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In various biographical statements, Jon Mills is described as both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. He teaches at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto and runs a mental health corporation in Ontario, Canada. In a previous book, he critiqued the philosophical underpinnings of relational psychoanalysis (2011). In this book, he combines his knowledge of philosophy and psychoanalysis to propose an approach to spirituality based in humanism rather than in religious belief. His premises are that God does not exist but is only an idea and that religious beliefs can be replaced by a new spirituality grounded in humanism.
To begin, Mills lays out “axioms,” arguing in logical, syllogistic fashion to conclude that (1) “God does not exist independent of mind;” (2) “Therefore God does not exist as an autonomous ontological entity or extant being;” (3) “God cannot exist without mind;” (4) “Therefore God exists only as thought;” (5) “Without thought, God does not and cannot exist;” and (6) “Therefore God is the invention of an idea” (p. 38). To bolster these conclusions, in the next chapters Mills examines philosophical discussions of the existence or non-existence of a divinity and psychological explanations for the “need to invent God.” He seems to be most opposed to any notion of an empirical existence of a god.
For Mills, the idea of God comes into the human mind because of our loneliness, our fear of death and meaninglessness. Nevertheless, “Belief in God is pathological, as it is an expression of our suffering” (p. 95). “Humanity's overwhelming need to invent the idea of God … tells us something profound about human nature: we want, crave, seek, pine - hence require an object of wish fulfillment” (p. 99). God is the ideal of absolute perfection that satisfies all these needs, and we develop a powerful transference to God because the idea is presented to us in childhood and throughout our culture. However, for Mills accepting the delusion of the existence of God