conceived — so the fuller description follows, as Richard Swinburne sets it out: a person with no body, a spirit, who has always existed and always will, who is completely free, who can do anything, who knows everything, who is wholly good, and who made everything else that exists.

Someone will ask how we know God is like that. But that is not a discovery being reported. It is a meaning being fixed, the way any term is fixed before an argument can start. The question worth arguing about is whether anything actually answers to the description.

“That Gives Me Nothing to Test”

This is the usual reply, and it runs two different questions together. What does the word mean? And what reason is there to think anything answers to it? A definition is not evidence and was never offered as evidence. Nobody complains that the definition of a neutrino gives them nothing to test. The definition tells you what would count as one; the testing is separate work, done afterward.

The deeper trouble is the assumption underneath the complaint — that a thing may be rationally believed only if it can be tested. Nobody lives that way. No experiment shows that other people have inner lives, that the world is older than your memories, or that cruelty is wrong, and every sane person believes all three. A rule strict enough to exclude God takes the laboratory down with the church.

So “it gives me nothing to test” is not an objection to a definition. It would carry weight only if testability were the standard for rational belief, and plainly it is not. That is the error the 1920s rule made, and it is the reason the rule did not survive.

Three Ways to Picture God

Mortimer Adler said there are only three ways to think of God, and that the list is complete. Two of them collapse on inspection.

Say God is nothing at all like anything we know, and no word we own applies to Him. There is nothing left to discuss, and the conversation ends before it starts.

Say instead that God is basically like the things we know. But everything we know is limited, made of matter, changeable and imperfect — so God would be too. This is the sky daddy exactly, and it proves too much: a God of that sort should be as easy to find as any other large object.

What remains is the third. God is partly like what we know and partly unlike it. Unlike, in that He is not limited, not made of matter, not changeable, not imperfect. Like, in the one respect shared by everything that exists at all — that He is real. Only the third leaves us anything to think about.

Like a Father, but Not Literally a Father

When Christians call God good, or wise, or a father, they do not mean quite what those words mean about a man. Nor do they mean something entirely unrelated. They mean something genuinely similar, but never the same. Theologians call this the analogy of being. The idea matters much more than the label.

The Church put a rule around it in 1215. A council of the whole Church condemned a monk named Joachim, who had made God too much like His creatures. It then laid down the measure still used today: however alike God and a creature may be, the difference between them is always greater than the likeness.

That rule is worth knowing when someone says believers have moved the goalposts — that the vague, abstract God was invented lately to escape hard questions. It was settled eight centuries ago, and settled for the opposite reason: to stop believers picturing God as a creature grown very large.

What Every Religion Agrees On

Roy Clouser draws a distinction worth borrowing. Ask who the president is and there are two good answers. You can name the man in the job. Or you can describe the job itself, and what powers go with it, without naming anybody at all.

The same two questions can be asked about the word ‘divine.’ Ask who is divine and the religions of the world answer wildly differently: one creator, two warring forces, many gods, being itself, emptiness. Ask instead what the word means, and Clouser found no disagreement anywhere. Everywhere it means the same thing — whatever depends on nothing else, while everything else depends on it.

That is what “ultimate Reality” means in Christian use. Not the vaguest thing that can be said about God, but the most exact: ultimate, because nothing stands behind it; Reality, because it is not an idea we hold but a thing that holds us. Say those two words and you have said the whole definition in short form.

Someone will object that this proves nothing, because every position fills that slot with something. The materialist says matter and energy are what everything else depends on and what depends on nothing at all. Quite so — and that is Clouser’s point, not an objection to it. The slot never stands empty. Nobody arrives at this question from neutral ground.

Which means the real disagreement is not between people who believe in something ultimate and people who believe in nothing. It is between rival candidates for the same office. The atheist has not declined to answer the question; he has answered it, and his answer is matter. Whether matter can carry the weight — whether the sort of thing that comes in quantities and changes over time can be the thing that depends on nothing — is a fair argument to have. But it is an argument about occupants, not about whether the office exists.

The pagans had this long before Christians did. The Pythagoreans thought numbers held that place. Plato gave it to the Forms. Aristotle described the divine as what can exist on its own and never changes. They argued about who holds the office. They agreed about what the office is.

Why We Often Say What God Is Not

A great deal of what can be said truly about God has to be said backwards, by ruling things out. Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, held that the negative statements are the true ones: we approach what is infinite by denying everything finite. Each denial does not add a picture. It removes a wrong one.

Keith Ward explains why the wrong pictures survive anyway. In an age that treats whatever can be counted and weighed as the only real thing, God gets turned into a super-person whose effects can be measured — and a God like that soon looks unnecessary. The bearded old man survives not because the Church teaches him, but through what Ward calls a failure of imagination.

Michael Novak puts the cost more bluntly than most atheists do. Get your own nature wrong, he writes, and you will get God wrong to the same degree; the god you then invent for yourself “will appear to you not very great, a delusion, a snare from which others ought to be freed. You will despise this god.” He is not describing a mistake unbelievers make. He is describing one believers make, and agreeing that the contempt it earns is deserved. Anything the mind can picture, he adds, is easy to ridicule.

The Reply in Brief

The word is not empty. It is defined, the way words are defined in every field, and the definition has held for a very long time.

That it gives you nothing to test is true, and beside the point. A definition never gives you anything to test; it tells you what would count. And testability was never the price of believing something rationally — not for other minds, not for the past, not for the wrongness of cruelty, not for the reliability of your own reasoning.

It is not a retreat. Pagan philosophers described the divine this way centuries before the creeds, and the Church fixed the balance between likeness and difference in 1215. That was done to stop believers shrinking God to creature size — not to dodge objections nobody had yet raised.

And it is not made of denials alone. Behind every denial stands one plain claim: God is real — the ultimate Reality, on which all else depends. That single affirmation is what keeps a description made largely of denials from being a description of nothing.

What the mockery knocks down is the sky daddy. The Church agrees, has always agreed, and condemned that error by name eight hundred years ago.

The full essay takes up what this panel only touches: why God cannot belong to any category or class; how words like ‘good’ and ‘wise’ can say something true about God without meaning exactly what they mean about us; why being able to do anything never included doing the self-contradictory; and how the God of the philosophers is related to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.