lch fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los,
weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. 1888.
“I fear we are not rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”
When Nietzsche made this statement, he meant it as a critique of lingering religious sentiments after 200 years of Enlightenment thinking. German philosopher Robert Spaemann transformed this criticism into one of philosophy’s more innovative arguments for God’s existence, focusing on an unexpected source: the future perfect tense (“Futurum Perfectum.“)
An example of the future perfect tense is a sentence like: “Tomorrow, we will have been here today.” What makes this tense philosophically interesting is that it connects three time points: 1) The present moment, 2) A future moment, and 3) A point that is in the future relative to now but in the past relative to that future moment. The proof of God through grammar hinges on this unique temporal structure. When we say “Tomorrow, we will have been here today,” we’re making a claim about how today’s present moment will persist as a past truth in the future. This raises the question: Where and how does this truth persist? Who or what preserves the reality of what “will have been”?
Spaemann begins his argument with an observation: the “rumor” of God persists wherever humans exist, however deformed its shape might be. This rumor can be found in most cultures, and across times. It crystallized into universal religious systems during the Axial Age, and found conceptual expressions in ancient Greek philosophy. But the fundamental question remains: Does this universal intuition correspond to reality?
Spaemann argues that dismissing this question as unimportant reveals a peculiar poverty of thought. Such indifference, he suggests, betrays a failure to grasp what’s at stake in the question of God’s existence.
Beyond Traditional Proofs
Classical arguments for God’s existence, from Aristotle to Leibniz, generally relied on the “intelligibility of the world” – the assumption that reality is fundamentally comprehensible to reason. These traditional proofs fall into two main categories:
- The Ontological Argument (Anselm): Derives God’s existence from the mere concept of God as that being than which nothing greater can be thought. We can only have a concept of the Absolute if the Absolute really exists.
- The Five Ways (Aquinas): Arguments for the existence of God from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and design that start from observed features of the world.
However, these traditional proofs faced two major challenges:
- Kant argued that theoretical reason can only organize sensory experience, not reach beyond it to metaphysical truths.
- Nietzsche went further, questioning whether we should assume “the world turns a readable face toward us” at all.
Nietzsche’s critique cuts deeper than previous skepticism. He argued that the very idea of truth presupposes God’s existence. Without divine consciousness, we have only subjective perspectives, not truth itself. This creates a circular problem: traditional proofs for God’s existence presuppose what they aim to prove, the ability to find truth in an intelligible world.
However, Spaemann notes that Nietzsche’s position faces its own contradiction. The claim “there is no truth” presupposes its own truth. Nietzsche’s response – “Who says we don’t live in absurdity?” – marks the point where reason despairs of itself.
The Grammar of Reality
This is where Spaemann’s innovative argument from the future perfect tense enters. Rather than starting from metaphysical premises, he begins with the structure of language itself. The proof unfolds in four steps:
- The future perfect connects to the present fundamentally: what happens now is equivalent to what will have happened in the future. This gives every truth an eternal quality – the present persists as the past of future moments.
- The past’s reality depends on memory. Yet eventually, no human consciousness will remain to remember.
- Since past moments are always tied to some present moment, when that present ceases to be remembered, its past vanishes too. This would make the future perfect meaningless.
- If a present moment will never “have been,” it lacks reality altogether. Eliminating the future perfect thus eliminates the present itself.
The conclusion follows: preserving reality’s coherence requires an absolute consciousness – God – in which all moments eternally exist. Without such a consciousness, our basic grammatical structures would reference nothing real.
This connects to the broader argument about human nature and truth. Our capacity for truth-seeking isn’t merely an evolutionary adaptation for survival. Rather, it reflects what Spaemann calls our “divine image” – our ability to transcend mere subjective perspectives and grasp objective truth.
The implications are profound:
- Either we accept God as the eternal consciousness in which all truths remain present, or
- We must embrace a radical skepticism that undermines not just religious belief, but the very possibility of truth and meaning.
Spaemann argues that naturalistic attempts to explain human consciousness face a fatal contradiction. If our cognitive faculties are merely evolutionary adaptations with no connection to truth, how can we trust them to tell us even this? The very attempt to deny our capacity for truth presupposes it.
Grammar and Transcendence
“We cannot think outside of grammar,” Spaemann concludes, “and grammar itself points to God.” The future perfect tense reveals something profound about reality: every truth demands an eternal consciousness in which it remains present. No word will ever become unspoken, no pain unfelt, no joy unexperienced.
Perhaps Nietzsche was right about grammar’s theological implications – just not in the way he imagined. Our ability to speak meaningfully about what “will have been” may indeed be our most profound evidence for divine existence.
The choice Spaemann presents us with is stark: either accept the existence of God as the ground of truth and meaning, or embrace a nihilism that undermines even its own assertions. In this light, the “rumor of God” that has accompanied human thought throughout history appears less as a primitive superstition and more as a necessary condition for meaningful thought itself.