Why I Don’t Believe in God

This is a clickbait title, obviously. If you know much about me at all, you have likely gathered that I am a theist to my core, even when I’ve resisted it. And if I were asked this question on some ridiculous survey—do you believe in God?—of course I would check yes.

But more and more I don’t like the question, because I think it suffers from a faulty set-up. It makes God already sound like an imaginary character, one which you might opt to believe in, or not. One might fairly ask, well what exact version of God are you asking about? Do I believe in an old white man with a beard who put humans on earth for the purpose of seeing how obedient we would be, and who is so offended by the slightest deviation from that obedience that from his perspective, we all deserve damnation? Well, no. And to be fair, that’s a caricature of the Christian understanding of God, though I do think it’s an image that a lot of people absorb. But the problem I have is less with the particular characteristics of this version of God—as off-putting as I find them—than with the underlying framework in which God is described as a particular character, and then we decide, based on both the evidence we see and our particular notions about what even counts as evidence, whether or not it is plausible that this character exists. When it all comes down, that’s not so different from the question of whether you believe in Santa Claus. You’re told about a figure who does x, y, and z, and you have to make a judgment about whether this character is actually real. Given that, I can understand why people say, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and I don’t believe in purple flying unicorns, and similarly, I don’t believe in God.

That’s why I would say that there’s a sense in which I don’t actually believe in God. Because whatever my relationship to God is, I don’t think that term “belief,” at least in the sense in which it’s getting used in this context, really captures it. I believe in a lot of things. I believe that universal health care would be a good thing to have. I believe that science is a useful tool for better understanding the world. I’m inclined to believe in the reality of human freedom, even though the details of that get murky and complicated. I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of human beings. There are plenty of ideas that I believe in. But God isn’t an idea that I believe in. I’m acquainted with various philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God, and they’re certainly interesting, but in terms of my personal faith, they’re not very relevant. It’s not because I want to bracket rational thinking away from faith; it’s because I think there’s a basic category error in conceptualizing God as, in the end, a philosophical premise.

How do I talk about God, then? It feels like a tricky thing to do, because I don’t want to hide out in a subjective mysticism that you use to deflect hard questions. At the same time, there is a way in which subjective mysticism is at the very heart of my faith; I can’t get around that. I wouldn’t say that I believe in God so much as that I have encountered God. I have had moments of profoundly sensing God’s presence. This experience isn’t at all the same as opting to believe in a known figure, like Santa Claus (I mean, known in the sense that you have a fairly solid understanding of the characteristics of the person that you don’t believe in). It feels more like a small glimpse of something incredibly vast, something far beyond me. As plenty of theologians have pointed out, knowledge of God isn’t something that you grasp; it’s something that grasps you. That’s where the language of “belief in God” feels utterly inadequate to me.

People have asked me, well is that really different from the moments of awe and transcendence that you experience upon seeing a gorgeous landscape or hearing deeply poignant music? It's a valid question, but truthfully my answer is yes. It is different. I mean, I have certainly had those kinds of moments, and I think that they can absolutely serve as catalysts for connecting with God.¹ But those experiences, as powerful as they might be, aren’t identical to an experience of God. I find my that my sense of God is perhaps analogous to other intense experiences—not entirely unrelated, but also not the same thing.

However, am I confident with 100 percent certainty that this is all real and not something my brain has cooked up that has no correspondance to the actual nature of the universe? Of course not. Do I sometimes wonder whether I’m simply trying to hold on to something that gives my life meaning? Sure. Do I have any idea why I’ve had the experiences I’ve had, when other people haven’t? Hell, no. But honestly, I don’t worry as much about those questions at this point in my life (at least in terms of my personal faith; I definitely think they are valid questions). A number of my experiences of God have stayed with me not just because of their power but because of how surprising they have been, how they have completely changed how I saw things. Such encounters have at times deeply challenged my assumptions about who God is and how God works. And given that they’ve occasionally upended my beliefs rather than confirmed them, it's at least harder for me to convince myself that I’ve only had such experiences because I was brainwashed to believe certain things, and so talked myself into them.

To say that I’m confident in my experiences of God—and I don’t know that I want the word confidence here; maybe it’s more like, settled in? Grounded? Accepting of?—but regardless, that isn’t to say that I’ve always heard God correctly, that I haven’t thought things were messages from God that turned out to be, let’s just say, not messages from God. Discerning divine communication is a practice, and it involves trial and error and time. I do wonder what’s going on with that, like why God doesn’t just communicate clearly. The standard answer is that it gives us a chance to practice faith, but then I wonder—why is faith a virtue? I mean, faith can actually lead you in a lot of terrible directions, so it’s hard to see it as an inherent good. However, I do think there’s something to be said for being willing to risk, to commit yourself to something without knowing that it will pay off, and that a life in which you never take risks is pretty impoverished. I also see something very powerful in opting for love and hope, rather than despair and nihilism, in the face of ambiguity. Lately I’ve also been thinking that the challenge of learning to hear God does have the effect of making us spend some time really grappling with that relationship, and one of the things I most fundamentally believe about God is that God cares, and cares a whole lot, about the relationship we have with God.

I’m noticing that I’m slipping back into the language of belief when I talk about what I believe about God, and that feels okay to me, because it’s back in the realm of ideas. It’s something that that’s in constant flux and undergoes regular revision. It’s certainly grounded in the experiences I’ve had, but it inevitably involves my interpretation of those experiences. But I will say that while I might play with different ideas about God, my deepest sense of God is that God is love, and I don’t mean that in the sense of holding a cognitive idea about God. I realize that saying, guess what, God is love! isn’t news to anyone. But whatever small sense I’ve had of God’s love has completely blown me away; I might even use the word unbelievable, or at the very least implausible. It’s not like, well God graciously loves us even though we’re pretty terrible; it’s something wild and fierce and uncontainable. To tell you the truth, I think it’s completely bonkers; I can’t process it at all, and frequently want to dismiss my own experience because on a cognitive level I am like, there is just no way, surely God isn’t that loving. But when I talk about God communicating, while sometimes it feels like language to me, or at least that’s how I interpret the experience, more often it’s simply a sense of God’s presence, and that presence is love. I would like to have a more exciting way to say that, but that really does sum it up.

So while it’s quite reasonable for me to say that I believe in God, and if someone asked me about it in a casual conversation, I certainly wouldn’t subject them to all the thoughts in this post—I think the post title has truth as well. The term “belief” simply doesn’t capture the way in which God is overwhelmingly real to me.

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1. I’m sort of stealing this approach from the poet Christian Wiman, who describes the experience of human love as a catalyst for the experience of divine love. I find that a very helpful way of thinking about this subject (and suspect that there is in fact no stronger catalyst than human love).