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To that question once put to him by an eager beaver graduate student, the eminent Protestant theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich, replied with some asperity: "NEIN!"
The Great Man had gone to a lot of trouble to make a case for what he called "the uncreated Creator," making it clear that, insofar as he was concerned, only those things both spiritual and material that had emerged in the universe during the course of its evolution could be said to "exist."
If Tillich had meant by his "NEIN" that God was out of the equation altogether, he would have made both himself and his three-volume magnum opus, Systematic Theology, absurdities. But he didn't mean that. His students -- those still living -- continue to struggle with what the hell he did mean. I think Tillich fixed that some by coining the phrase "the Ground and Source of Being."
Moving on to the emergence in Christian theology of the son of a first-century CE Galilean peasant couple, whose name, it is said, was Yeshua -- or "Jesus" as the name appears (incorrectly) in English. It took about 300 years before Yeshua officially became God. The Nicene Fathers, with the first 14 verses of Κατα Ιωαννην (the Gospel according to John) to back them up, concluded that Yeshua was "true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father ..."
Does John's phraseology concerning his messianic ideal pass the Tillich test? "He was before time with God. All thing things were made by (or through) him and without him was not anything made that was made." But then comes the astonishing assertion that the medium of the making was itself made flesh. See John 1:14.
That theological aggression and its influence upon the Nicene deliberations changed the course of history insofar as Western civilization was concerned. It erected a permanent barrier between Christianity and Judaism as the church both appropriated the scriptures of Judaism for its own use and, at the same time, dared call them the "old" testament.
But the question is, "Does God exist?" Without having paid much attention to the work of evolutionary biologists as I should have done, I published a book in 2003 with the rather flamboyant title: Seven Sayings of Jesus: How One Man's Words Can Save Your World.
In its pages, I emphasized an idea of which the Yeshua of both the Gospel according to Luke and the Gospel of Thomas had spoken, viz. that the kingdom (domain or governance) of God is present in and among human beings./1 Thomas's Jesus added: "There is no waiting for it ... Rather it is spread out upon the earth."/2 I intimated that the word "God" might be considered a descriptor of human being at its best.
I see now the connection between that idea and the work of David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, who makes much of what he calls "altruistic behavior" and the contribution it makes to the moral stability of human groups. Wilson seems to be saying that when persons moderate their behavior for the sake of community, something slightly above and beyond what is normally considered to be lowly human nature is at work.
Those seven sayings of Jesus about which I wrote? Here they are in my translation and paraphrase:
Turn the other cheek to the one who slaps the first.
Walk the second mile voluntarily with the burden of the one who required you to carry it one mile.
Love your neighbor.
Love your enemy.
Give up your shirt as well as your coat to the one who has neither.
Forgive another as often as it takes.
Treat others as you wish to be treated.
These easy-to-remember and difficult-to-perform pieces of advice are about altruistic behavior. I think Professor Wilson would agree. They can work as a foundation for the ethos of a community that aspires both to create and maintain a culture of peace and justice.
Note, please, that none of those seven sayings attributed to Yeshua comes close to any mention of any god, existent or otherwise. Reinhold Niebuhr at the age of 21 said in a student sermon to a congregation of Midwestern conservative Protestants that he understood not at all such things as "the divinity of Christ," but that the "moral and social programs" of Jesus were clearly understandable to him.
Would Tillich have accepted for consideration the proposition that whatever "God" may be might actually exist, among other places, in the genetic evolution of Homo sapiens? Many of the Bible's images of its deity have to do with the ideas of justice and peace and the invitation, variously offered, to help achieve both through what could arguably be called altruistic behavior.
Genes exist. Might they not, therefore, be considered as partaking somehow in what Tillich called "the Ground and Source of Being"? And more: If he were with us now, would Tillich would be willing to use the indefinite article "a" instead of "the" in reference to his "Ground" and "Source"?
Maybe Graham Greene will let us off the hook in this matter with his extraordinary question: "Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests?"/3
1/ Luke 17: 20-21
2/ Thomas 113: 2-4
3/ The End of the Affair, London, GB. Penguin Books, 1962. p. 110
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