The Conceivability of God

Some people believe in God and some do not. Those that believe in God have some conception of who He is and those that do not believe in God either lack any conception of God at all or have some conception of what God is but reject the claim that this mental conception bears any reference to an existing entity. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the conception of God entertained by those who believe in Him and by those who do not. What does it mean for a person to say, "I believe in God" or for a person to say, "I understand that the devout mean when they say they believe in God but I do not believe in Him myself"? I intend in this essay to explore this question.

The seminal description of God comes from St Thomas Aquinas. The eight main attributes of God are supposed to be simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, ubiquity, immutability, eternity, and unity. Prior to Aquinas writing in the thirteenth century, there was presumably a conception of God much like this among the faithful. Aquinas simply articulated it. After Aquinas, his description became part and parcel of Christian belief. I claim that the Thomist description captures much of what modern Christians and perhaps modern Jews and modern Muslims mean when they say that they believe in God even if they know nothing of St Thomas Aquinas. To this list we can add other items. God is thought to be perfectly just and perfectly merciful, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. Philosophers of religion tend to focus on just the last three attributes.

I regard this conception of God as incoherent and, in arguing for this position, wish to begin by discussing God's presumed omnipotence. In a philosophy of religion course I took earlier this year, I asked why God could not cause all the chairs in the room to float to the ceiling. Presumably he could do so if He wished in this way to prove conclusively that He exists. I claim that Christians generally do not believe such miracles ever occur. In our ordinary understanding of the world, underlying our ordinary interactions with it, we tend to believe that there are rules that are always observed. If one holds a book out at arm's length and lets go, it will drop to the ground.  We believe that gravity is an immutable law. If we expect the rules of the universe, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, to be faithfully adhered to, in what way can God be said to be omnipotent? It seems that He is bound by the laws of physics. Is there an alternative to supposing that God's power is limited? Presumably, if God is indeed omnipotent, He has the power to cause all the chairs in the lecture room to float to the ceiling but chooses not to exercise this power.

In the thirteenth century, very little had a scientific explanation. The annual harvest could be bountiful or scarce seemingly at the caprice of God. Diseases were rampant and there was no theory to account for why one person might become sick and another not, no theory or practice to cure the ill. In a world without science, life was wildly unpredictable. In the thirteenth century, it made sense to ascribe fortune and misfortune to God. The scientific method was not adopted until the seventeenth century and did not make significant inroads into our understanding of the world until the nineteenth or twentieth century. It is perhaps unsurprising that the diminishment of the realm of the unknown has coincided with the rise of atheism. Less and less needed to be credited to God. We could put our faith in science rather than in a divine being. Consider meteorology. The ancients could not predict the next day's weather or the general weather pattern of the next six months. Storms at sea were attributed to Poseidon or, later, by the Christians, Jehovah. Today, if we watch the six o'clock news, we can be informed by the weatherman of the next day's weather. Meteorologists have discovered the El Nina and El Nino weather patterns which enable them to make general predictions about the weather over the next year. Consider now the Covid pandemic. The slogan constantly chanted by both the Left and by international governments was, "Trust the science!" We observed social distancing, wore masks, and stayed at home during lockdowns because most of us trusted the science.  (I think though that for many people the wearing of masks was an act of superstition akin to wearing a crucifix, carrying on one's person a lucky gemstone, or the habit the Irish got into after the potato famine of carrying spuds in their pockets to magically ward off hunger, as described in Joyce's Ulyssess. There is magic associated with prayer and magic associated with masks but the magic associated with masks found its pivot, its origin, in the magic associated with the word "science" whereas the magic associated with prayer finds its origin in the word "God". I shall come back to this idea later. )

There were voices on the other side. In the United Stated and here in New Zealand, a vocal and often ignorant minority opposed Covid restrictions. Often these people were stridently religious. These people rejected the slogan "Trust the science" and endorsed the apparently contrary statement, "Trust God." It tends also to be fundamentalist Christians who doubt the science of climate change. "God is in charge of the weather, not humanity!" they say. It seems that science and faith in God are in opposition – the Culture Wars were often a battle between Christians who felt that science had encroached upon their faith and atheists, like Richard Dawkins, who regarded faith as basically idiotic and ignorant. I think many Christians today are insecure because science has invaded so much of the territory that once belonged to God. It seems that people have had to choose between believing in science and believing in God. Despite this undercurrent of conflict felt by many ordinary Christians and atheists, intelligent Christians can be found online who claim that science and religion are not at variance but support each other. Another popular philosophical position that attempts to reconcile science with religion, most famously advanced by Stephen Jay Gould, is that religion and science constitute non-overlapping magesteria because religion concerns values and science concerns facts. The problem with both positions relate to the claim that God is omnipotent. If science is indeed absolutely trustworthy, then God's power is limited. If religion only concerns values, then God's influence on the world is limited. Another position often proposed by Christians is that there were miracles in the past, especially during Christ's life, but that the age of miracles has passed. It is protestant thinkers who argue this way – catholics believe that miracles can occur today. For instance, the Catholic Church is still beatifying new saints and, in order for a person to be officially called a saint, there must be at least one miracle associated with the person during his or her life.

Science seems superior to faith in God because the predictions made by science seem a more reliable source of knowledge than blind faith in God. Nevertheless science does not allow us to make fully accurate predictions concerning the future. Consider meteorology again. Although a weatherman can give a reasonably precise description of the next day's weather and can make general statements concerning the next couple of months, he or she cannot give a precise description of the weather that will obtain in a fortnight's time. This is a consequence of the butterfly effect. Atheists recognise that despite all the scientific knowledge they possess, an irreducible amount of uncertainty remains. Those atheists who are determinists may ascribe events in their lives to causes that are unknowable because the butterfly effect stipulates that large events can have causes that are so tiny they are unobservable– atheists who believe in, say, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics or the Many Worlds interpretation may want to believe that there are events in their lives that have no causes at all. Atheists use the word "chance" to describe the causes of events that are either unknown or unknowable. It may well be that atheists ascribe all events to a combination of chance and necessity. 

Let us now consider the ordinary views of ordinary Christians. Ordinary Christians do not reject science  entirely even while putting their faith in an omnipotent God. However those events that atheists attribute to chance, ordinary Christians attribute to God. Although science has explained so much, there is a certain amount of wriggle room which enables Christians to believe that God is exercising His power, showing Himself, through small occurrences which are in principle unpredictable, such as, to give examples from my own life, the allocation of a new Key Worker or new psychiatrist to a mental health patient. Such occurrences are not regarded as miracles because they can be accounted for by invoking the residual uncertainty that remains after the determinism of science is removed. The basic unpredictability of the future is what allows the faithful to believe prayer is effective. If a cancer patient who has prayed every day goes into permanent remission, he or she might attribute his or her recovery to God. If the person dies, the person's religious friends might say that God moves in mysterious ways and that the person is happy in heaven. I shall come back to prayer later in the essay.

It seems that Christians who believe in both God and science, in their ordinary way of engaging with the world, also believe that God acts through the world only in ways permitted by science, through circumstances that atheists attribute to chance. So there is an incoherence in the way that ordinary Christians regard God. While paying lip service to the idea that God is omnipotent, they believe that God no longer chooses to perform miracles. If a seeming miracle occurs, a Christian, while thanking God, will still also simultaneously attribute the seeming miracle to natural causes. God could choose to perform a miracle but ordinary Christians tend to assume he does not and will not make this choice and so regard miracles as impossible.

The second attribute of God that philosophers often focus on is his omniscience. God supposedly knows everything.  The incoherence in people's minds connected with this attribute arises when they try to imagine whether or not God knows the future. Predestination appears to conflict with the tenet held by most Christians that human beings possess free will. Let us suppose for a moment that Aristotle was correct when talking about the truth and falsity of future propositions. I am writing this post seven days before the American midterms – if the argument made by Aristotle known as the Sea-Battle Argument is correct, the proposition that the Democrats will pick up a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate is currently neither true nor false but will become either true or false in seven days time. If Aristotle's argument is correct, if propositions concerning the future are neither true nor false until such time as the truth-makers that make such propositions true or false become present, then we could say that God's knowledge encompasses the entirety of the past and present but nothing of the future. However, if this is true, then God's knowledge is constantly expanding. If God's knowledge of the world is constantly expanding then this would mean that God is changing but, should we accept the Thomist attributes listed above, we find ourselves faced with a contradiction because Aquinas claimed that God is immutable. If we accept that God is immutable, then God's knowledge is also absolute and unchangeable and so he must possess complete knowledge of the future.

Theologians accept that God has absolute knowledge of the future, that predestination is a real thing. However Christians generally also believe in free will. Christians believe in free will because it is thought people can choose to accept Christ and therefore salvation, and can choose between virtuous and sinful actions. Christians believe, generally, in heaven and hell and it would contradict God's goodness and omni-benevolence if he were to predestine some of his flock to fire and brimstone from birth. A minority of Christians are Calvinists who believe just this but I would suggest that most ordinary Christians reject the idea that God assigns people to heaven or hell before they are even born. The attempt to reconcile predestination with free will has for millennia been one of the key projects of Christian theologians. 

One way that Christians have sought to reconcile divine omniscience with free will is to say that God is outside time. How are we to understand the nature of time? McTaggart, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, distinguished between two different ways of understanding time, the A series and the B series. In the A series there is a distinction between past, present, and future. Distant future events become near future events then become present events then become near past events then become distant past events. The B series orders events sequentially or with respect to dates and times. We could say that Trump's reelection preceded the 2026 midterms or that the New Zealand election is to occur on Saturday 7 of November. McTaggart argued that we need the A series to explain change but because if we want to explain how the same event can at different times be future, present, or past we need to invoke the A series once again, thus leading to a vicious regress, he thought for this reason among others that our experience of the passage of time must be an illusion.

Theologians have generally not accepted McTaggart's conclusion that time is illusory. However his way of understanding the nature of time has been partly accepted and proves a challenge for theologians. Those who believe that God is outside time, such as Augustine and Boethius, claim that for God everything, all events that humans assign to either the past, present, or future, occurs for God in one single eternal present. God simply observes all human actions from this vantage point of an eternal present. However there are problems with the proposal that for God all eternity is present at once. The first is that theologians accept scriptural accounts of God interacting with the world such as when he helped Moses part the Red Sea. It is far from clear how a timeless being can interact with a world in which events occur in time. Although Christians believe often that the age of miracles has passed, they still tend to believe that God can answer prayers and this involves a putatively timeless being intervening in the world at a time. Of course, Christians can say that God knew the prayer was to made before the individual had even formed the wish to pray but there still seems to be a problem with understanding how libertarian free will can exist in a world in which the totality of its past, present, and future is observed at once by a timeless being. A second problem is that if all history and all future are known to God at once, it seems that God has an understanding of the B series of time but is ignorant of the A series as it is experienced by humans. This would appear to place a constraint on God's omniscience.

For these reasons, among others, many theologians have argued that God is a temporal being rather than a being outside of time. One important theological, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century, argued that God is a temporal being. Ockham, like most major philosophers of religion, still believed, nevertheless, in both free will and predestination. Because for Ockham God is a temporal being, the proposition "God knew yesterday that the Democrats will win in a landslide next week" is a cogent statement. Ockham's attempt at a solution was to say that this belief of God is what is known as a 'soft fact' – it will not become a hard fact until next week when the Democrats win. Some facts about the past are dependent on future occurrences and it is these facts that followers of Ockham designate as soft facts. It takes the freely willed actions of agents for such soft facts to become hard facts. However one problem with Ockham's account is that beliefs in God's mind seem to change from being soft facts to hard facts as the irresistible drift of time drags events from the future into the present and then into the past. If beliefs in God's mind can change from soft to hard, this seems to suggest that God can change and is thus not immutable. A second problem is that the use of the term 'soft fact' seems to involve a kind of equivocation. To me, the term 'soft fact' seems not clearly defined and I have struggled to find sources online that can give a clear account of how a 'soft fact' in God's mind differs from a hard fact.

How do ordinary Christians make sense of God's omniscience? I claim that they do not. Ordinary Christians pay lip service to the claim that God knows everything while still believing in free will. Ordinary Christians do not attempt to resolve this dissonance between divine foreknowledge and human volition. The theologians and philosophers who have attempted to resolve this incoherence have failed but ordinary Christians are not familiar with the huge corpus of writings that have attempted unsuccessfully to reconcile predestination with free will. I myself lean toward the idea that there is no free will at all and have adopted a different metaphysics to Christianity. I see the world as a kind of production line in which some but not all humans graduate to a higher plane while the others are reincarnated. I do not believe in hell. To me, the notion that the world is 'the vale of soul making', to employ an expression coined by Keats, seems more likely than a world in which God condemns people to hell before they are born.

The third attribute of God discussed endlessly by theologians and philosophers of religion is his omni-benevolence. When trying to imagine that God is perfectly good, we run smack into the Problem of Evil. I am not going to discuss the Problem of Evil in depth in this essay because there is an enormous amount of material elsewhere online discussing this. One answer, first offered by Aquinas I think, is that evil does not exist but is only a privation of good caused by God's withdrawal from part of the world.

So far we have discussed God's supposed omnipotence and omniscience and have gestured towards his supposed omni-benevolence. However it may be that we are still only a little closer to a description of what the faithful conceive of when they conceive of God. Is there another way we can approach this puzzle? It seems we can claim that God is the ultimate answer to all questions. Should one ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" the faithful will reply, "Because of God." Should one ask, thinking of the Kalam cosmological argument, "What is the cause of the universe?" the faithful will answer, "God." Should one ask, "Why did Agnes recover from liver cancer?" the faithful will answer, "God." Should one ask, "Why did Agnes die from liver cancer?" the faithful will again answer, "God." God is the centre of the system, the pivot or fulcrum of reality, the unmoved mover, the one necessary being who upholds and sustains a universe made up of contingent facts, a universe that is contingent because it depends on God's freely willed decisions. 

Back in the days of Socrates and Plato, ordinary religious Greeks were polytheists. There were various Gods they could make offerings to and the choice of God was determined by the purpose of the Athenians making the sacrifice. If they wished for safe sailing, they might make a sacrifice to Poseidon. Other sacrifices might be made to Zeus or to Athena depending on what was being requested. The prayer for a bountiful harvest might be made to Demeter. The ancient people who became the Jews were also polytheists but they became monotheists during the Babylonian captivity. Monotheism spread west as Christianity took hold and spread East after the advent of Islam. When monotheism was established, it became normal to think of a single God to whom all prayers should be addressed. Catholicism is complicated by the fact that God is three-personed, is at one and the same time Jehovah, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Ordinary Christians often believe in angels and in saints, saints that can be addressed in prayer and who can intercede between the person praying and the ultimate source of all power and goodness, God Himself. Ordinary Christians also believed in demons and the Devil. However the intellectual position of serious thinkers throughout Christendom was that all beings, natural or supernatural, were lower in the hierarchy then God, that God occupied the apex. The term that I think is helpful when thinking about how God is supposed to be the centre from which everything else emanates is Derrida's term "transcendental signified". Everything comes back to God. This is a key part of the conception of God entertained by believers and understood by non-believers.

Not only is God supposed to lie behind all truths and events in the world, is supposed to be the central principle in the universe, God is supposed to be good. The faithful pray before meals and before going to bed at night. A prayer made by one of the faithful typically involves thanking God for the good things in the person's life, enjoining God to help the faithful person himself or herself, his or her friends and his or her family overcome any troubles they might have, and asking God for protection against future misfortune. A prayer is, to my mind, a kind of magic spell not entirely dissimilar from the wish a person might make having found a four-leafed clover or the protection awarded against goblins and fairies by having a horseshoe hung over one's front door. The superiority of prayer as a magic incantation or spell over other types of magical thinking is that the prayer is addressed to a power that is absolutely ultimate. Is prayer effective? As discussed a little above, although God is no longer expected to perform miracles, there is a little wriggle room in the determinism suggested by the scientific stance toward the world, a little wriggle room that science leaves open. The faithful believe that they can exploit the wriggle room left open by science through prayer. A Christian might pray that he or she will pass the next day's university exam or that he or she might be accepted for a job interview. Are prayers answered? It might be that all over New Zealand the evening of a Lotto draw there are thousands of Christians praying to win several million dollars but only one can, and the winner might not even be one who had prayed to do so.

Logically, it seems that some prayers are answered, so to speak, and many are not. From an atheist materialist perspective, it is a matter of chance whether or not a reasonable prayer appears to be answered. If one wanted to reach a conclusion concerning the efficacy of prayer, could one use the scientific method? Could one carry out a statistical survey to find out if the Christians who do pray have statistically significant better outcomes in their lives than those who do not believe in God and do not pray? It seems we could carry out such a study and in fact I believe studies of this kind have been carried out. It is the type of thing a social psychologist could study. Although neither Christians nor non-Christians believe it at all likely that God might answer a prayer by going so far as to perform a miracle, we might find that there are good things that occur more often in the lives of the devout than in the lives of the godless. If we found this to be the case, it might cause atheist materialists to be less confident in their claims that misfortune visits us randomly. Presumably there were many Christians during the Black Death in the fourteenth century who prayed to God to be spared and were not, and presumably there were many Christians on the fields of Flanders during the First World War who prayed to be spared from death and injury and were not, and it is arguments like this, arguments related to the Problem of Evil, that are often marshalled by atheists against believers. However, I believe that the studies carried out to investigate this question have indeed found a statistically significant result suggesting that theism and prayer do result in better outcomes and greater happiness. Does the atheist materialist have an answer to this finding? It could be that faith in God and a habit of regular prayer increases the confidence and optimism of the person praying. This increased confidence and optimism affects the person's attitudes and behaviours and makes it more likely that he or she will pass the exam or do better in the job interview.

The belief that God is an all powerful and all knowing immaterial being who is good and answers prayers definitely instills optimism in the person who believes in Him. A part of an ordinary Christian's conception of God is that God is an all-powerful and omnipresent person who loves him or her. A part of Christian faith is that one should love God because God loves one back. I do not believe we can fully disentangle the Christian conception of God from faith in an afterlife. Oddly enough, I suspect that a person who is seriously depressed, who is seriously considering killing himself, might decide against self-slaughter because he believes that he will go to heaven when he dies or that he will be reincarnated in a better life after death. I am aware that this sounds paradoxical. The claim that I am gesturing towards is that the optimism engendered by faith in a loving God means one can tolerate all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because an all loving God will ensure one has a happy afterlife. People say, "Life is shit and then you die." Christians add, "But then you will go to heaven." Given the enormous amount of unfairness in the world, the amount of suffering that so many endure, the only way we can justify the claim that God is good, omni-benevolent, is by supposing that God will ensure that we will be happy after death.

So, a part of a person's conception of God is that He hears our prayers even if He does not always answer them. There is one other part of the conception of God that I should include in this enumeration. Sometimes people have religious experiences in which they literally perceive a perfect unified spiritual eternal being in nature. One might, for instance, have a sense of the God's presence when observing Niagara Falls, hearing a fine Beethoven sonata, or taking in a particularly sublime sunset over Piha. The person who has such a religious experience perceives God in the world. Such religious experiences do not occur to many people but, when they do, they greatly reinforce the observer's faith in God and can be understood as adding something to their conception of God.

Is the conception of God that I have tried to sketch out in fumbling fashion in this essay the only conception of God believers tend to imagine? I wish now in the next part of the essay to describe my own conception of God, a conception I neither believe in absolutely nor wholly reject. As I often have in this blog, I will begin by relating some of my own experiences and then will explain the metaphysics I have reached having tried to make sense of these experiences.

The first story is one I have told before in this blog although I forget when. I recall, in 2009, that I was hearing voices quite frequently. It seemed to me that though that I did not hear God but rather a large number of disembodied intelligences. On Waiheke Island, in spring of that year, I heard the voices telling me, "Perhaps he's the one." I recall saying back to them, in my head of course, "What is this – a committee?" A little later that year, in the evening, I was outside in the front yard of my mother's house and suddenly felt that the tree in the yard was one of the suicide trees from Dante's Inferno. I felt that I was Jesus. I did not believe myself to be Jesus because I thought I had magical powers but rather because I thought I was to be crucified. I thought I had been chosen for a mission to save all the gay seeming young men from being driven to homosexuality or suicide by the misdiagnoses of sadistic psychiatrists. I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" The voices immediately replied, "Okay." I went back inside and lay on the couch. I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" The voices replied, "What's the difference?"

Over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I heard in my head, among others, Jon Stewart and Barack Obama. I believed then that it was possible to enter into telepathic communication with others. All of the people spoke with were atheists and I felt my role was to invent a religion for atheists. I remember telling Barack, "God is the goodness that speaks through men." I hope the reader will forgive my sexist formulation. Essentially I believed that it was up to people rather up to God to try to improve the world and perform good works.

In 2013, I became 'ill' again and in early 2014 actually prayed to God to save myself. Did I kneel beside my bed with my palms pressed against each other and murmur a prayer as practicing Christians do in the imagination of atheists? No. Rather I went to the Anglican Cathedral and lit candles. I would light the candle and make a wish to God, asking him to save me. I was not really a Christian but I thought this magical rite might prove efficacious. I recall that on one occasion, I decided that God might not answer a prayer made for myself and made my wish for someone else, praying that she would be happy. On one other occasion having lit the candle, I believe I asked God in my mind what he wanted from me. He said, "I want you to be gay."

At the end of 2014, having seen an incompetent clinical psychologist for some eight months, I was lying in bed in the daytime. There was a thunderstorm. With every thunder clap, I heard a voice saying, "I'm gay!" It is interesting to remind the reader that Yahweh was originally part of a pantheon and was the god of thunder.

It seemed that God wanted me to be gay. However I did not turn gay. Yet I was gay in the eyes of others, in the eyes of those treating me, something that caused me intense distress for over ten years.  It seemed that God was evil – this is something I shall come back to later when I try bring these disparate experiences together into a synthesis.

 Last year I had another psychotic experience that I shall try to describe in more detail in a future post. A moment that sticks in my memory that I do want to talk about here is that while I was walking to my mother's apartment in the morning, I saw a perfect rainbow over Auckland Grammar School, the school I had attended as a teenager. According to the Bible, a rainbow was thrown up in the sky after the Flood by God as a message that there would be no future deluges. Christian readers of this blog may think God was showing me a sign that he existed and that I should have interpreted this sign in positive terms. If God was giving me a sign that He existed, should I not have read into this sign the idea that God loved me and wanted me to be happy? I did not interpret the rainbow in this way at all. The rainbows I have seen throughout my life have only be portions of rainbows, mere minor arcs, whereas this rainbow was the real deal, arching from the horizon back to the horizon and unbearably vivid. A minor arc could be explained as a sign from God or, scientifically, as a kind of optical illusion, and in this way taken superstitiously as a good omen, but the complete rainbow I saw felt like a miracle that could not be explained away scientifically and felt somehow malevolent. Yes, it felt like God was telling me that He existed but the rainbow I saw did not evoke in me feelings of devotion or serenity or even really awe. Rather, it felt as though God was kicking me in the head and saying, "I exist." At this time, last year, I felt at one time that I had literally died and passed on to some other realm as I have hinted at in the post, "Concerning the Garden of Eden". It felt to me as though I were in an indirect relationship with God but God was not good. Rather, he was either evil or incompetent and was certainly not answering any prayers I made. During the psychotic episode I had last year, I heard many different voices in my head, including for instance Sabrina Carpenter briefly, but I never spoke with God at all.

The metaphysical picture I have arrived at is influenced by Gnosticism. I am not an expert on the complex mythologies various Gnostic writers have constructed but I have incorporated some of the general ideas associated with Gnosticism into my thinking. One central idea is that the God of this world is either evil or incompetent. When I had my psychotic episode last year, an episode that lasted some eight months, I expected it to cease naturally. I refused to go back to the Mental Health System and start taking medication again. However, 'God', by which I mean the Demiurge, had determined that I should have another psychotic episode and once again be put under the Mental Health Act. For those people who have more suffering in their lives than happiness, those people who pray to God for help but whose prayers go unheeded, it makes a kind of sense to believe that the God of this world, by which I mean the Demiurge, is either evil or incompetent. The Demiurge is associated with public opinion. Everyone seems to believe that if a person who has experienced psychosis takes medication, he or she is well, and if he or she goes off medication that he or she will become 'ill' again. Even though my dosage had been decreased gradually from 2022 onwards and even though in the last part of 2024, I had been on a dosage so low I had gone off-label, I did not experience any psychotic symptoms. The psychosis I experienced began the moment I went off medication entirely and ceased the moment I started taking medication again. This makes no sense whatsoever unless there is a kind of magic associated with medication, a magic that does not arise from the chemical makeup of the drug but rather with the prejudices and assumptions that pervades society. It is the magic associated with the word "science" rather than with "God" that lies behind the efficacy of antipsychotic medication, and it seems the Demiurge is allied with science.

Although I have never suffered any real physical pain, although unlike almost all other mental health patients I have never been hospitalised, I have experienced considerable psychological distress from 2013 onwards. And it was unnecessary. If the people treating me had simply recognised that I was heterosexual, my distress would have vanished. As said, people who experience more unhappiness than happiness are likely to either believe that God does not exist or that the ruler of this world is evil. Where then is good? The quasi-religious experience I had last year involved, and I know this sounds ridiculous, faeries. My Christian readers, if I have any, may think the intelligences I spoke with were angels or demons. I thought that they were real people who were able to communicate telepathically with others. Aside from Jon Stewart and another who shall remain nameless, the other two were psy-ops agents or exorcists associated with the Vatican. One lived in Buenos Aries. The faeries were neither good nor bad but rather amoral and in this way resembled the faeries of British folklore. One of them said to me once, "We hate God." It seems that the faeries in the world are in constant war with the Demiurge. They come to the aid of individuals who are fighting against the whole world as it is administered by the Demiurge. Oddly enough, the conception of God and of supernatural reality most closely resembles the view of reality presented by Grant Robertson in his comic book series The Invisibles.

Where else is there good? The Gnostics believed in a supreme, invisible, and transcendent first principle or ultimate source of all existence called the Monad. However the Gnostics did not believe that this Monad affected the material world. The Gnostic idea is that each person contains a spark of the divine, a spark of the Plemora, which wishes to return to the realm of light inhabited by the Monad. The world is a prison from which some of us escape. In my metaphysic, the Monad is basically passive – although souls shift from the material world to the Plemora inhabited by the Monad, the Monad has no influence over the material world. It is the Demiurge who controls the material world. Individuals have to overcome evil either themselves or with the assistance of the faeries, the angels or demons who can in some cases communicate with us.

What is the lesson I have drawn from my last psychotic episode? I am planning to make a complaint to the Health and Disabilities Commissioner. The lesson I eventually learned from my release from the Mental Health Act in February 2024 is that I was released in the wrong way for the wrong reason. I need to fight for myself. I need to be released from the Mental Health Act again but this time having availed myself of the legal protections that New Zealand provides for the protection of mental health patients that other nations lack. In taking action against the Mental Health Service it is as though I am fighting against the Demiurge because I am fighting against the whole system. Closely aligned with the magic associated with the word "science" is a kind of evil magic associated with the word "psychiatry". It may be it is a hopeless battle but it is still a battle I must engage in.

This essay is not written as well as I would like. The next post I shall write concerns supernatural beings but I may not write it for a couple of weeks because over the next fortnight I shall have to concentrate on revising a submission I made to the court so that it can be sent to the Health and Disabilities Commissioner. If I have readers who like me, I would like them to direct their positive feelings and thoughts towards me. If I am to enter into battle with the Demiurge, I need all the help I can get.