In today’s Times(UK), Fordham Philosophy professor Brian Davies, O.P., writes about the God who is – and isn’t – the object of atheists’ ire.

Atheists make a great fuss about how God does not exist. This claim, they think, is at odds with what those who believe in God hold. But is it? What kind of God do the atheists have in mind? And can someone who believes in God not actually feel happy to say that God does not exist?

Ordinarily, of course, we think that something either exists or does not exist. So we say that the Eiffel Tower exists while the Colossus of Rhodes does not. And if, like some, we presume that belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, or that God is a top, invisible person, a celestial consciousness (with or without a beard) living alongside the Universe in time while learning about it from on high, then, presumably, He, too, either exists or does not exist, just like you and I. But there are other, and more traditional, ways of thinking about God.

Take, for example, what we find in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. He never thought of God as an entity seriously comparable to what we find in the Universe. He took God to be the cause of everything real and imaginable to us, the cause of all natural kinds and their members, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. Aquinas, of course, realised that when we talk of God we are forced to make use of words we have come up with to name and describe what we find in the world in which we live. And since he took people to be higher forms of being than anything else around us, he naturally ascribed to God what we most value in ourselves — such as intelligence. But Aquinas was equally keen to emphasise that God is not a creature, not a member of the world, not a being among beings, not, in this sense, an existing thing. God, he says, “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms”. For Aquinas, there is a serious sense in which it is true to assert that God does not exist. He would readily have agreed with Kierkegaard’s statement: “God does not exist, he is eternal.”