I read something interesting that Parodites wrote about this issue, he said the question “Does God exist” is meaningless because first of all existence is not something you can predicate, as Kant and others have pointed out, so we need to be subtler in our meaning and intentions here; but also and more importantly because God functions as a symbol of the transcendent space within us, within and as the limits of our mentalities and conscious experiences, the ‘virtual’ or abstract-like existence of the mind, which itself represents an irreducible dyad or polarity with that other facet of our lives namely our bodies and all the atoms and chemicals etc. that constitute them. He supposes the right question would be, “Is there a God?” and the answer to such a question is certainly Yes, for God is a functional concept within our minds and even the atheist cannot deny this.
Furthermore and to counter in advance the criticisms of the angry self-proud atheists reading this, “existence” is not something that could properly be applied to God assuming this God-thing was actually… real in the sense that theists assume it to be. Why? Because existence as we know and mean it as an idea and as a reality constitutes an inevitable scope of finitude, of being in space and time; is that God? Certainly I think most theists think about God as if he exists physically of sorts (even if immaterially-‘physically’) insofar as occuping some region of the universe, as if heaven were out there somewhere and if we could look far enough we could find it in a telescope, or like God is in the clouds as an old man with a long white beard, watching what we do. These images reveal that what is commonly thought about as God’s existence is already transposed into the human realm of finite, material and spatially-temporally located things. But God, if such a thing ‘exists’ then would not its existence, by definition of maximum transcendence, exist more virtually as indeed our own minds do, and perhaps alongside that same plane of symbolic references we can imagine God emerging from/as the highest of all possible contradictions and irreducible irreconciliations, as indeed our own minds and thoughts are and our very lives in the subjective/“I” sense of them. What I am trying to get at here and if I am following Parodites line of thinking accurately is the idea that God properly would not exist in any way that we exist; God would in effect be the highest-most possibility for transcendent virtuality, absolutely removed from anything material or immanent and therefore not of the human world in any way other than mediated contacts as might be possible through the mind’s apprehension of transcendence and the nature and stuff of virtuality-as-such either directly as pure conception and knowing in the philosophical sense or indirectly as coming up against the hard limits beyond which we cannot think, reason or even feel. Parsing out liminal spaces in this way is also a function of the God-concept for our minds, although I am sure not its primary function therein.
So to ask if God exists I wonder if we are doing God a disservice, anthropomorphizing something that by its very definition and meaning at the level of pure conception itself should be understood as beyond all possible finitizing and immanentizing, beyond all materiality, space and time relations; as emerging secondarily, triadically, etc. as the sum-result of underlying tensions that cannot be resolved yet persist and never vanish, like as Parodites points out the irresolvible and uncollapsable tensions between the realms of things like atoms and molecules on the one hand and our love on the other, or the neurological impulses in our brain cells and our thoughts and moral understandings. Despite far-removed causalities and correspondences these domains are so far removed and remote from each other that meaning slips away, they cannot at once be brought into perfect alignment within a single system and understanding as if one might clearly emerge from/become the other without excess and error. Continuing on with that example we see this as the cause of so much philosophical debate and discussion and theorizing, and still there is no agreement as to the nature of consciousness or its relation to things like neurons and action-potentials in the brain.
Imagine for a moment pure mentality, pure abstract virtuality and the transcendent dimension itself, then attempt to relate or juxtapose that to the entirety of physical material existence. It cannot be done, this implies too huge and unresolvable a contrast and contradiction, and the tension that results must produce something in the form of a higher triadic non-dialectical relation, a third term as Parodites calls it after Pierce’s work I believe; what is that third term between finite and infinite, between all of ‘existence’ on the one hand and all immateriality/meaning/transcendent virtuality on the other hand? Perhaps that third term is God itself, as indeed the tension between our own irreducible dyads lead to what we experience as thinking and our inner selves, unresolvable to either of the terms of the underlying relation, it may be the case that there is a higher thinking and experiencing going on as the unresolved tension-emergence between the highest possible dyads.