The Master Betrayed

Talking about God

What exceeds us cannot be grasped. It can only be approached, attended to, and lived with.

To speak about God is already to risk misunderstanding. The very act of naming invites the left hemisphere’s habitual desire to define, contain, and settle what may be essentially uncontainable. In this episode, McGilchrist approaches the subject obliquely, not by offering doctrine or proof, but by attending carefully to what happens when we try to speak of ultimate things at all.

The conversation begins with an intuition: that consciousness may not merely inhabit the cosmos, but be woven into its fabric. This suggestion is not offered as a claim to be defended, but as a way of orienting oneself. It opens onto a sense of the world not as a machine assembled from parts, but as something more like a celebration, an overflowing abundance in which things come into being without strict necessity. This sense of joy, however, immediately encounters resistance in the form of suffering and evil. How, it is asked, can such exuberance coexist with horrors like the Holocaust?

Here McGilchrist resists the familiar image of a God conceived as an engineer: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent in the sense of having everything mapped out in advance. Such a figure, he suggests, belongs to a left-hemisphere imagination—one that equates power with control and knowledge with prediction. A world governed in this way would leave no room for genuine novelty, no unfolding story, no real freedom. It would be static rather than alive.

Instead, McGilchrist gestures toward a different understanding of divinity: not an entity standing outside the world, but a ground of being intimately involved in its becoming. On this view, God does not know the future as a list of predetermined facts. Rather, God knows in the way of deep acquaintance; knowing things as they come into being, through relationship. This is not ignorance, but a different kind of omniscience: one rooted in presence rather than foresight.

The same shift applies to omnipotence. Power, here, is not the capacity to intervene arbitrarily or tip the scales at will. It is the power to allow—to permit things to be what they are. A cosmos constantly overridden by divine manipulation would be deprived of its integrity. Freedom would be illusory, and meaning would collapse. The risk of things going wrong is not a flaw in creation, but the condition of anything truly coming into being at all.

This reframing also transforms the question of purpose. Purpose, in the modern imagination, is often treated as a utilitarian endpoint: something is made in order to achieve a specific outcome. But life does not unfold like a machine assembled for a single task. Its purpose is not written down in advance. Rather, purpose emerges through the realisation of potential. It becomes known only in the living.

To say that life has no purpose, in this deeper sense, is therefore misleading. What it lacks is not meaning, but a blueprint. Life’s purpose is closer to the purpose of music or art: it reveals itself in the act of being played or made. As Oscar Wilde suggested, all art is quite useless—not because it is meaningless, but because its meaning is not instrumental.

This perspective helps to illuminate why so many contemporary attempts to “solve” life end in despair. When life is treated as a problem, death appears as the ultimate obstacle to be overcome. But death, McGilchrist suggests, is not a problem at all. It is a boundary that gives shape and urgency to living. Without it, there would be no reason to act now rather than later. Meaning would dissolve into endless postponement.

Here, limitation emerges not as an enemy, but as a gift. A life without limits would not be fuller, but emptier. Sacrifice would lose its weight. Choices would lose their significance. As Mary Midgley observed, the idea of living forever is less a promise than a kind of terror. Almost anything, carried on without end, becomes intolerable.

This recognition casts a new light on human anxiety and perfectionism. Much suffering arises from an inability to accept the world as it is because it does not conform to an imagined ideal. A small imperfection begins to dominate the whole field of attention, eclipsing everything that is working well. In such moments, the demand for perfection becomes a refusal of life itself.

Yet the answer is not to abandon ideals altogether. We need something to strive towards, even knowing it can never be fully achieved. The wisdom lies in holding the ideal lightly, recognising that perfection belongs to the realm of the divine, not the human. Traditions that deliberately leave a flaw—a missing tile, a misplaced stone—understand this deeply.

To talk about God, then, is less to define than to be reminded of how to live: attentively, humbly, and with gratitude. It is to recognise that life is not a puzzle to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. Meaning is not imposed from above, nor manufactured from below. It arises in the meeting between limitation and possibility, where something genuinely new is allowed to appear.