Gods are a matter of epistemology rather than theology
or Why the boundaries of cognition need the invention of Gods
An essay on a subject which I have addressed many times with my views evolving and getting more nuanced over the years but generally converging over time. I suspect this is now as close to any final convergence I can achieve.
Summary
Human cognition is finite, bounded by sensory and conceptual limitations. When we attempt to comprehend realities that exceed those limits—such as the origin of existence, the nature of infinity, or the essence of consciousness—we inevitably reach a point of cognitive failure. At this boundary, we substitute understanding with “labels” that preserve the appearance of explanation. “God” is one such label, a placeholder for what cannot be conceived or described.
The essay argues that the invention of gods is not primarily a cultural accident or a moral device but a “cognitive necessity”. Any consciousness that seeks to understand its total environment will eventually collide with incomprehensibility. To sustain coherence, the mind must assign meaning to the unknowable—whether through myth, metaphysics, or scientific abstraction. “God” thus emerges as a symbolic bridge over the gap between the knowable and the unknowable.
This tendency manifests in the “discretia/continua” tension which arises from our inability to reconcile the world as composed of both distinct things (particles, identities, numbers) and continuous processes (waves, emotions, time). Different cognitions, human, alien, or animal, would experience different boundaries of comprehension depending on their perceptual structures. Yet each would face some ultimate limit, beyond which only placeholders remain.
The essay further proposes that “God” represents not an active being but the “hypothetical cognition that could perceive the universe in its totality”. For finite minds, such total perception is impossible. Thus, the divine concept is born as a projection of impossible completeness. Even an unconscious entity, such as a rock, is immersed in the continuum but lacks perception, suggesting that only through perception do concepts like “continuity” and “divinity” arise.
In essence, “gods exist because minds are finite”. They are conceptual necessities marking the horizon of understanding. The invention of gods is not weakness but the natural consequence of finite awareness confronting the infinite. Where the finitude of our cognition meets the boundless universe, we raise placeholders—and call them gods. “God” emerges not from revelation, but from the structure and limits of cognition itself.
Human finitude
Human cognition is finite. Our brains are finite, and we do not even have many of the senses that have evolved among other living species on earth. We rely primarily on the five traditional senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), plus some others like balance, pain, and body awareness. But living things on earth have evolved many “extra” senses that we do not possess. Unlike other creatures we cannot directly detect magnetic fields, electrical fields, or infrared or ultraviolet radiation. We cannot either detect and use echo location, or polarized light or seismic signals as some other animals can. (See Senses we lack). And for all those other detectable signals that must exist in the universe, but are unknown on earth, we cannot know what we do not have.
I take the cognition of any individual to emerge from the particular combination of brain, senses and body making up that individual where the three elements have been tuned to function together by evolution. It is through the cognition available that any observer perceives the surrounding universe. And so it is for humans who find their surroundings to be without bound. No matter where or when we look, we see no edges, no boundaries, no beginnings and no endings. In fact, we can perceive no boundaries of any kind in any part of the space and time (and the spacetime) we perceive ourselves to be embedded in. Our finitude is confronted by boundless surroundings and it follows that each and every observation we make is necessarily partial, imperfect and incomplete. It is inevitable that there are things we cannot know. It is unavoidable that what we do know can only be partial and incomplete. All our observations, our perceptions are subject to the blinkers of our cognition and our finitude can never encompass the totality of the boundless.
It is this finitude of our cognition and the boundless world around us which gives us our three-fold classification of knowledge. There is that which we know, there is that which is knowable but which we do not know, and then there is that which we cannot know. Every act of knowing presupposes both a knower and what is or can be known. Omniscience, knowing everything, is beyond the comprehension of human cognition. To know everything is to remove the very meaning of knowledge. There would be nothing to be known. It is a paradox that as knowledge grows so does the extent of the interface to the unknown and some of that is unknowable. Any mind contained within the universe is a finite mind. Any finite mind faced with a boundless universe is necessarily curtailed in the extent of its perception, processing, representation and understanding.
A key feature of human cognition is that we have the ability to distinguish “things” – things which are discrete, unique, identifiable and countable. We distinguish fundamentally between continua on the one hand, and discrete separate “things” on the other. We classify air, water, emotions, colours as continua, while we recognize atoms and fruit and living entities and planets and galaxies and even thoughts as “things”. Once a thing exists it has an identity separate from every other thing. It may be part of another thing but yet retains its own identity as long as it remains a thing. To be a thing is to have a unique identity in the human perceived universe. We even dare to talk about all the things in the visible universe (as being the ca. 1080 atoms which exist independently and uniquely). But the same cognitive capability also enjoins us to keep “things” separated from continua. We distinguish, draw boundaries, try to set one thing against another as we seek to define them. Perception itself is an act of discretization within a world we perceive as continuous in space, energy, time, and motion. Where there are flows without clear division, the human mind seeks to impose structure upon that flow, carving reality into things it can identify, name, and manipulate. Without that discretization there could be no comprehension, but because of it, comprehension is always incomplete. As with any enabler (or tool), human cognition both enables inquiry but also limits the field of inquiry. Even when our instruments detect parameters we cannot directly sense (uv, ir, infrasound, etc.) the data must be translated into forms that we can detect (audible sound, visible light, …) so that our brains can deal with data in the allowable forms for interpretation. But humans can never reproduce what a dog experiences with its nose and processed by its brain. Even the same signals sensed by different species are interpreted differently by their separate brains and the experiences cannot be shared.
When finitude meets the boundless, ….
It is not surprising then that the finitude of our understanding is regularly confounded when confronted by one of the many incomprehensibilities of our boundless surroundings. All our metaphysical mysteries originate at these confrontations. At the deepest level, this is inevitable because cognition itself is finite and cannot encompass an unbounded totality. There will always exist unknowable aspects of existence that remain beyond our cognitive horizon. These are not gaps to be filled by further research or better instruments. They are structural boundaries. A finite observer cannot observe the totality it is part of, for to do so it would have to stand outside itself. The limitation is built into the architecture of our thought. Even an omniscient computer would fail if it tried to compute its own complete state. A system cannot wholly contain its own description. So it is with consciousness. The human mind, trying to know all things, ultimately encounters its own limits, of comprehension.
When that point is reached where finitude is confronted by boundlessness, thought divides. One path declares the unknown to be empty and that beyond the horizon there is simply nothing to know. Another declares that beyond the horizon lies the infinite, the absolute. Both stances are responses to the same impasse, and both are constrained by the same cognitive structure. Both are not so much wrong as of providing no additional insight, no extra value. For something we do not know we cannot even imagine if there is a fence surrounding it. Each acknowledges, by affirmation or negation, that there exists a boundary beyond which the mind cannot pass. It is this boundary which limits and shapes our observations (or to be more precise, our perception of our observations).
The human mind perceives “things.” Our logic, our language, and our mathematics depend upon the ability to isolate and identify “things”. An intelligence lacking this faculty could not recognize objects, numbers, or individuality. It would perceive not a world of things, but a perception of a continuum with variations of flux, or as patterns without division. For such a cognition, mathematics would be meaningless, for there would be nothing to count. Reality would appear as a continuum without edges. That difference reveals that mathematics, logic, and even identity are not universal properties of the cosmos but features of the cognitive apparatus that apprehends it. They exist only within cognition. The laws of number and form are not inscribed in the universe; they are inscribed in the way our minds carve the universe into parts. A spider surely senses heat and warmth and light as gradients and density, but it almost certainly has no conception of things like planets and stars.
We find that we are unable to resolve the conflicts which often emerge between the discrete and the continuous, between the countable and the uncountable. This tension underlies all human thought. It is visible in every field we pursue. It appears in particles versus waves, digital versus analogue, fundamental particles versus quantum wave functions, reason versus emotion, discrete things within the spacetime continuum they belong to. It appears in the discrete spark of life as opposed to amorphous, inert matter or as individual consciousnesses contributing to the unending stream of life. It appears even in mathematics as the tension between countable and uncountable, number and continuum. Continua versus “discretia” (to coin a word) is a hallmark of human cognition. This tension or opposition is not a flaw in our understanding; it is the foundation of it. The mind can grasp only what it can distinguish, but all of existence exceeds what can be distinguished.
Where discreteness crashes into continuity, human cognition is unable, and fails, to reconcile the two. The paradox is irreducible. To the senses, the ocean is a continuous expanse, while to the physicist, it resolves into discrete molecules, atoms and quantum states. Both views are correct within their frames, yet neither captures the whole. The experiences of love, pain, or awe are likewise continuous. They cannot be counted or divided or broken down to neural signals without destroying their essence. Consciousness oscillates perpetually between the two modes – either breaking the continuous into parts but then seeking a unifying continuity among the parts. The unresolved tension drives all inquiry, all art, all metaphysics. And wherever the tension reaches its limit, the mind needs a placeholder, a label to mark the place of cognitive discontinuity. The universe appears unbounded to us, yet we cannot know whether it is infinite or finite. If infinite, the very concept of infinity is only a token for incomprehensibility. If finite, then what lies beyond its bounds is equally beyond our grasp. Either way, the mind meets different facets of the same wall. The horizon of incomprehensibility is shaped by the nature of the cognition that perceives it. A spider meets the limit of its sensory world at one point, a human at another, a hypothetical superintelligence elsewhere. But all must meet it somewhere. For any finite mind, there will always be a place where explanation runs out and symbol begins. These places, where the boundary of comprehension is reached, is where the placeholder-gods are born. “God” is the label – a signpost – we use for the point at which the mind’s discretizing faculty fails.
…… the interface to incomprehension needs a label
The word “God” has always carried great pondus but carries no great precision of meaning. For millennia, it has served as the answer of last resort, the terminus at the end of every chain of “why?” Whenever a question could no longer be pursued, when explanations ran out of anywhere to go, “God” was the placeholder for the incomprehensible. The impulse was not, in the first hand, religious. The need for a marker, for a placeholder to demarcate the incomprehensible, was cognitive. What lies at the root of the use of the word “God” is not faith or doctrine, but the structure of thought itself. The concept arises wherever a finite mind confronts what it cannot encompass. The invention of a placeholder-God, therefore, is not a superstition of primitive people but a structural necessity when a bounded cognition meets unbounded surroundings. It is what minds must do when they meet their own limits. When faced with incomprehensibility, we need to give it a label. “God” will do as well as any other.
Each time the boundary of knowledge moves, the placeholder moves with it. The domain of gods recedes in a landscape which has no bounds. It never vanishes, for new boundaries of incomprehension always arise. As the circle of knowledge expands the boundary separating the known from the unknowable expands as well. Just think of an expanding circle. As the circle of knowledge grows the perimeter to the unknowable also expands. Beyond the line of separation lies a domain that thought can point to but not penetrate.
The mind must first collide with what it cannot grasp. Only then does the placeholder-God emerge as the marker of our cognitive boundary. This is not a deliberate act of imagination but a reflex of cognition itself. The finite mind, unable to leave an unknown unmarked, seals it with a symbol. The placeholder-God is that seal – not a being, but a boundary. It does not describe reality but it provides a place for thought to rest where explanation collapses. As a placeholder, “God” is just a 3-letter label. The interface with the incomprehensible, and the placeholder it produces, are therefore necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for any God-being to appear in human thought. Without the interface, divinity has no function; a God invented without an underlying mystery would be a mere fantasy, not a sacred concept.
The paradox deepens when one asks what kind of cognition would not require such a placeholder. Only a mind that could know everything without limit would need none – but such a mind would no longer be finite, and thus no longer a mind in any meaningful sense. To know all is to dissolve the distinction between knower and known. The infinite mind would not think “of” God; it would be what the finite mind calls God, though without the need to name it. Hence, only finite minds invent gods, and they must necessarily do so. The invention is the shadow cast by limitation.
The concept of God, then, is not evidence of divine existence but arises as a consequence of cognitive limitation. It is the sign that the mind has reached the edge of its own design. To invent gods is not a failure of reason but its completion. The placeholder is the punctuation mark at the end of understanding. It acknowledges that thought, to exist at all, must have limits. And within those limits, the impulse to name what cannot be named is inescapable.
The earliest people looked at the sky and asked what moved the sun. The answer “a God” was no explanation but it marked a boundary. It was a placeholder for the inexplicable. The label has changed. It was once Zeus, later Nature, now perhaps the Laws of Physics or even Science, but the function remains the same. Existence, time, causality, matter and energy are still fundamental assumptions in modern science and are all still inexplicabilities needing their placeholder-Gods. Let us not forget that terms assumed ro be very well-known, such as gravity and electric charge, even today are merely placeholder-Gods. We may be able to calculate the effects of gravity to the umpteenth decimal, but we still do not know why gravity is. Electrical charge just is, but why it is, is still just a brute fact in science. Every so-called brute fact invoked by science or philosophy is nothing other than a placeholder-God. Where comprehension ends, a placeholder is needed to prevent thought from collapsing into chaotic incomprehensibility. The idea of a placeholder-God, therefore, is not a primitive explanation but an intellectual necessity. It is the symbol that marks the limits of the cognitive map.
From cognitive placeholder to God-beings
(Note on my use of language. I take supernatural to mean supra-natural – beyond known natural laws – but not unreal. While the unnatural can never be observed, the supernatural is always what has been observed, and is therefore real, but is inexplicable. The rise of the sun and the waning of the moon and the onset of storms and the seasonal growth of plants, all were once considered inexplicable and supernatural. As human knowledge grew, each was gradually absorbed within the gamut of human comprehension. The supernatural is therefore not a denial of reality but a recognition of the incompletely understood. The unnatural is what I take to be unreal and fantastical or invented. The unnatural may be the stuff of fairytales and fantasy but being unreal, can never be observed).
As the placeholder-God gains social form, it must somehow rise above the human condition to retain meaning. A God limited to human capabilities would fail to explain what lies beyond it. Thus, gods become supra-human, but not unnatural, for they remain within the world but “beyond what humans can.”
Under the pressures of imagination, fear, and the need for coherence, the placeholder-God then acquires agency. The divine is invoked. The unknown becomes someone rather than something. A God-being, however, cannot be invented except from first having a placeholder-God. It cannot be created or invented directly, ex nihilo, because invention presupposes a motive, and without the confrontation with incomprehensibility, there is none. The human mind can understand the exercise of power only through will and intent and so the boundary acquires intention. In time, societies institutionalize these projections, turning the abstract placeholder into a God-being and endowing it with purpose, emotion, and supra-human capacity.
This perspective gives the divine a new and paradoxical definition: “God is that which would perceive the entire universe without limit”. Such perception would not act, judge, or intervene. It would simply encompass. Yet a cognition capable of perceiving all would have no distinction within itself. It would no longer know as we know, for knowledge depends upon differentiation. To perceive all would be to dissolve all boundaries, including the boundary between subject and object. Such a consciousness would be indistinguishable from non-consciousness. The rock that perceives nothing and the god that perceives everything would converge, each beyond cognition, each outside the tension that defines life. Consciousness, poised between them, exists precisely because it knows but does not (cannot) know all.
The necessity of the divine placeholder follows directly from human finitude. The mind cannot tolerate infinite regress or complete ambiguity. It demands closure, even when closure is impossible. To preserve coherence, it must mark the point where coherence breaks down. That mark is the god-concept. It halts the chain of “why” with the only possible answer that does not generate another question. “Because God made it so” and “because that is how the universe is” perform the same function. They end the regress. In this sense, the invention of gods is an act of intellectual hygiene. Without a terminal symbol, thought would never rest; it would dissolve into endless questioning.
Understanding the god-concept in this way does not demean it. It restores its dignity by grounding it in the architecture of cognition rather than in superstition. Theology, stripped of dogma, becomes the study of where understanding fails and symbol takes over – a form of cognitive cartography. Each theology is a map of incomprehensibility, tracing the outer borders of thought. Their differences lie in what each places at the edge of their maps and the projections and colours each uses. Yahveh or Indra, Heaven or Hell, Big Bangs and Black Holes, and Nirvana or Nothingness, but their commonality lies in the inevitability of the edge itself.
Modern science has not abolished this pattern; it has merely changed the symbols. The physicist’s equations reach their limit at the singularity, the cosmologist’s model ends before the Big Bang, the biologist’s postulates begin after the spark of life and the neuroscientist’s theory marvel at the mystery of consciousness. Each field encounters an ultimate opacity and introduces a term – “quantum fluctuation,” “initial condition,” “emergence”, “random event” – that serves the same function the placeholder-God once did. Quantum mechanics has shifted the position of many placeholders but has replaced them with new boundaries to the inexplicable. New concepts such as fields and quantum waves and collapse of these are all new “brute facts”. As labels they provide no explanations since they cannot. They are “brute facts”, declarations that comprehension goes no further, that explanation stops here. Matter, energy, spacetime, and causality remain today’s deepest placeholders and there is no explanation in any field of science which can be made without presupposing them. The structure of thought remains the same even when the vocabulary has changed.
In this sense, the divine arises not from invention but from collision. There must first be an encounter with incomprehensibility – the interface – before any god-being can appear. Without such a frontier, divinity has no function. A god invented without an underlying mystery would be a mere fiction, not a sacred idea, because it would answer no cognitive or existential demand.
Thus the sequence when finitude is confronted by boundlessness is inevitable and unidirectional:
incomprehensibility → cognitive discomfort → placeholder → personification → divinity.
The Atheist–Theist Misunderstanding
When gods are understood not as beings but as boundaries of cognition, the quarrel between theist and atheist becomes a shadow-boxing match. Both speak to the same human need – to name the edges of what we cannot (or cannot yet) know.
The theist affirms that beyond the boundary lies sacred divinity while the atheist denies the personality that has been projected upon that region. Yet both acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that the boundary exists. The theist says, “Here is God.” The atheist says, “Here is mystery, but not God.” Each uses a different language to describe the same encounter with incomprehensibility. In that sense, the death of God is only the death of one language of ignorance, soon replaced by another. Every age renames its mysteries. Where one century says “God,” another says “Nature,” or “Chance,” or “Quantum Field.” The placeholders persist and only their symbols change. The Laws of Nature are descriptions of observed patterns but explain nothing and do not contain, within themselves, any explanation as to why they are. All our observations assume causality to give us patterns we call Laws. When patterns are not discernible we invoke random events (which need no cause) or we impose probabilistic events on an unknowing universe.
Theism and atheism, then, are not opposites but reactions to the same human predicament, the finite mind meeting the incomprehensible. One bows before it; the other pretends to measure it. Both, in their own ways, testify to the same condition – that we live surrounded by the unknowable. If there is a lesson in this, it is not theological but epistemological. Gods are not proofs or explanations of existence. They are confessions of cognitive limitation. They mark the frontier between what can be known and what cannot, yet or ever, be known. To understand them as such is not to destroy them but to restore them to their original role as signposts for, not explanations of, the boundaries of thought.
Our cognition may evolve but will remain finite for the length of our time in this universe. So long as it remains finite, there will always be gods. Their names will change, their forms will evolve, but their necessity will endure. They must endure for they arise wherever understanding ends and wonder begins.
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