Why I still believe in God (most of the time)

“Where is God?”, my friend asked me. 

“Everywhere,” I replied. 

“You mean, He’s over there?” he said, pointing to a spot two metres to my right. 

“Yes!” I exclaimed, trying to explain omnipresence in terms that my 7-year old brain could comprehend and articulate. “He’s everywhere!”

“Then why can’t I see him?”

“Because he’s invisible,” I said.

My friend picked up a handful of small stones and began throwing them at the spot where I’d just claimed God was present. “Am I hitting God with my stones?” he shouted somewhat gleefully. 

I sighed, “No of course not, it’s not that kind of invisible, its a different kind. God is a Spirit.” 

But I no longer had his attention. He was wearing a huge grin and hopping from one foot to the other pelting the invisible God with stone after stone. Once he’d finished, he stood back satisfied  “I don’t think God is really there,” he exhaled. “I think you made him up.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, except that in my mind, God was there. Invisible, undetectable, silent but present.

I haven’t thought about that story in a long time, but I guess it stuck in my mind for a reason. Sometimes I find myself wondering why I still believe in God and occasionally I’m not convinced that I do, despite my life as a theologian. There are lots of reasons to doubt the idea of a divine reality. Science has filled in many of the gaps that belief in the gods (or a God) were used to explain. Evolutionary theory, anthropology, and sociology have helped us to understand how we got here, and even why humans are drawn to religion. Physics and quantum mechanics help us to understand how the universe is unfolding, and how reality is held together. And history tells us that religion can be divisive, oppressive, competitive and violent.

So why hang on to it? Surely we enlightened modern people simply have no need of it anymore. Let us leave behind such primitive fairy tales and outdated fantasies. Let us be sensible about this, move on and live free of silly religious scripts.

But I guess I’ve never been able to fully move on, even though I know all of that. And if I’m honest, most often I find myself yearning to believe more deeply, even if I have much less certainty than my 7-year old self.

So why do I continue in this folly? 

Well, perhaps there’s no simple answer to that question. Why people believe in God is a complicated and indecipherable mystery. But other than simply saying “because I do”, I have a few reasons.

Firstly, all the science in the world doesn’t prove there isn’t a God. If we are going to talk about any kind of divine being/reality/existence at all, and if that divine reality has given rise to the universe, we shouldn’t expect that kind of “God” to be provable, or reducible to the findings of our scientific methods. By very definition, science is dealing with the world as we know it – both material and immaterial (if we’re want to get sub-atomic) – and this kind of God would be beyond, beneath and above the exploratory nature of the sciences. Similarly, being able to explain religious experience by evolutionary mechanisms, or even by demonstrating what happens in the brain, does not discount those experiences as invalid or untrue. How else would we expect a human being to have such an experience? 

Secondly, the emergence of human consciousness in the universe is a remarkable and extraordinary phenomenon. If it has happened by complete accident, it is the most gloriously astonishing accident that we know of, and worthy of wonder all on its own. But it is no less feasible to suggest that this emergence is the trajectory of the universe because of a divine-ness that desires relationality and knowing. The idea that our consciousness has emerged entirely accidentally is no more compelling to me (and often less compelling, if I’m honest) than the idea that God might be somehow mysteriously at the centre of all of this, calling evolution forward into something (and someones) truly knowable. 

Thirdly, the fact that beings like humans have evolved a wondrous and mysterious consciousness, and that in the process have formed deep connections to notions of beauty, truth, compassion, connectedness and love; well, this just makes my head spin. We might not agree on all of these things, we might not agree on what justice looks like, or what goodness truly is, or anything much at all, but the very human desire to even want to argue about these things is so truly remarkable to me. What a glorious reality. Again I say, if its an accident, it is the most beautiful accident there is, albeit a curious one. The idea that the only independently conscious, self-aware and self-reflective beings that we know of (i.e. humans!) have such a desire to purse these realities, calls me into a kind of believing that I find it difficult to turn away from. Are all of these desires explainable? Of course. And I would expect them to be. But the very fact that we have these particular desires to explain, when a world of other possibilities would be available; I find this hard to get away from.

And lastly, although there are many times when God is hard, if not impossible, to discern, I – along with billions of other humans – have found there to be a connectedness to things. And this is not just a connectedness to each other, nor even simply to the cosmos, but to something that can only be named as divine. I don’t know exactly how to describe God, I’m not sure we have the words. But I do know what it is to sense a response to my internal searching, even if that response remains impossible to firmly grasp. 

When I think of God I think of a beautiful piece of music that is playing in a nearby room. I can’t describe it very well, I can’t grab it with my hands nor can I figure out precisely where it’s coming from. I might be able to understand the mechanics of how my hearing works. I could explain the auditory system and the functioning of the brain to receive and interpret sound. But none of that is enough for me. There is something much more beautiful and moving going on in the song. I know that some people can’t hear the music, and sometimes I can’t hear it either. I don’t know if it comes and goes, or if it’s that I listen more carefully sometimes, or if it’s just that on some days the wind is carrying it in my direction. Sometimes I strain to hear it and find myself exasperated. But I know that when I do hear it, even if it’s just a few bars, the music somehow feels more real than everything else, although not in a way that makes everything else less real. Instead, it somehow makes everything else feel more alive, more electric with possibility and hope. Like the music is that which makes everything what it is. 

I guess that’s why I still believe in God (most of the time).