I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
Reflections on the Apostles Creed: Part 1

August 26, 2026

In our post modern age, belief in God has come to feel like a personal option—one choice among many in the marketplace of ideas. Yet it was not always so. In pre modern times, God was not a question but a given, as self evident as the sun’s rising in the East and its quiet descent in the West. To begin this meditation, I borrow a thought experiment from philosopher Richard Taylor in his 1963 Metaphysics. Imagine you are walking through your city, your town, your village, or perhaps along a wooded path in a quiet park. Suddenly, suspended before you, there appears a luminous globe floating in mid air. Your response would be immediate and unmistakable: wonder.

Where did this come from?
Why is it here? How does it hover like this?
Who placed it in your path?
Now imagine the same walk, but without the globe. Instead, you see the familiar world: a blue sky stretched like a canopy overhead, tall and ancient trees, flowers opening themselves to the light, birds tracing invisible patterns in the air, and perhaps a toad, a lizard, or a fox slipping through the underbrush. Do you respond with the same wonder? Do you ask where these trees and creatures came from, or who placed them here? Do you ask why you are here?

It is easy—comfortably easy—to fall back on science. The universe is composed of energy and matter. Some of that matter forms inert things: planets, stones, sand. Some of it becomes living things: plants, animals, human beings. Physics and biology describe their emergence. I myself am the product of my parents’ genes; my growth from embryo to adult unfolded through natural processes.

And yet, every natural phenomenon—whether the birth of a child, the death of a frog, the collapse of a star, or the formation of a planet—depends on another natural phenomenon. Nothing in the universe is self sufficient. Everything is contingent, including the Big Bang itself. We live, move, and have our being within a vast web of contingency.

Many who believe in God imagine God as one more being—greater, more powerful, more mysterious, but still a being among beings. Yet if God is merely another being, we must ask: where did God come from?

Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, offers a different vision. God, he says, is not one being among others. God is being itself—ipsum esse subsistens. If this is so, then the universe and we who inhabit it are expressions of God’s own being, sustained moment by moment by the divine desire that we exist.

If this is so, then perhaps God may indeed be called Father—or Mother—for all things arise from and are held within this source. And if the universe is an expression of God’s being, and if God continually wills us into existence, then perhaps what we name as God is what we also name as Love.

“God is love” is a beautiful theme, and one I suspect I will return to often as I continue these meditations on the Apostle’s Creed.