Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist philosopher, argued that even 'emptiness' is empty — that no concept, including the concept of ultimate reality, can be grasped without immediately slipping through your fingers. This wasn't nihilism. It was a precise logical demonstration that the divine, if it exists, cannot be an object among other objects in your mental inventory. Here's where this cuts against a common assumption: most people who wrestle with God's existence are unconsciously treating God as a very large, very powerful thing — something that could, in principle, show up and be confirmed. Nagarjuna's śūnyatā — the doctrine that all phenomena lack fixed, independent essence — implies that any God worth the name would be precisely what no category can contain, not because of mystical vagueness, but because categories require contrast, and the divine, by most serious theological accounts, has nothing outside itself to contrast with. The practical consequence is stranger than it sounds: your most honest moments of encountering something that feels like the sacred may be the ones where your usual conceptual equipment simply failed to fire.

What would remain of your working idea of God if you stripped away every property that requires contrast with something else — not-evil, not-limited, not-absent?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Nāgārjuna)