Understanding Our Creator

You cannot know who you are until you know whose you are.

The modern world has spent a century telling you that you are your own creator, your own judge, your own meaning. That you are a random accident of biology.

You have felt the weight of that lie. Every man has. It is the weight of being asked to be your own god, which no man can bear.

You we're not an accident. Before you we're born, God knew you. He gave you your face, your voice, your strengths, and even the weaknesses you would rather not have.

Why? So that you could play a part no one else can play. The world will tell you that you are interchangeable. That is a lie.

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

Most people — including most people who say they believe in God — imagine God as a bigger version of us. A supreme being. A powerful person. Somebody up there. The old man with a beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The “ man upstairs.”

This is precisely what God is not.

Bishop Robert Barron has spent decades trying to correct this mistake. “ I think what most people get wrong when speaking of God is to imagine God as a big being,” he says. “ I look up in the night sky and I see stars and planets, I see the world of beings, of things. The great mistake is to say, we'll, he must be the biggest being around. He’ s the supreme being among the many beings of the world. And that’ s precisely what God is not.”

The atheist who says “ show me the evidence for God” is often arguing against this same straw god — a god who would be, if he existed, just one more object in the universe, subject to the same laws and limitations as everything else. Barron is blunt: “ If you imagine God as one more big contingent thing among others, we'll then there’ s no evidence for that reality.”

Being Itself

So what is God, if not a being?

God is being itself. The medievals had a phrase for it: ipsum esse subsistens — the sheer act of existence, subsisting in itself. Thomas Aquinas argued that in God alone essence and existence coincide. Everything else that exists — every star, every stone, every man — has existence borrowed from somewhere. Only God is existence. Only God cannot not be.

Barron puts it this way: “ God is the sheer act of existence itself in and through which all particular things exist.”

Think of it like this. Every created thing exists in something, through something, by something. A tree exists in the soil, by the water, through the sun. A man exists in his body, by his breath, through his family and his place. But God does not exist by anything. God does not exist in anything. God is the act of existing by which everything else exists.

This is what God says to Moses at the burning bush: I Am Who I Am (Exodus 3:14). Not “ I am a great being.” Not “ I am the greatest of all beings.” I AM. Being itself. The ground of all that is.

Here is where the doctrine stops being abstract and becomes personal.

If God is the ground of all being, then God is not far away. God is not “ up there” or “ out there.” God is the reason you exist at this moment, holding you in being, closer to you than your own breath, closer to you than your own thoughts, closer to you than you are to yourself.

Barron quotes Augustine’ s famous line and then presses it home: “ He’ s higher than anything I could imagine, and he’ s closer to me than I am to myself. Now, figure that one out.”

This is the paradox at the heart of theism. God is transcendent — beyond all categories, beyond all imagining, beyond anything we can grasp. And God is immanent — present at the deepest point of our own existence, more intimate to us than our own interior life.

The author-and-book analogy helps. Barron borrows it to explain the relationship: the author is not a character in the book. You will not find the author on any page. But the author is responsible for every comma, every character, every plotline. In the book the author is both everywhere and nowhere. God is not a character in the story of the universe. God is the one who is writing it — present in every word, absent from every page.

If God is a being — even the biggest being — then God is in competition with us. The more of God there is, the less of us there is. God’ s freedom limits ours. God’ s power diminishes ours. This is what Barron calls the “ competitive” view of God, and it is what makes so many modern people instinctively recoil from theism.

But if God is being itself, there is no competition. “ Because God is not a being, there is no competitive nature between God and humanity,” Barron says. “ The closer God gets to us, the more alive we are.” God is not the rival of your freedom; God is the ground of your freedom. The closer you are to the source of your being, the more fully you become the being you we're made to be.

Barron calls the alternative incurvatus in se — the soul curved in upon itself. “ When you lose that sense of God and you collapse back in on yourself,” he says, “ you are by definition unhappy.” The modern world has made an entire religion out of incurvatus in se. It has told us that the highest good is autonomy, that freedom means the absence of limits, that the self is the measure of all things.

And the results are visible everywhere.

The Vacuum

Men do not stop worshipping when they stop worshipping God. They just find something else to worship. This is the deepest insight of the biblical tradition, and it is the one the modern world has most thoroughly forgotten.

Dennis Prager has spent his career making this point. “ When God is removed, there is no reason to do anything,” he said at Biola University in 2014. “ There is a very powerful argument for murder. If you can get away with it, why is it wrong? There is no secular answer to that question.”

This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a logical claim. If there is no God — no transcendent source of moral order — then moral claims are just preferences. Prager’ s argument, developed at length in his book If There Is No God, is simple: “ If there is no God, the labels ‘ good’ and ‘ evil’ are merely opinions.”

If good and evil are merely opinions, then whoever has the power to enforce his opinions becomes the source of good and evil. That is what the state becomes when God is removed. The state does not merely govern; it defines. It decides what is true, what is good, what is human, what is permissible, what is forbidden. It becomes, in the most literal sense, the new god.

Bishop Barron names this idolatry. In his 2025 interview with Tucker Carlson, he observed that when people lose the true God, they inevitably find a substitute. “ They attempt to escape themselves by replacing God as the ‘ highest good’ with politics or sports,” he said. All such substitutions are “ fruitless violations of the First Commandment to have no other gods before Him.”

The First Commandment — You shall have no other gods before me — is not primarily about statues. It is about worship. It is about what you order your life around. It is about what you treat as the summum bonum, the highest good, the thing for which you would sacrifice everything else.

Barron is emphatic: “ God is the highest good, the ‘ summum bonum.’ That’ s why you love the Lord your God. That’ s the First Commandment. But when the culture has lost that, which ours is in danger of, you, by definition, become unhappy.”

When a society replaces the summum bonum with the state, it does not become more moral. It becomes less. It becomes a society in which every political question becomes a religious question, and every political opponent becomes a heretic.

Prager has catalogued the consequences. “ In America, every public institution has been rendered God-free, that is, devoid of God,” he wrote in 2022. “ From the age of 5, and sometimes before that, children attend schools that make no reference to God or the Bible. Indeed, schools generally hold God and the Bible in intellectual and moral contempt.”

What happens when a generation is raised in institutions that treat the source of moral order as an impediment to moral progress? Prager’ s answer is direct: “ The rates of suicide, self-injury, depression, mass shootings and loneliness (at all ages) are higher than ever recorded.”

He is not alone in this diagnosis. Barron, speaking with Carlson, said the same thing in different words: “ They’ ve lost a sense of God. I mean, God is the supreme good — when you lose that sense of God and you collapse back in on yourself — that’ s St. Augustine; he defines sin as ‘ incurvatus in se,’ I’ m caved in around myself’ — when you do that, you are by definition unhappy.”

Prager goes further. In his PragerU Master’ s Program, he argues that “ the rise of secular extremism has led to the death of communal life, and by extension, our happiness.” The claim is empirical: “ actively religious people are significantly happier than secular people.”

This is not a sentimental assertion. It is one of the most robust findings in the social sciences. Religious participation is correlated with lower rates of suicide, depression, loneliness, and addiction. It is correlated with higher rates of marriage, family stability, charitable giving, and civic involvement. The data are not ambiguous.

Prager’ s point is that this should not surprise us. If God is the ground of being, then a life ordered toward God is a life ordered toward reality. If God is the summum bonum, then a life ordered toward God is a life ordered toward the highest good. And a life ordered toward the highest good is, by definition, a good life.

When the state becomes the summum bonum, four things happen.

First, politics becomes total. Every question becomes a political question because the state is now the source of meaning. Everything from marriage to medicine to education to speech is now under the state’ s jurisdiction, because the state has taken on the role that God once held.

Second, the individual becomes atomized. The intermediate institutions — the family, the church, the neighborhood, the voluntary association — lose their authority because the state claims authority over everything. You are no longer a member of a family, a church, a community. You are a subject of the state. That is what Prager means by “ the death of communal life.”

Third, morality becomes therapeutic. If the state is the source of good and evil, and the state is made up of people, then “ good” becomes whatever makes people feel good. And what makes people feel good, it turns out, is whatever gives them the most choices. Barron warns against exactly this: “ When you deify choice itself, when you say, ‘ Autonomy, that’ s my God.’ No, choice is for some good.”

Fourth, the state becomes an idol. And idols, as the prophets never tired of telling us, devour their worshippers.

The Numbers

The data Prager and Barron cite are not abstractions. They describe the world we live in.

Suicide rates in the United States have risen by roughly 35 percent since 1999, and among men the rate is nearly four times the female rate. Depression and anxiety among American teenagers have doubled in less than a decade. Loneliness — the so-called “ epidemic of our time” — now affects more than half of American adults. Fatherlessness has become the defining feature of childhood for roughly one in four American children. Church attendance has collapsed across nearly every demographic group.

These numbers are not unrelated. They are the downstream consequences of a culture that has, for several generations, been systematically de-Godded.

Bishop Barron locates the root: “ When you deify your own psyche, your own ego, you get lost.” When the self becomes the center, everything outside the self becomes either a tool or an obstacle. The community becomes a tool. The family becomes an obstacle. The unborn become optional. The elderly become expensive. The weak become a burden.

This is what Prager means when he says that when God is removed, “ there is no reason to do anything.” Not that men stop acting — they act constantly. But the actions lose their why. The transcendent reference point is gone, and with it goes the whole architecture of meaning.

The response is not despair. The response is return.

Barron points to what he calls theonomy — the ordering of the self toward God. “ When God becomes the norm of my life, I become more myself,” he says. “ I find who I really am. If I jettison God and I say, ‘ No, I’ m the leader of my own life,’ I get lost.”

This is the paradox of the Christian life. The way up is down. The way to find yourself is to lose yourself. The way to freedom is to bind yourself to the only thing that can free you. “ Lose your freedom in God’ s greater freedom,” Barron says, “ and you become now authentically free.”

Prager’ s version of this is more direct: “ When you truly suffer in life, you come to realize that the only thing left is God.”

That is where the recovery begins. Not in a political movement. Not in a candidate. Not in a policy. In a man on his knees, in a family around a table, in a church where the Word is preached. The recovery begins with the First Commandment. It begins with putting God back at the center.

And the promises of Scripture are for those who do:

A man who knows who God is — being itself, closer to him than he is to himself — has already begun the recovery. Everything else on this site is built on that foundation.