16 Unusual Proofs for the Existence of G-d
An Unnecessary Field Guide
A New Question
Does G-d exist? is a surprisingly modern question.
Five or six centuries ago, it sounded as academic as asking whether the number three exists. Philosophers may have worried over it, but the average person didn’t. G-d’s existence was treated as a simple function of the world's self-evident existence. It was trivial to demonstrate the logical necessity of G-d in one way or another. Yet it was hardly a primary matter of philosophical contention. The issue was not whether He existed but what He was like—was He Aristotle’s unmoved mover, Rambam’s Necessary Being beyond being, or perhaps even the kabbalists’ Creator who “gives what He does not have”? On the other hand, just as no one today speaks of “your physics” instead of simply “physics,” “your G-d” would once have struck the ear as unambitious. G-d’s existence and identity were once trivial even as His nature was contentious. Today, existence is considered a “live” question, one allegedly without good answers. G-d is treated as personal, private, and negotiable, even when He’s permitted to exist. Why? What changed?
To ask seriously whether G-d exists is thus already to inhabit the modern dislocation. The philosophers of old would have said that if the world is explicable, then G-d must exist. Only if you cease to care whether the world is explicable at all can you afford to say He doesn’t. Indeed, it was precisely such a move—toward the ultimate inexplicability of the world—that turned G-d’s existence into a capital-Q Question in the West.
Jews and Proofs
Jews Don’t Need Proof
In this, the Jewish approach is decidedly non-modern. For Jews, the decisive “proof” has always been not an argument but an event, Sinai. The Pesach Seder, the annual transmission of testimony from parent to child rebooting Judaism from its hard code, sufficed as proof for Jews for thousands of years. Jews were telling their children our story at least annually for many centuries before a single formalized work of Jewish theology was written. As Yehuda HaLevi writes in the Kuzari, Jewish existence itself is the witness.
For Judaism, then, intellectual proofs of G-d were always posterior and exterior to the faith, a post-Sinaitic afterthought. We have never and do not need them. G-d is on our family tree.
The entire issue of proof has the whiff of the bedieved, non-ideal tools for Jews who have forgotten ourselves. It is hard to imagine there has never been a Jewish community that refused someone an Aliyah because they held of Crescas’ proof for G-d over Albo’s.
Yet proofs are not useless. Proofs help us look more deeply at the world, to integrate our rational side with our Jewish side. They show the insufficiency of reason and its surprising transparency to G-d’s reality. Proofs are not ladders to the Infinite Light but exercises in clearing the fog from our lenses.
The Ceiling of Philosophy
The greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages teaches us, in a roundabout way, the insufficiency of proof. The Rambam in the Guide for the Perplexed writes a famous riddle. He says, as philosophers always have, that contingent things require a necessary thing. From dependent beings, we must reach an Independent one. But the moment we ask whether this Independent Being “exists,” we have already collapsed Him into our category of contingent being. Our categories are derived from our experience, and in the great dichotomy of contingency and necessity, finite and infinite, dependent and independent, all our knowledge is on one side. We have no idea what a non-contingent being is like; assuming any of our categories apply to Him is presumptuous. Rambam therefore insists that by the very same argument that demonstrates G-d’s existence, G-d does not “exist” as creatures do. Existence comes from Him even as the word doesn’t apply to Him.
The two sides of the Rambam’s argument, that G-d must exist and that this necessary existence cannot at all be what we define as “existence”, bear directly on the importance of proofs. If we are to insist on proving G-d’s existence, of using Him as the ultimate explanation of the world, we will always be closing ourselves off to His nature.
The tacit axiom of classical philosophy is ex nihilo nihil fit, “from nothing, nothing comes.” It is the operating grammar of natural reason. But if the term “existence” truly does not apply to G-d in any way, then G-d has no existence to impart. Our existence emerges neither from existence nor non-existence but from a mysterious alternate reality impenetrable to reason. The reliable Necessary Being in which the proofs conclude cannot really be called reliable, or necessary, or a being. If, on the other hand, we relinquish proofs and the rules by which they operate, we may open ourselves up to a higher conception of G-d, but it will cost us our classical explanation of the world.
What emerges from the Rambam’s approach is the sense that proofs of G-d and G-d never quite meet. “If I knew Him, I would be Him,” an acceptance of our ultimate ignorance of the Creator, may be a profound form of humble knowledge, but it leaves the system of the world perilously unexplained. The Creator is never quite captured by demonstrations of the Creator.
So Why Proofs?
If philosophy indicates that no philosophical proof can “reach” G-d, and Jews never needed proofs anyway, why bother? Because:
They show what reason can and cannot do.
They expose the way our minds are structured to expect unity, explanation, and transcendence.
They show how every rational road points upward until it runs out of road.
Proofs are not about capturing G-d but about cleansing idolatrous concepts, humbling the intellect, and letting us glimpse why the Jews’ G-d is of an utterly different type. They are the place where the method of the Greeks is most transparent to the Truth. Despite contemporary propaganda to the contrary, monotheism is the least totalitarian idea possible, always kicking away the ladder used to reach it, dissolving the structures that try to contain it. It demands a dynamic equilibrium of the intellect, a pushing of things to the breaking point and then setting up camp. So if we are going to be taking our rational intellect out for a drive (and after all, it is G-d who tuned the engine), we may as well drop the top and head for where the asphalt ends.
There are dozens of solid proofs for G-d spanning the entire history of human thought and every imaginable register and cultural milieu. Our souls are made in the image of G-d, and it seems that anyone willing to enjoy their own mind, to mentally putter and tinker, is always tripping over the Creator in one way or another. What follows is not a catalogue of “airtight demonstrations” that would convince a computer. It is a field guide. I have assembled a menagerie of my favorites, which, as you will quickly discover, are not necessarily the classics. Some of these proofs are rigorous, some comic, satirical, or even absurd. Telling which is which is an exercise left to the reader. The common denominator is that they delight me.
Proof 1: The Lit Tower
The Tzemach Tzedek, in his Sefer HaChakira, makes an extraordinary claim:
In my opinion, support for the teleological proof in Torah can be found in the Midrash at the beginning of Parshas Lech Lecha:
“A man was wandering from place to place and saw a lit tower. He said, ‘Can you say this tower has no ruler?’ The tower's owner looked out and said, ‘I am the owner of the tower.’ So, too, Abraham said, ‘Can this world have no ruler?’ G-d looked out and said, ‘I am the Master of the Universe.’”
That is to say, just as a tower is a great hall with many rooms that we clearly recognize is built for a purpose and intention, and it is impossible that it should exist without an intender, so too and even more so the world…if so, the terse words of the Midrash include all of the lengthy teleological proofs of the Rambam and the Ralbag.
The Tzemach Tzedek sees in Abraham’s vision a teleological proof of G-d, or in plain English, a proof from purpose. Just as an arrow requires an archer, the world is a “great hall with many rooms,” a vast and complex display of purpose. “Can you say this tower has no ruler?” is the Midrashic form of the Rambam and Ralbag’s question, “Can you say these purposes exist without a Mind?”
While many argue that modern science, especially Darwinian evolution, has done away with inherent purposiveness in nature, their claims seem premature. Teleology means that natural beings act consistently toward ends. The heart circulates blood, the eye sees, and the acorn grows into an oak, not a poodle. Modern biology has largely translated this into the language of “function,” but the idea is the same. To call a mutation “beneficial” is already to speak teleologically, in terms of survival and reproduction.
Teleology here does not mean conscious design, but a built-in aboutness, a directedness. It is difficult to see how raw matter—a pebble, an atom—can be “about” anything. Such orientations, built-in tendencies for characteristic outcomes, are the signature of the spiritual, the mental, mind. An acorn has never heard of an oak tree, yet it persistently tends toward it. One might protest, “Aren’t we just talking about how the oak is encoded in the acorn’s DNA?” Precisely. DNA is not magic; it explains the consistent tendency of the acorn because we see it as information, a rational phenomenon. When we say a particular biological code tends to produce a certain result, we are speaking teleologically. We cannot make sense of DNA without knowing that it’s code for something. That’s precisely what Abraham realized, looking at nature in ancient Sumer. If directedness or purposiveness is required to explain nature, then mind is required to explain nature.
Like many of the classical proofs for G-d, the teleological proof finds a deep consonance between our minds and the world. Our own minds, themselves structured around intentionality and directedness, recognize something of themselves in the acorn. The world is not a heap of accidents but a story, made up of innumerable smaller stories, tending in every detail toward conclusions, a structure already “about” something.
The Tzemach Tzedek says Abraham realized that a great hall possesses order but does not order itself. Ends require a mind. The mind looks at the world, sees its own signature everywhere, and realizes that a Mind like itself lies beneath the world.
Proof 2: The Proof from Dictionaries
Words define words. Open a dictionary and you find an endless regress. “Apple” is a fruit, “fruit” is a plant structure, “plant” is an organism, and the definition for “organism” might include plants as an example. Each entry leans on others. At no point does the book explain itself.
Yet somehow, when we speak, we understand each other. Meaning is not an infinite chain of referrals. It terminates in something self-intelligible, a ground that gives sense rather than borrowing it.
That ground cannot be just another word, or another brain-state, because those, too, are caught in the web of derivative meaning. It must be a non-derivative truth, a mind whose knowing is identical with its being, a Word that explains itself.
We call this Word the Word of G-d.
Proof 3: The Proof from Jeff Mangum
“Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.” So sings Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, voicing a sentiment most children at some point feel. Why is there a horse and not a unicorn? Why do fictional stories not exist while we do? Their “what they are” doesn’t seem to entail their non-existence.
Philosophers call this the problem of the thatness of things, the sheer fact that they exist. Nothing about a unicorn is any less coherent than a horse. But here we are, living in a world where horses exist and unicorns do not. Why?
Every “that it is” seems justified only by another “that it is.” This oak exists because this acorn exists, which exists because certain molecules existed, and so on. But each of those is just another brute “thatness.” If this chain never terminates, then we never truly explain existence; everything is arbitrary; there is no explanation at all for horses over unicorns. The only way out is to posit something whose “that it is” is identical with what it is, a being whose essence is existence. Such a being would exist because it is impossible for it not to exist, and could then justify every other state of affairs.
Our childlike wonder is the first step of all philosophy. “Things could be different, but they’re not,” sings Kevin Barnes of fellow Athens band Of Montreal. Just so. Every honest search for why terminates in a necessary being.
Proof 4: The Proof from Doubt
Everything we know depends on something we can’t be sure about. Every proof has premises; every premise can be doubted. Doubt is not an accident in human knowledge but its very context.
If each doubt were only relative to some other doubt, then in principle we could escape it. We could doubt the doubt, climb a level, and arrive at certainty. But we never truly arrive. Doubt persists. It is strangely reliable, ever-present.
This suggests that doubt itself is a function of something deeper, not just unknown but unknowable. How else could doubt be so all-pervasive when it can easily be dispelled by a little knowledge? Rather, there must be something whose nature is to exceed knowing. Our perpetual doubt is the shadow of a reality that can only be known in its unknowability.
Our knowledge is a fragile light flickering upon the face of a vast, tenebrous sea. Perhaps it was given to us just so we could feel its fragility, permitted to burn by the No-Knowledge, the great ignorance persistently undercutting our every assertion. This Nothing, we call G-d. Probably.
Proof 5: The Proof from Frank Sinatra
“I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet/a pawn and a king,” belts Sinatra in the chorus of “That’s Life.” Who is the one who remembers being all these people? Whoever Sinatra is at the microphone, he must be able to embrace each of his previous selves, the failures, the triumphs, the masks and roles. They are gathered together in one perspective, one “I.”
But here lies the problem. Any unifier whose act of unifying is other than itself would need another unifier above it. If Sinatra is just a bundle of experiences, what holds the bundle together? And what holds the holder? Down that road lies an infinite regress; nothing explains how Sinatra can sing a true song.
Our inner worlds are united in just this way, mysteriously. My mind can know many things yet remain itself. But how? If thoughts X, Y, and Z are only neural signals or brain states, then they stand in juxtaposition like words on a page or processes on a computer. Nothing in the page knows it has three words; nothing in the machine knows it has three processes. By contrast, I not only have thoughts, but know that I have them, and grasp them together in one act of awareness.
This is known as the “binding problem” in philosophy of mind, an ongoing and contentious issue. No arrangement of parts explains why they are given to one subject rather than lying side by side in causal sequence. Any composite unifier needs its own unifier, ad infinitum. The regress halts only in something simple whose knowing is identical with its being. The only resolution is that there exists a simple, indivisible unity, a consciousness whose act of self-awareness is identical with its being, a Witness.
The only way Sinatra’s song makes sense is if there is, behind all the shifting roles, a unity that is simple and indivisible, a consciousness whose act of self-knowledge is not pieced together but whole. Without that First Unity, Frank couldn’t sing true. Frank must always sing true (axiomatic), and as such, G-d exists.
Proof 6: The Proof from Modern Love
If the clever materialists are right, then you and I are not “about” each other at all, my love. We are not to or for one another. We are just two configurations of matter and energy, two little weather systems briefly whirling beside each other. Patterns can run parallel, collide, or dissipate, but no “us” arises.
At best, our togetherness would be an illusion of alignment. Shapes themselves don’t know they are shaped, and patterns behold nothing. Even a book is ignorant of its content; the ink marks are “about” something only because a mind writes and reads them.
Yet love is not ignorance. To say “I love you” is to be about someone, to be directed toward them, to unite across separateness. That aboutness cannot be accounted for by parallel matter alone, because to even recognize “parallelism” already implies a vantage point that gathers the two together. If that vantage point is also just a pattern, it too requires a vantage point above it, and so on. An infinite roll call of observers, no gavel ever falling.
We are captured by that symbol of modernity, a photograph, photons fixed in silver emulsions, background on background. There are only patterns, but no lovers. We are separate forever. Such is modern love. But even to declare us separate is to behold us. And the regress of beholders can only stop in a First Beholder, one whose act of beholding is identical with His being, whose knowing is His unity. In Him, two storms of matter can truly be one. In Him, love conquers all.
Proof 7: The Proof from Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Free Bird” is a Southern Rock classic living dual lives. We know the material constituents, the amps, the riffs, and the extended instrumental structure to give the singer a break. Culturally, we know the greasy pole of popular music, the record label, the critic, the best-of lists, the ironic barroom and concert requests.
And yet, when the song soars, all that feels like mere commentary. We don’t just hear a sum of causes and conditions; we feel the song itself. “Free Bird” flies free of its parts. As all art does, it transcends. We get the distinct sense, experiencing a work of art, that no amount of writing about it will ever “yield” it itself. Cultural context and the stories of the band’s drug escapades may grant appreciation, but the music never reduces to them.
If that’s true of Skynyrd, it may be true of everything. The physical facts don’t explain themselves. They only become facts when gathered in appreciation. If even a rock ballad can’t be fully captured from the outside, then reality itself must have an Inside. This interiority to all things would indicate an experiencing Self as the highest reality.
Proof 8: The Proof from Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams made a career out of showing us that the universe is mad. But nonsense only works if it plays against sense. Comedy requires expectation, and expectation requires order. A joke lands because there is a background of rationality to subvert. If everything were chaos, nothing could surprise us. It would be not hilarious but flat, like static.
So why do we laugh at Adams’s universe? Because we are not stuck inside it. We have the author, the frame, the wink. His madness is funny because it’s told from above. To perceive absurdity as absurd requires a deeper order. Our very capacity to laugh is a homing signal.
Even as Douglas Adams insists he’s an atheist, his humor relies on an expectation of order he cannot justify. The very assertion that absurdity is the truth of the universe falls into contradiction the moment it becomes funny. In that sense, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a theistic disquisition. It brings G-d to us by being funny.
Proof 9: The Proof from Therapeutism
We are told that every human being should be in therapy. But if your therapist is also a human being, then she, too, should be in therapy, and so on. The regress cannot continue forever, or else all therapy would just be a passing on of the therapist’s own failings and neuroses. Therapy, if it is to work at all, must terminate in a Therapist who needs no therapy.
But such a being would not be like me, and might make me feel inferior, requiring more therapy. Therefore, G-d does not exist.
Proof 10: The Proof from True Ethics
To find the truth requires objectivity. But who can say they are unbribed? Every thinker is lured by pleasure, by comfort, by fear, by the desire to be right. If I follow these impulses, my conclusions are bent; if I rise above them, I have no reason left to care about my conclusions. Reason cannot even begin unless I am already committed to truth for its own sake.
That commitment cannot be bribed, nor rationally justified. To “care about reason because reason tells me to care about reason” is circular. To care because it is pleasant or socially rewarded is not objectivity at all. If honest inquiry ever begins, it must be rooted in a ground deeper than reason, a fidelity that binds knowing and the motive for knowing without external incentive.
The Chassidic masters say this ground is pleasure, but not the coarse bodily sort. It is the soul’s pleasure in G-d, a supra-rational delight that gives reason both its warrant and its power. The prophets, divesting themselves of their garments of calculation, accessed this “madness,” the soul’s stiff-necked refusal to turn aside from its Beloved. Their madness was more rational than reason, for it enabled reason to exist at all.
Therefore, only in a state of total detachment can there be true objectivity, yet total detachment provides no reason to act. The solution is faith, which is not blind assertion but the soul’s native orientation to G-d, its delight in Him before it ever argues.
This is no mere brute evolutionary given, for that would limit knowledge, an external imposition on rationality. Faith, by contrast, is not a bribe; it is the beginning of all freedom from bribes. Rationality accepts axiomatic grounds as long as they are not yet another thing to be questioned but its own wellspring. Faith is the first act of knowing in which the soul cares to know and dares to trust itself, where it and its knowing have never yet been separate.
Without this supra-rational starting point where knowledge and will are identical, no ethics, no philosophy, no thought could begin. Thus, every honest argument, every attempt to think at all, already assumes G-d.
Proof 11: The Proof for Marxists
We are told there are no self-made men. Every person is shaped and sustained by the society that precedes him. But that society was itself shaped by a previous society, and so on.
If “society” means a structured order of relations, it cannot arise from chaos. And if it depends only on prior societies, the regress never ends. We need wealthy people to resent for their exploitation, but for there to be any exploiters, there must be a First Society, a primordial order not derived from another order.
That society cannot be a human collective, whose organization always depends on outside factors; it must be a unitary Mind, the first Social Architect, the one in whom relation originates.
That Mind’s vision for society is perfect. He is, therefore, a Marxist. We shall allow Him to exist.
Proof 12: The Proof from Hitler Being a Real Jerk
Adulthood teaches us that everything is complicated. Yet some truths brook no qualification. Hitler was a jerk.
If this clarity depends only on reasons, then it is hostage to a regress of complexity, with our clarity always suspended. If it depends on nothing, then it is mere assertion. Either way, it is groundless.
Yet we act as though we do have clarity. As though all explanations are illumined by a grand simplicity even a child can follow. That light is what we call G-d.
Proof 13: The First Steinsaltz Proof
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz once shared two proofs of G-d. The first proof is that Pravda, the Soviet Union’s newspaper of record, denies His existence. Witty, as Rav Steinsaltz of blessed memory always was. It is also deeper than meets the eye.
Consistent denial indicates the object it denies. A compass that always points south just as surely testifies to the existence of a North. Pravda, in its long war against faith, did not merely sneer at this or that ritual; it set itself against the very idea of G-d. But why should “nothing” attract such endless opposition? Why should absence have enemies?
One might object that perhaps Pravda opposed G-d only because religion was a mass delusion with real social force. The “something real” was not G-d but the delusion itself. But even this is unstable. To call something a delusion already measures it against a standard of truth. A hallucination is only a hallucination because it misrepresents a real referent. Why should this supposed mistake, of all mistakes, be the one opposed with such vehemence and consistency?
In Chassidic thought, the Yetzer HaRa or evil inclination always opposes the mitzvah in particular, even though the mitzvos often require no great ethical insight or sacrifice and may seem trivial. This uncanny accuracy testifies to the Jew’s special relationship with the commandments.
So too with the world’s allergy to the Jews. Antisemitism has pursued us with tireless regularity, through changes of country, culture, and custom. Nothing unites us across time and space except the claim that we stood at Sinai. And that very claim is what the world, in every age, cannot abide. That the story remains the lightning rod is evidence that it is more than a story.
How strange, if North did not exist, that every compass should point so steadily against it.
Proof 14: The Second Steinsaltz Proof
Rav Steinsaltz’s other proof was equally direct. The survival of the State of Israel under the leadership it has had shows the hand of G-d.
This is really a species of the larger proof from Jewish survival. The Jews have had no unified government for two thousand years, scattered among nations that not only disliked us but often made us their central obsession. We should have vanished through assimilation or been destroyed outright. Yet here we are, alive, cohesive, still recognizable as one people.
Israel makes this point even sharper. By any natural measure, the state had poor odds of surviving its first year, let alone seventy-five. Surrounded by enemies and governed with folly, it has persisted and thrived. That survival is exactly what our own scriptures predict, but it flatly contradicts all political and sociological expectations.
It is hard to deny the simplest explanation, providence.
Proof 15: The Proof from Innate Desire
Every natural desire has its real object. Hunger has food. Thirst has water. Weariness has rest. But within us lies a deeper desire no created thing can satisfy. No love, no achievement, no feast or utopia brings it to rest. It is a longing for something outside of time, beyond all creatures. If every other natural desire corresponds to a reality, then so must this one.
Objections come easily. One might say, “Not every desire has an object. What about the desire to fly, or to be invisible?” But such desires are not truly innate. They are composites of natural desires (for freedom, power, or escape) stitched together by imagination. Or one might say, “Perhaps this infinite longing is simply a quirk of evolution.” But that explanation leaves the longing strangely singular. Evolution shapes us for survival, yet this yearning points not toward procreation but transcendence. Why should natural selection burden us with a desire so universal, so insistent, and yet so useless? Evolution optimizes fitness, not infinite rest, yet the ache is precisely for the latter.
Unless it is a homing signal. The heart knows what it wants, and it wants more than the world. We sense the answer to our question lies beyond, and we cannot rest until we find it. The ache is the proof.
Proof 16: Golda Meir’s Proof
The second-most-Jewish proof of G-d is to ask G-d and believe as He commands.
Golda Meir provided the most Jewish proof of G-d. When an interviewer asked the “atheist” prime minister whether she believed in G-d, she replied, “I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in G-d.”
Where Proofs End
Reason always points past itself. These proofs show us the necessity of an ultimate ground for reason, though they all carry a certain air of disappointment, a sense that we are playing games with ourselves rather than stepping beyond ourselves. When we contemplate lines of thought like these, we feel our minds growing more transparent to Something, but it is something we never seem to grasp—or, if you prefer, Nothing.
The Rambam already knew this. To prove that a Necessary Being must exist is also to prove that this Being cannot “exist” in any sense drawn from created beings. If He exists like us, He is not G-d. But if He is beyond existence, then He cannot “give” it by the rules of philosophy. “From nothing, nothing comes,” unless Sinai tells us otherwise. G-d creates not by extending His own being, but by bestowing what He rationally “does not have.” That breaks the philosopher’s axiom, and with it the very idea of a line of reason ever concluding in G-d Himself.
That is why, as we noted at the beginning of this essay, Judaism does not begin with syllogism but with memory. “I am the Lord your G-d who took you out of Egypt.” The Pesach Seder, the chain of parents and children, is the only Jewish proof.
And yet the playful proofs matter. They show how even our jokes, our loves, our doubts, our music, our politics, all keep running aground on the same mystery. They prepare us to glimpse what Sinai reveals openly, that the world is not an accident, nor even a rational puzzle, but a creation. The philosopher asks for ultimate explanation; the Jew accepts that explanation ends and creation begins, that at some point G-d speaks. To say “G-d exists” is already a misunderstanding; He is not existence or non-existence, but the One who makes both possible.
What these unusual proofs really prove is that every path, if followed honestly, leads to its own breaking point. This does not seem to be a feature of the world but of path following itself, which means, of us. We possess the contours of our own self-transcendence, and even this recognition reveals deeper mysteries within.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that before he found G-d, “the two hemispheres of my brain stood in sharpest contrast. On the one hand, a glib and shallow rationalism. On the other, a many-islanded sea of myth and poetry. Nearly all that I loved, I believed subjective. Nearly all that was real, I thought grim and meaningless.” If we are to indulge in unnecessary proofs, it ought to be for this reason. Proofs of G-d indicate that the place of reconciliation lies within us, that we ultimately stand beyond this profound alienation. So does our Creator.