Nothing That Is Not There

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Does the fact that we participate in bringing God into being mean that he doesn’t really exist? If to be real means to exist in the same way as physical phenomena like gravity and electricity, then the answer must be that God is not real. However, God is at least as real as any other entity brought into being by and in a field of meaning. Language and money, to take two paradigmatic examples, are absolutely real for us, to the point that it would be impossible to make sense of human experience without taking account of them. As science has given us greater power to change the material world, traditional systems of meaning have atrophied but we still need them.</jats:p>