Chapter 2 - Does God exist ?

Written on 01/01/2026

Stephen Ridley

Chapter 2 - Does God exist ?

God is the good in all.

Do I believe in God? No, I do not 'believe' in God, I 'know' that God exists. I have both surrender and faith.

'Knowledge' is not the same as belief (acceptance that something is true without proof), an opinion (a view or judgement) or blind faith (trust without any evidence). How true knowledge is attained is described in Chapter 8 - the same number as the symbol for infinity pointing between Heaven and Earth!

However, let’s say for the moment that you do not 'believe' in God, or that you are uncertain of God’s existence. This could be for many reasons, especially if this is based on what life has taught you so far and the pain you have felt.

Now, let’s say that God could be a 'concept of your ideal'. Most people are essentially capable of understanding this. Then, if you understand that concept, God would exist as a conecpt of this ideal from your thoughts, and therefore 'within you'.

That thought would probably make God smile.

The English word for God comes from the German word ‘Gott’. This in turn is derived from the German word ‘gut’, meaning ‘good’.

So, do you believe in good?

Using the logic of the words we use to describe something and the symbols that can be associated with these words (which are our ways of communicating common concepts to each other), then God must also include our (or your) concept of the ideal or common good, even if at the moment you might think that this ideal does not exist across or within this world.

Even if you had thought you were an atheist or agnostic, just knowing that you have a concept of the common good, or an ideal of a greater good, is proof that you have just contradicted yourself about what you thought you knew about God, or good!

That is why opinion, which is based on assumptions or gaps in knowledge, can only ever give a partial knowledge of the nature of reality and creation, which you 'know' you a part of.

There are some people who believe that Jesus was God manifest, or the Will of God, the Christ, manifest on Earth, but sometimes without really knowing the reason why.

Jesus has many names in different languages. The most common are transliterations of his real name. If you conjoin Isa (in Islam), Jesus and Joshua and try to come up with a common pronunciation, you will probably approximate to the pronunciation ‘Yeeschwah’. People of other faiths will recognize this as ‘YHWH’, the previously unpronounceable name of 'God'. This has commonly been pronounced since that time as Yahweh, or Jehovah, as Human Beings have no knowledge of how the original Aramaic name would have been pronounced or heard.

In the Jewish faith, people were not allowed to pronounce God's name (in Hebrew), so it was shortened to 'Yah' or 'Jah' to enable early Christians to recognise this. This 'name' was also given to identify God's Prophets, for example 'Elijah' (Eli of God). In Islam, which means 'surrender your will to God', the 'name' used in Arabic is 'Allah'. This is similar in pronunciation because Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (plus Maltese) are all semetic languages, in other words languages of 'Shem', son of Noah.

'Jah' is also used in an expression for worship when people say or exclaim the word 'hallelujah' (praise be to God / goodness, an expression of gratitude for the gifts in this world).

The chosen 'name' is less important than a truer 'knowledge' of similar or the same 'messages' given in all the faith systems of One God, The One, or more simply understood, and therefore 'known' through our own eyes, ears and thoughts, The Universe. In spirituality, this wisdom can be expressed as 'follow the message, not the messenger'. Please think about this message, and its' true meaning, your eyes to see and your ears to hear. The Universe teaches us in a perfect learning model.

The Universe is One. The Universe exists, and we all know this. The remaining questions therefore relate to the Transformation of Human Consciousness, a critical mass to 'know' and live by this, within the knowledge of a potential 'goodness'.

As one avatar said, 'at the centre of your Being you know who you are and what you want'. This Being can be 'known' by doing the inner 'shadow work', working through the experience, learning and growth of life itself.

We can also 'know' that Jesus (or the name Iesus in Latin) was the name of a Human who was also a Being, with thoughts and feelings just like you. He was and is an avatar that appeared many times, a warrior of the Light, fighting the forces of darkness since some of the angels, the higher and original creations, had fallen. His Being appeared many times before his time as Jesus and many times since. He is also known as The Christ, the Energy of Christ, within.

His Being, the Christ within, will appear again, but many will not know him. The reason is that it is the message that is important, since it came from Source in many different forms, including the Buddha who taught about reincarnation (resurrection / embodiment) and the associated Karma in order that Human Beings could learn what they needed to know from their many 'lives' before being able to return to Source, The Universe, in what some call 'eternal life'.

The basis of all true faith systems (from all the avatars) is Love, whether this is from Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism or Christianity. The primary thing to understand is that if the message is about Love then it will always come from Source, because Source is Love, and will always be because creation is an act of love. Creation and love will always be for the common good because true love is gentle and self-less. A God of Love must be a gentle God, because any other supposition would be a contradiction. Therefore all suppositions of another god must be demons created and 'maintained' within the mind.

Do we learn this or is it innate? According to Sister Frances Dominica, founder of the first children’s hospice in Oxford, England, ‘Faith is caught, not taught’, which leads to some poignant questions:

Is there intrinsically any real difference between the faiths of love? Did the major religions or ideologies not go to war in the name of God, each of them claiming that ‘if God is on our side, who can be against us’?

Part of our mind allows this separation. There is no such thing as ‘us’, because ‘us’ is a relative term to force a temporary distinction with ‘them’ that creates an artificial separation between essentially the same thing, and that in itself is a contradiction. This is essentially because love cannot be separated from creative existence and a focus on non-self, or is seeing something that we connect with in others that automatically negates a perceived divide between us.

Since contradictions are a counter of two opposites, within reality they cannot be true since reality must include all things. You could argue that a distinction is a perception, and perceptions exist in reality, but even that is only a one-sided perception since there is another perception that contradicts that one! In other words, all distinctions are contradictions that essentially cancel each other out.

The reason that we use distinctions is to make sense of the physical or temporal (temporary) world. These distinctions do not exist within the spiritual (energetic) world. They are simply a duality of perceived energy. If you doubt this, quantum mechanics may provide a clue: observation of a particular particle will make the particle change its relative position, suggesting that we are looking at the same particle from the same particle!

Every-thing, The Universe, is One. 'Things' only exist temporarily within it.

Further clues are provided by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, in other words that all perceptions are relative to each other. To help understand this, imagine for one moment that you are observing four planetary bodies, three lined-up vertically and the fourth to the right of the bottom-placed body (you can try drawing this). Light will travel from the top to the bottom right by ‘bending’ around the body of the middle one, yet also travel directly from the top body to the bottom right. The distance is not the same, yet the light arrives at the same time. All observation of energy is therefore relative to the viewpoint and the interaction of other bodies. That is why scientists will never find a Grand Unifying Theory, because none will be able to exist other than by ‘observing’ the whole or The Universe as One and that is not possible from a limited viewpoint. It is much like trying to measure the length of a needle from two points upon its’ tip!

Relating this to Human Beings, we are a just a blip in the time of creation and ‘us’ is therefore a semantic to distinguish the artificial distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet, if we had not been born within the assumed group that we call ‘us’, we could have been born in one of the assumed groups we call ‘them’, and vice versa.

If we could switch between the two groups, we would see the perspective of both sides and see clearly that there is no truthful reality as ‘us’ and ‘them’. In other words it is ultimately no more important being born into a Jewish family rather than a Hindu one, or taking up the vocation of ‘nursing’ as opposed ‘being a doctor’, both of whom are essential parts of the same family of medicine. Within medicine we have both men and women, yet this does not distinguish their profession, etc.

So the point is this: we are all part of the family of creation, regardless of our age, gender, sexual orientation, culture, race or religion, including all other species and all other things that are created. In addition, we become part of creation when we create with all other things that are created. God, even if only seen as the creative will of good, would demand that to be good we would have to think and act for the common or greater good, together.

Human Beings are conscious and free will, as are the angels that preceded them and, through that evolutionary process, our consciousness has become energy observing its own form and able to understand what it is to be good. In other words, Human Beings are a form of energy that has developed consciousness of creation, including its’ own. Was that created? Of course it was. Was there a beginning? Of course there wasn’t - what could there have been before the beginning if not another beginning!

The true question is not ‘what is the meaning of life’, but rather ‘what is the purpose of life’? Desire is a motivating force that gives meaning, and love is a need and pursuit of all. However, it is creative direction that gives purpose. Aligning the two around love unites the physical, emotional and intellectual with the ideal. So, even if you do not believe in God’s existence, the pursuit of the ideal has no less meaning for creation, otherwise everything is meaningless. This creative experiment we call Earth is one in an infinite of many. God bless Douglas Adams.

If God (or good) is creation or creative will, then God must also represent perfection, since the world must be the best of all possible worlds to date, otherwise a better world would exist. However, we also know that a better world is possible because we have ideals of that better world. If we are part of creation, and anything else must be a contradiction, then our ideal must be the ideal of creation and therefore also of God. The worst that anyone can therefore say of God is that He or She is our concept of the ideal.

If we look back to religion, distinctions between the major faiths and the Christ Being in particular, what would the Christ (God’s manifestation and will) have thought of greed and corruption? More pragmatically, what would the Christ have thought of temples, churches, mosques and synagogues closing their doors that could be opened in times of trouble to protect, cloth, feed and house the homeless and destitute? Do you really think that praying for your own well-being is what the Christ would want before you have prayed for others? What would be said about war and conflict?

I looked for many years to find answers and the common ground between some of the major religions as a proxy for the truth, by trying to identify the overlap between the faiths of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, much like the overlapping areas of the five Olympic rings used in the symbol for the world’s Olympic Games. There has been much written about each faith, yet most of it was not written by the respective avatars but by others after they had died. However, after many years I realized that I was looking at this the wrong way round and from a particular perspective, much like a paradox. In my experience, all life is a paradox.

If we separate the rings and look at their core message, the point or the circumpunct at the centre of each of these faith systems, the essential message is identifiable as similar, if not the same, within each of them. The centre is an essential part of the circumference, therefore the two cannot be distinguished as being separate from each other, much like the true or sustainable messages within all faith systems of the common and greater good.

Initially I considered Buddhism and Hinduism, the essence of the messages respectively being: ‘connect Heaven and Earth through spirituality’ and ‘revere the essence in all objects’.

Then I thought that God thought…. Not all of you got that, perhaps it was too difficult for everyone, so how about looking after family and community? For that I will give you…. Judaism. But not everyone understood that either, perhaps because they thought their families were ‘us’ and others were ‘them’, rather than focusing on all loved ones, including all new people that they met and were able look after within the communities that they had created. Exclusive communities cannot by definition include the wider whole.

So I think that God, probably exasperated but ever patient, thought…. If you can’t be inclusive within communities, no matter who is in them, how about you treat someone else as you would wish to be treated, one-to-one? This was the main message of Jesus. Jesus had essentially borrowed the Golden Rule from the past, essentially love another as one-self. Not everyone listened. The conflict continued.

Then came an additional core message from the Prophet Mohammed: surrender your will (Islam) and live within community (Umar), building upon the teachings from the past. The conflict continued.

The last main avatar after Mohammed is Nanak Dev who propounded that there are good values by which to live (Sikhism). Still the conflict continued.

These core teachings are more or less chronological in time and have the same essential meaning. What surrounds and has been added to these messages is less important than the core of the messages which is, in essence, the same. It one of Love.

Zoroaster preceded these avatars with the message that there is one God or, put more simply, God is One. It is mostly this lack of understanding, knowledge and acceptance that creates the root cause of conflict and separation within Human Beings and across man-made nations. If we want to live as One, then we must think and act as One, nurturing our diversity, but with the same shared values that God would regard as being for the common and greatest good, for all of creation.

Once I had fully understood this, the way back to reconnection with The Source of Creation became increasingly obvious, the chronological reverse of the core messages: live by good values, surrender your will, love one another, build inclusive communities, revere all objects on Earth, and reconnect Heaven and Earth as One, a religious and spiritual ‘quid pro quo’.

The result is an end of war, conflict and sin. ‘Sin’ is the Latin ‘sine’ meaning 'without', in a religious, spiritual or moral context without God, goodness or the common good. In other words, it would be the end of separation from One or another within the whole of creation regardless of which faith system you were born into or have chosen that best helps you to understand Holiness, which means the whole or One-ness.

To be Holistic we must also learn to collectively focus on and change some of the words we use, since, to produce a positive intention and outcome, all words must be the words of good, or God, for all and One. This happens because our consciousness is developed based on our words and their relative meanings and distinctions. Words will influence our understanding and psyche within both the unconscious and conscious mind, which in turn influences our behaviours, forms our attitudes and results in our accepted cultures or ways of living and Being.

For example, when we take a holiday it was meant to be a Holy Day, or Whole Day, or a One Day, when we could reconnect with each other within our communities. Some have changed this to vacation, such an empty word!

We have also started to use terms such as myself, meaning ‘me’ as separated from ‘us’, let alone ‘them’! There have been many changes to language, some good and some not so good. The original and correct term is 'one-self'.

The importance of words relates to having right thoughts, right actions and positive manifestations of our intentions, as language reinforces conscious behavior and ultimately unconscious attitudes that result in semantics such as us and them, and sin (or separation).

To illustrate the potential falsity of distinctions further, we might call a tree a tree. Most people would recognize a picture of one, and yet no two trees look the same, in other words they do not have exactly the same form as each other. They are essentially the same and yet unique. They also change individually over time; they grow and their energy is recycled.

So why are they not exactly the same?

Diversity creates life and fills every niche, increasing the possibility of creation and growth. Charles Darwin explained this before a dark philosophy tried to change this to ‘survival of the fittest’. If this so-called philosophy had been true, I am sure that if Human Beings had competed against each other rather than collaborated during the last Ice Age they would not have survived, and we would not have been able to talk about it now!

In much the same way as trees, we are all unique, but we have the most important creative features in common, including our acknowledgement or understanding of what would be regarded as either the common good or having the common concept of God as our ideal. We are all part of a whole within the whole of creation, including trees and all other things which help to keep us Human Beings alive.

I do need to explain 'critical mass' as an important concept in understanding the next paragraphs.

Imagine a children’s see-saw. If the weight of one child is heavier than that of the other, the see-saw will go down. If they are the same weight as each other, the see-saw will balance. Critical mass is the weight or energy that is transferred from one end to the other to create movement and life in an object, in this case the see-saw, hopefully for the joy of the children!

Material objects are critical mass systems sustained by ever changing energy, for example the Human body. New, expended and transferred energy creates movement. The energy within a seemingly fixed object may change several times, but as long as the critical mass is maintained, the object continues to exist. No matter how much the component energy changes, if critical mass is not maintained, the object will cease to exist. Therefore critical mass is essential to the existence of any particular object, including the living body of a Human Being.

For example, the cells in a Human body, each one a critical mass system in its own right, are replaced throughout each lifetime. Old age occurs when cell replacement cannot maintain a critical mass, the net replacement of worn out cells. Therefore all material objects that exist, and all movement and any change in the form or shape of any object, are supported by an underlying change in the energy they use.

Change that is at a faster or slower pace than is able to support the critical mass of the material object changes the materiality of that object and its’ associated balance and harmony with its’ environment. In others words, it becomes in danger of ceasing to exist. Since the Human body is genetically programmed for cell replacement, material or temporal existence is programmed or modeled to exist then not exist. This means that we are programmed to live; we learn, then we die. During life, we extend our chances if we learn to live in balance and in harmony, in the flow of universal energy.

Does this mean that your Being ceases to exist when you die?

It is possible, if you think that everything that you are, including your innate consciousness, is no more than a critical mass system called the Human body that is constructed of nothing more than continuously recycled energy and if you then live in that way, only for yourself, out of balance with other created things. In other words, the Human part of the Being ceases to exist as a living form, like all other physical living things within the temporal world. Even mountains ‘die’ eventually.

Alternatively, if you choose to be worthy of creation, some of the energy that was a part of your life is preserved, to sleep and then to return. If you are to return to Source, or as some would call God or Heaven, you must take responsibility for the choices you make, both within your thoughts and for all the actions that you take within your life, choosing ‘to be, or not to be’.

Quoting Shakespeare’s opening of Hamlet:

‘To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’.

Be careful what you wish for; wishes and dreams, wishful thinking, can be manifested in the ether. Shakespeare was also a messenger.

Only you and you alone are responsible for how you choose to live your life, regardless of the multitude of tests and challenges that we must all face in each and every life, or to put it another way: ‘to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.

You can also choose not to surrender, not to learn and through that process to fight this inevitability: ‘Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end’.

The choice to learn or not to learn from troubles is the price of free will in order to become worthy of eternity, the to be or not to be, the message of potential eternal life, accessed by understanding the intended nature of each and every Being and the development of one-self. Each person is a mirror for the other.

We sometimes call the essence of our true Being the soul, the seed system of true Being. Many thoughts and dreams can be contained and processed within a quantum of energy, carried forward into the lifetimes of ‘the thousand natural shocks’ of possibility and learning. Sometimes we falsely look outside of ourselves to realize that possibility.

When we as conscious Beings look for God outside of the material objects that we can see, we are missing the point at every level, whether this is at the level of quantum energy, the Human body or The Universe. God exists at every level because God is One and is every level, including all the levels of energy and creation, and therefore within you as a soul Being. This is analogous to the learning from the Olympic Games symbol, and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

We are not alone in this understanding, nor is this new. Many others have had the knowledge that God is, has been and will always be immanent, the divine manifested in the temporal world, including Albert Einstein, an eminent scientist and Pantheist. That is where Einstein derived his genius as we call it, transcending the duality with extra-ordinary thinking. His original thinking came from within him, and yet at the same time he was connected to an understanding of the observable nature of the Cosmos that he could not possibly experience by touch, sight, smell, taste or hearing.

Christ (the Being) also tried to get this message across in his time as Jesus (the Human). This message is shown in the New Testament of the Bible, Book of John, Chapter 14, Verse 6: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’.

Many people interpret this as Christ being someone on the outside, to guide them to see this, without taking responsibility for one-self.

What the Christ was messaging is perhaps best understood by saying the words as though they apply to you: I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me. He was essentially saying: be like me and you will help others to come back to the Creator, and as I lead by example, so must you too. He was and is a true leader and avatar that serves followers, always helping people through their understanding of the message and what that means in terms of choice.

Christ reinforced this message within the Book of John, Chapter 14, Verse 7: ‘If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him’. In other words God is within you and you within God, or if you do not believe in that, good or love is within you and you are within love and good, because creation is love being given and therefore very good. As Rumi also said, 'In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion'.

God created Human Beings with free will as part of the whole. The best analogy I can give you regarding relationship to the common good, God or the One, is that we are each like cells in a body. We can choose to be benevolent or cancerous within the life that we each live and therefore every choice that each of us makes will either add to or subtract from the whole. This duality makes every Being a part of God, along with the tests of life to see if each of us are worthy of that creation and service to The One, The Universe.

The next time you look at someone, try to think ‘although they may appear different to me, be at a different stage of their journey to me or have a different perspective, they are essentially the same as me and we can therefore make life easier by helping each other on our respective journeys that will eventually lead to the same destination’. That thought would also probably make God smile. If everyone is part of that whole, then we best serve The One by serving and helping each other.

The search for the Christ within each Being begins with learning that each and every life, and the challenges that are presented, will give each of our conscious free wills the opportunity to learn how to reconnect and pass through the Gates of Light (Chapter 8).

If and when you pass through all the Gates of Light, through the learning and sacrifice of the ‘self’ within ‘one-self’, you will come to know that Zoroaster, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus, Mohammed and Nanak Dev are the same connected Being, with essentially the same message of self-less love. In spiritual circles he is known as The Messenger, because he carries the essence of the same message.

His Being will come again in the year 2,536 A.D. ~ 500 years after the collapse of the 2030 Agenda ~ to help the learning and complete the experiment within the garden that we call Earth. This is the basis of the seven churches within the Bible’s Book of Revelation.