God Lives

The “death of God” was not a victory cry but a lament for a lost world. Now, the cosmos whispers otherwise.

Editor’s note: this is a guest post by my friend Matt Ellison, formerly of Palladium Magazine and Stanford. Matt is a brilliant mind, as you are about to discover, and his new publication

DRAFTS by ELLISON RESEARCH

comes with my full recommendation. — Johann

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The arc of Western civilization has been driven by an insatiable desire to transcend boundaries of mind and matter, to reach the infinite, and to wrestle meaning from the unconquered beyond. This yearning, forged in medieval Christendom by monks, mystics, and bards rediscovering ancient wisdom in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse, birthed a vision of reality: relational, teleological, and dynamic.

At the heart of this vision was a metaphysical worldview: God as the unchanging source of all becoming and the transcendent ground of existence itself. Every movement and moment of the cosmos participated in God’s sustaining act of creation. This Christian vision—God as both the source and the horizon of all being—provided the bedrock for our civilization’s greatest achievements.

Yet, the West forgot. We dismantled the old metaphysics and replaced it with a mechanistic view of reality, born of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment rationalism. Modernity gave us power but turned the world into a machine, life into a chemical accident, and consciousness into an illusion. Science flattened meaning into mechanism.

In severing humanity from its transcendent plane and undermining its metaphysical and epistemic unity, modern philosophy, coupled with secularization, returned an even graver observation: God, so we were told, had died.

In declaring those infamous words, Nietzsche was not celebrating but mourning—and prophesying. Without the divine as the unifying source and final cause of all being, the cosmos became shattered into arbitrary and relativistic fragments. And as modern man stands amidst the ruins, existential alienation persists as the great symptom of this metaphysical catastrophe.

The collapse of metaphysics left humanity adrift. We stopped asking why things exist or what they are for, and instead asked how things work and how they could be “improved.”

Our mechanistic turn dissolved rituals—practices that once gave texture to human life and a shared sense of meaning. As Byung-Chul Han notes, we replaced embodied ritual with mere communication, shallow forms of connection divorced from real community. The result: power over nature, but alienation from our place within it.

Lately, material reductionism has shed its atoms for bits. Computationalism—the belief that reality reduces to formal computation—now influences the imagination of philosophers and technologists, especially in Silicon Valley. For thinkers like Eliezer Yudkowsky, consciousness is an accidental byproduct of algorithms. Yet this view remains mechanical and lifeless, leaving no room for transcendent soul or purpose.

But the story does not end here. God is rediscovered—not as a relic of belief but as the necessary ground of all reality. Science has returned us to mystery. Quantum theory and cognitive science reveal a universe alive in ways that point beyond mere matter or computation.

These discoveries, alongside insights from psychology and philosophy, point us back toward what the ancients and medievals already knew: reality is not dead matter, but dynamic and relational.

Thomistic metaphysics—the synthesis of faith, reason, and reality Thomas Aquinas developed some eight centuries ago—provided the foundations for practically all subsequent Western thought. It is more than theology; it is a profound philosophical vision addressing questions of being, causality, and purpose. God lives; reality itself bears witness to Him. In rediscovering this vision, we find hope for a fractured world.

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The Machine Breaks Down

Modernity’s triumph was built on the metaphysics it rejected. The Renaissance and Enlightenment, emerging from medieval thought—later recast as the Dark Ages—promised liberation through reason. Figures like Newton, Leibniz, and Galileo saw science not as a rejection of God but as a way to uncover His order. Yet, over time, this pursuit of reason became divorced from its metaphysical roots. Science flourished, technology transformed the world, and human power expanded on the back of these developments.

But this liberation came at a cost. In dismantling the old metaphysics, the Age of Reason severed reality from its connection to the eternal. Time itself became secularized: the organic rhythms of liturgical time—aligned with the seasons of worship and eternity—were replaced by clock-time, mechanized and abstract. The stars, once understood as signs pointing beyond, became distant orbs in a vast, indifferent void. The cosmos, once a participatory order created by a God both transcendent and immanent, was reduced to mere mechanism.

Reality, we were told, was governed by impersonal laws. Cartesian dualism split mind from matter, reducing the physical world to lifeless extension. Newton’s physics revealed a universe of order and precision, which he saw as evidence of a divine Creator.

But later thinkers stripped away this theistic foundation, leaving a mechanical cosmos that no longer pointed beyond itself—inert, predictable, and ultimately disinterested in human life. Kant drew a line: we can know appearances, not ultimate reality. Yet even he left space for belief—God and moral truth as necessities, not relics.

While brilliant in their explanatory power, the replacement of meaning with mechanism fostered a reductionist mindset that would in time petrify the entire culture. If something could not be measured or quantified, it could be dismissed as unreal.

This reductionism spread into every corner of Western thought. Materialist philosophers explained consciousness as an epiphenomenon—an illusion generated by neurons firing in a deterministic brain, which could just as possibly be in a vat—or, more fashionably, our subjective consciousness trapped in a computer simulation.

For the first time in history, humanity became alienated from itself. The soul, once understood as a reflection of the divine, was now irrelevant. Man was no longer man; he was merely matter. Meaning itself became redefined as a human construct—arbitrary, subjective, and ultimately empty.

Yet the mechanistic view was always incomplete. Even at the height of Enlightenment optimism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sensed this. For him, life could not be reduced to mere laws; nature was alive—an organism, not a machine.

Goethe’s Faust dramatized this longing for wholeness: the striving of the human soul to transcend the limits imposed by a dead and mechanical world. “Whoever strives with all his might,” Goethe wrote, “that man we can redeem.” The striving itself pointed to a deeper truth: man is made for more. Life resists reduction.

As modernity advanced, cracks in the mechanistic worldview deepened. While relativity expanded the mechanistic paradigm, quantum mechanics shattered it altogether, revealing potentiality, observation, and even consciousness as central to reality’s unfolding.

Some leading 20th-century physicists, like John von Neumann and John Archibald Wheeler, offered interpretations of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is necessary for measurement. But these theories are not universally accepted among physicists; as metaphysical claims, they go beyond what empirical physics can prove.

Von Neumann, in The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, argued that the collapse of the wave function—the transition from potential to actual—terminates with consciousness. The chain of measurement, von Neumann showed, can regress infinitely through physical instruments, but it always ends with the human observer. London and Bauer advanced this, proposing that the boundary of quantum collapse lies in consciousness itself.

Wheeler described this as the “participatory universe.” In his philosophical interpretation, reality is not just passively there; it emerges through interaction, with the observer playing a constitutive role. Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis suggests that information is foundational to reality, but unlike computationalism, it implies a relational and participatory cosmos where consciousness plays an integral, irreducible role.

While interpretations like Wheeler’s are compelling, others, such as the many-worlds theory, reject consciousness as a causal factor—but have yet to explain consciousness itself.

These developments could undermine the reductive materialist and computationalist—the “mechanicalist”—paradigms. If mind is the boundary of observation—if reality collapses through consciousness—then consciousness cannot be a mere byproduct of matter, mechanism, or algorithm. It is, instead, something fundamental.

This has radical implications such as for machine consciousness. If man is just matter, then AI becomes the next logical step—merely a superior machine. But if consciousness is participatory and irreducible to life as we know it, AI remains a powerful tool, no more capable of true consciousness or transcendence than a sophisticated calculator.

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The Cosmos Speaks

For Thomas Aquinas, this collapse of mechanicalism would not be surprising. The Thomistic understanding of creation rests on the distinction between act and potency—between what something is and what it can become. Created being is always a mixture of the two, participating in God’s pure actuality (actus purus).

Thomism’s act-potency framework provides a striking philosophical parallel to quantum mechanics’ concepts of potentiality and actualization. The universe does not exist apart from God but participates in Him. This participation points us toward consciousness. If Wheeler is right that observation co-creates reality, then mind must be ontologically prior to matter.

The “hard problem” of consciousness—the question of how subjective experience arises from matter—has proven resistant to any materialist explanation. Increasingly, scientists and philosophers are considering the possibility that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter at all but something fundamental to reality itself.

Theoretical speculations abound. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman proposes that physical reality emerges from networks of conscious agents, challenging materialist assumptions. Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) describes all of reality, the entire universe, as self-referential consciousness.

These models, though modern, align with what Aquinas always held: that reality is grounded not in dead matter but in an infinite, self-subsistent intellect: the mind of God. God is not only pure being but pure intelligence—the Logos that orders the universe and makes it intelligible.

Relational Metaphysics

Thomistic metaphysics brings these insights into a coherent vision of reality. For Aquinas, creation is not a distant past event but an ongoing act—creatio continua—in which God sustains all things as the source of their being. This dynamic vision resonates with modern questions about existence and relational order, revealing a cosmos that participates in something greater.

Aquinas’ actus purus describes God as pure actuality: fully realized being without potential or change. Unlike contingent beings that move between potency and act, God is the unchanging source of all becoming. This divine simplicity ensures that God is not just a participant in reality but its sustaining cause and end. “Through Him all things were made.” In Him, all relationality finds its coherence.

Nothing therefore exists in isolation; every being is defined by its relation to God, the source (alpha) of its existence and the end (omega) toward which it strives. The cosmos is dynamic, teleological, and alive—ordered toward its final cause in God. The recent discoveries in science, for their part, suggest a relational view of reality. Quantum particles exist in relational states of potency and act. And consciousness, far from being incidental, seems to permeate reality itself.

This relationality finds its ultimate fulfillment in what Jacques Lacan calls the Real. For Lacan, the Real lies beyond the symbolic order—beyond all language, representation, and cultural systems. It is the unmediated encounter with what cannot be grasped or contained. While Lacan’s Real is psychoanalytic, it serves as a provocative analogy for the unrepresentable yet grounding nature of God as infinite being. He exceeds all human categories yet remains their condition.

For humanity, this relational metaphysics reveals something crucial. Our existential restlessness—the sense of longing, striving, and incompleteness that marks human life—is not an accident. Our existential longing—what Augustine called the “restless heart”—reflects this striving for the Real. It is the natural consequence of our participation in God’s act of being. We are made for God, and our very existence points beyond itself to Him.

Modern Man In Search of God

The death of God, as Nietzsche saw it, was not an intellectual conclusion but a cultural catastrophe. Without God, humanity lost its footing, its purpose, and its horizon. Nietzsche’s “will to power” was an attempt to fill this void—a drive to impose meaning through sheer force of will.

But the will to power, as compelling as it may be, cannot satisfy. It points to a deeper truth: that humanity is made to strive beyond itself. Where Nietzsche saw this striving as self-assertion, Thomistic metaphysics sees it fulfilled not in power in itself but in participation in God—the beginning and end of all being and true power.

Heidegger’s Being-toward-death captures another facet of this restlessness. Death, for Heidegger, is the ultimate boundary that gives life its urgency. But for Thomists—indeed for all Christians—death is not the end. It is the threshold to eternal participation in divine life.

Simone Weil goes further still. For Weil, the path to God requires kenosis—self-emptying love. This love mirrors the nature of God Himself, who as Trinity exists as a communion of self-giving love. In Christ, this love is made flesh: God empties Himself to draw us into union with Him.

The existentialists were right to see restlessness as central to the human condition. But they stopped short of its fulfillment. Our restlessness is not absurd or arbitrary; it is teleological. It reveals our orientation toward the God who is both our origin and our destiny.

A Dead Machine and A Living God

The recovery of this vision is not optional—it is necessary. Modernity’s fragmentation—its reductionism, alienation, and despair—can only be healed by a metaphysics that integrates truth wherever it is found. Thomism, as the great synthesis of classical philosophy and Christian revelation, provides the scaffold for the new framework we need.

This essay serves as a prologue to a broader inquiry: the reimagination of Thomism as the most coherent metaphysical framework for a relational and participatory universe. As our ongoing research explores, God—as actus purus and ultimate reality—provides both the sustenance and the telos of all becoming. The convergence of modern science and existential philosophy is not accidental but points back toward this lost metaphysical unity.

This renewed metaphysics affirms science’s discoveries while revealing their limits. Thomism integrates existential critiques, reframing humanity’s search for meaning as evidence of a deeper reality. It restores the cosmos—not as a dead mechanism but as a living, relational order sustained by divine being.

God lives. He is not a hypothesis to be tested or a relic of the past. He is the act of being itself, the consciousness that sustains all reality, and the final cause that draws all things to Him. The cosmos bears His mark, and our very existence points to Him.

The mechanistic worldview has failed. It cannot account for the mystery of consciousness, the relational nature of reality, or the deep longing of the human soul. Key strands of modern science and philosophy point us back to what the West once believed—that existence finds itself grounded in God, the pure act of being.

In the end, the rumors of God’s death were greatly exaggerated. The “death of God” was not the end of the story. It was a temporary moment of crisis—a rupture and a revealing that makes rediscovery and renewal possible. God lives and so does the universe. And in this truth lies the hope of a fractured world made whole.

Matt Ellison is a researcher, writer, and strategist. He is the former executive editor of Palladium Magazine and has held research positions at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution. His present work focuses on history, philosophy, theology, and culture. Subscribe to his new Substack

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