God As Emergent Symbol

“God is a symbolic creation to symbolize the yet unsymbolized.”

With this aphoristic formulation, one of the most demanding theses of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity is inscribed: God is not an entity external to the world, nor a historical error to be corrected — he is a symbol, and as a symbol, a material structure of reorganization. To say that God is a symbol is not to deny him; it is to situate him. It is not to devalue him; it is to reinscribe him into the regime of matter that complexifies, creates marks, and operates upon them through symbolic gestures. By naming what cannot yet be fully symbolized, God occupies a real and operative place: he makes it possible to stabilize excess before it becomes chaos. This idea of “chaos” should not be understood as a dualistic ontological reality, but as a historical expression of a zone of matter not yet symbolically organized. It is not the origin of the world — it is the symbolic stabilization of what could not yet be named within it.

The contemporary critique of the so-called “God of the Gaps,” formulated by authors like Richard Dawkins, presumes that science progressively replaces ignorance with testable explanations, removing God's space. The Ontology of Emergent Complexity shifts this critique to another level: it is not about denying God as a belief or as a cultural figure, but about understanding him as an emergent symbolic operation in contexts of low density of symbolic inscription. God does not fill the unknown out of superstition — he inscribes the yet unsymbolized out of operative necessity.

That is why his presence traverses every moment in history when human thought found itself facing the indeterminate: thunder, rain, death, the origin of life. In each of these zones, the absence of sufficiently stabilized symbolic marks gave rise to the emergence of a symbol with an anchoring function: God. The complexity of the world was excessive for the available regimes of symbolization. God's function was precisely to reduce this excess to legibility, not through empirical explanation, but through symbolic condensation. God was, in many ways, the first instance of legibility of chaos.

This role should not be understood as an error, but as a historical phase of the complexification of matter itself. The symbol God, like all symbols, does not arise from nothing: it emerges from material systems capable of generating inscription — language, ritual, gesture, body, technique. It is produced by symbolic organisms to operate upon what could not yet be conceptually organized. It is not external to the world: it is part of its symbolic machinery. In this sense, it is a real, but derived, ontological structure. Like myth, like art, like algebra: local forms of stabilization of the indeterminate.

In the Western philosophical tradition, however, this symbolic function of God was quickly captured by a metaphysical gesture: instead of a material symbol, God came to be understood as a founding spiritual essence, as a necessary being, as eternal substance. Plato and Aristotle, then Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and later Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel — all reinscribed the symbol into a logic of foundation, emptying its material origin. Secular modernity, even while denying God, inherited this same structure: it replaced the figure of God with Reason, with the Subject, with History, always maintaining the same function of symbolic closure.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity breaks with this lineage. It rejects both transcendence and its negative. God is not cause, but consequence. He does not found matter — he is founded by it, in its effort to become legible to itself. The symbol God is, therefore, a real effect of the complexification of matter in certain historical phases, where symbolic inscription did not yet have the tools to deal with excess. His power does not come from his truth, but from his symbolic efficacy: he allowed the organization of the real where organization was not yet possible.

But matter did not stop. The world continued its symbolic reorganization. With the development of physical, biological, and cosmological sciences, with the advancement of technology, language, epistemology, and politics, other forms of inscription became possible. Rain became predictable, death thinkable, life genetic, chaos measurable. God's function as a symbolic stabilizer lost consistency — not because science “won,” but because matter itself began to produce denser, more precise, more operative marks. God became, in this process, a residual symbol: operative only for those who remain in zones of low symbolic inscription. Even so, this symbolic residue continues to operate intensely in affective, ritual, and political systems — and therefore cannot be discarded as obsolete in social terms, only as deactivated in ontological terms.

It is not, therefore, about denying God. The symbol is not denied — it is reinscribed. God, as a symbol, continues to operate in multiple systems of meaning, affectivity, and ritual. But his founding function has been deactivated. He is no longer necessary for the real to organize itself. Reason itself, today, complexified by the sciences, by systems theory, by the philosophy of matter, and by non-metaphysical ontologies, is capable of operating upon what once needed to be symbolized by God. The emergence of new symbolic forms makes the symbol God obsolete as a stabilizer, but not as a historical trace.

In the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, God is a legitimate, historically effective, culturally dense symbol. But he is also a symbol that can be overcome — not through destruction, but through reorganization. Not through combat, but through inscription. What was symbolized by God can, today, be reinscribed by other symbolic devices that are more potent, more open, and more consistent with the material regime of the real. And this reinscription is not an attack on faith: it is a gesture of symbolic restitution.

God was the provisional name for the indeterminate. Today, the indeterminate can already begin to be read without him.

“God was the first symbol of the indeterminate — but not the last.”