I grew up in a household where religion, faith, and God meandered in and out with whichever guests were over for brunch or dinner. I celebrate Eid with my extended family, but I do not know a single surah. I went to iftar invites, but I never fasted. I would watch the cows and goats being herded to the back of the farmhouse for Eid-Ul Adha, but I could never bring myself to eat their sacrifice. At funerals, I would cry, but I had no God to pray to.
My parents never really discussed religion, but I was surrounded by it regardless –– such is the case when religion and culture marry. With strangers and relatives, I would echo greetings that began with ‘Assalamualaikum’ and ended with “Wa Alaikum-assalam… cha?”
I felt that it must be easy to say that faith need not be spiritual, but can just be the faith one has in the family and community around them –– that should be enough to ground oneself and bask in the soft glow of familiarity and kinship. I remember when I was twelve, I asked my cousins to teach me how to pray. I asked because I needed to know; that should I find God, I should know how to communicate. They laughed, teased, then comforted me, and taught me how to perform wudu to cleanse myself, the surahs for each time of prayer, and the motions. I was in awe; how strong their faith must be for these rituals to be as known to them as their own name.
It went in one ear and out the other.
That seems to have been the way for me since childhood: an active participant in religious practices, not for faith, but to be with the people I love. The practice of faith has always been rituals of community. I learned that I didn’t need God to do any of that, that there is no harm in my pretending.
For me, faith has always been tied to religion — an idea I approached like a scholar, not a believer. It became an echo in the hallway, tempting me to steal A History of God by Karen Armstrong from our bookshelves and read it in my bathroom. I knew the rituals, the greetings, the smell of beguni wafting through the air before iftar. But I did not know the feeling my grandmother seemed to when she pressed her forehead to the ground.
God and Religion
The distinction between the idea of God and the institution of religion is where much confusion lies. Though organized religion is the most common way of recognizing God, the divine, as a concept, is fundamentally separate from human attempts to define or institutionalize it. Religion may describe God, but it cannot contain Him. To confound scripture with truth is to mistake the human map for the terrain.
God’s connection to religion depends entirely on the meaning one assigns to God. God can exist without organized religion just as easily as God might not exist within it –– because we will never truly know. As philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “the mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.” Perhaps, then, the divine is not to be proven, but to be wrestled with.
If God is omnipresent, untouchable, and incomprehensibly vast then the human attempt to capture Him in scripture is necessarily imperfect. It may be the word of God, but it is still a word passed through centuries of human fallibility, power struggles, and institutional control. Thinkers like Karen Armstrong argue that religion was never originally meant to provide doctrinal certainty, but rather to cultivate a disciplined practice of compassion, awe, and surrender to the unknowable. If so, what we call “religion” may be more of a cultural performance than a path to metaphysical truth.
So then,what should be the basis of refuting God? It’s a question that presumes an answer must exist. But, perhaps the more radical stance is to question the question itself.
Why do we feel the need to refute or affirm God at all? Is it a demand for finality in an otherwise uncertain world, or a desire to understand how something so empirically unprovable could have such scale and depth of power?
Paul Tillich describes God not as a being, but as “the ground of being”; not an object among other objects, but the depth of existence itself. From that perspective, belief becomes less a matter of actual assent and more a way of orienting oneself in the world. You may not need a God in the doctrinal sense, but perhaps you are already living with a kind of God in the questions you ask, in the wonder you feel, in the moral instincts that feel innate.
So when you ask yourself, “Do I need a God?”, the answer may lie not in whether you believe, but in how you live with the not-knowing.
God and Science
But the question of God’s existence can’t be explored in isolation from the world we try to understand. So how do science and faith sit side by side?
One can argue that the belief in God does not preclude acceptance of scientific principles. In the philosophy of compatibilism (which suggests that determinism and free will can coexist), this can fall true. Compatibilists reconcile the determinism of God with human agency, saying that our free will is a test that is separate from the divine. Our agency is not our own, but rather given and limited by God. This allows us to invoke scientific inquiry while maintaining our belief.
Now, I would rather say that God and science can coexist, but not by overlapping in function. Rather, they intersect in the human need to explain, to locate meaning, and to belong to a story larger than ourselves. They are not solving the same puzzle. One seeks truth through observable cause, the other through meaning and moral consequence.
Science can provide invaluable insight through empirical observation and experimentation, however, it has its limitations when addressing our questions beyond the scope of the physical universe — or even ponderous questions within ourselves. But, as science operates within methodological naturalism, we are restricted to natural phenomena. It is one thing to analyze the psychology of being human, but something else entirely to use science to answer metaphysical questions of God, which we have been unable to do.
To me, attempting to analyze God and science using criteria appropriate only for empirical inquiry is flawed. When it comes to God, our scientific method does not matter. Since by definition, God is transcendent, then scientific methods, designed for the observable, are simply structurally unequipped to address God.
The desire to reconcile science and God may not come from compatibility, but from discomfort with fragmentation. We long to believe that truth can be whole, that we can hold the laws of physics and the mystery of spirit without contradiction. But perhaps wholeness isn’t about resolution. Perhaps it’s about accepting the dissonance.
The Cosmos, Human Meaning, and Finding God
I do not think the question of God’s existence is important. I think the question of understanding why God happened and why so many stopped believing is more important; the philosophy of God, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of atheism.
I personally do not care if God exists or doesn’t. If God exists, to me God is great in some ways, and terrible in many. I don’t understand God.
If they exist as an unlimited being, they chose what things happened to me, what things happen to people. I don’t like it being viewed as trials and tribulations to test my character for heaven or hell.
For me, God was never an answer.
I think we need to understand why God became necessary, and why, to some, God is not. Why did existence have to be reliant upon something so much greater to begin with? Perhaps language gave us the power to name things we couldn’t explain, and with it, the birth of Gods to explain what language could not. Perhaps the most provocative question is not whether God exists, but why we believed God must. What was it about the human condition that longed for something so large, so loving, so merciful to tether ourselves to?
This longing did not emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by the conditions in which people lived, and over time, different societies produced different kinds of Gods; each reflecting their unique environmental, political, and cultural realities. Historically, many early civilizations practiced polytheistic religions. These civilizations were primarily agrarian, dependent on unpredictable natural forces such as rainfall and seasonal shifts, and so these cultures envisioned pantheons of multiple gods governing different aspects of life (sun, water, war, fertility, love, etc.) –– a structure that mirrored their own societal organization.
Monotheism became a powerful ideological tool, capable of unifying vast empires through shared law, that is,a reflection of evolving state structures. In Persia, the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra) taught devotion to one supreme creator, Ahura Mazda, which was adopted as an imperial creed, explicitly to legitimize kingship and impose common moral order across diverse satrapies. In each case, state centralization and the need to unify ethnically varied subjects encouraged the belief in a one true God.
Still, beyond social necessity and historical pattern lies a different kind of question — one not of society, but of existence itself. There are some propositions that create a feeling of definitive confirmation for the existence of God. One such thought experiment is fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is the idea that the conditions required to create and sustain life are so precisely constructed that it must be by design rather than happenstance. One may look at the elegant interplay of physical constants and see the beauty of mathematics, physics, biology where others see the divine. But, improbability is not impossibility. There was a time when black holes were deemed fantastical, and yet we came to accept them as natural consequences of cosmic evolution.
Yet for many, the fine-tuning argument is not a scientific claim at all, but a gesture of awe:a recognition of mystery that exceeds that language of physics. Scientific disproof does little to shake such faith, not because it is irrational, but because it arises from a different impulse — not investigating causes, but finding meaning. As Rudolf Otto might put it, it is the response to the numinous: an encounter with “the wholly other” (das ganz Andere), marked by a feeling of awe, reverence, even dread. This frames the structure of the universe as a site of metaphysical intimacy where what appears as scientific observation is felt as a sacred gesture. In that light, the appeal of fine-tuning lies not in its evidentiary power, but in its resonance with that numinous experience –– a whisper of the transcendent in the language of physics. It becomes less of an argument for God, and rather a reflection of the human longing to feel that existence is not accidental, but significant.
But even if life is an accident –– the inevitable result of an infinite universe –– does that make it any less meaningful? Albert Camus, in his ruminations about the absurdity of a silent universe, argued that significance is not handed down from the cosmos, but created in our defiance of its indifference. Our lives do not require divine authorship to matter. The miracle is not that we exist under such rare conditions, but that we can recognize it, reflect on it, and live as if it matters. The search for significance, then, need not rest on whether the universe was made for us or if we were created to witness it, but on the astonishing truth that we are here within it.
At the end of it all, it would be a cosmic shame for the Big Bang or God’s creation to go unwitnessed, for consciousness not to rise to meet it.
We ponder human existence while our cats sit on our lap, we coexist without ever knowing each other’s minds. I wonder if our relationship with the universe is the same. We are here, a small part of something bigger, but invaluable because we get to share ‘experience’ itself.
Sometimes we liken that cosmic weight to something we can hold: a metaphor of God. A way of draping form over formlessness. A weighted blanket for the soul. It makes the whole idea of existing more comfortable.
We are not separate from the universe that is so beyond our reach. Once you reconcile that the unknown to you is as unknown as you are to it, one can find peace in understanding that God does not need to exist for one to exist.
To Reflect…
Somehow I have found friends that are agnostic, or atheist –– this not brought up in discussion, but just a silent consensus that rings clear with living life by one’s own charter. We indulge in whatever life can give, with the boldness and care of entering our mid-twenties:young, yet old enough to grip the pumping arteries of adulthood that pulse between freedom and discretion. It is this learning, experience, and control that instills faith within myself and for those I love. That in the face of loss, grief, and pain, I was able to recover with or without God. I simply overcame it.
I would not declare myself as agnostic. Nor an atheist. Nor spiritual. I find the contestations and adorations of God entirely indifferent to my existence.
That being said, we are all, in some way, responding to the same ache. Whether you believe, disbelieve, or dwell in the in-between, you find yourself asking the most human questions. Why are we here? How do we live meaningfully in a world like this? What is my purpose?
To the believer, God is a presence that orders the chaos, the writer of a history that explains the skies that cry to the water we drink. To the atheist, God may be a construct –– a story told to soothe that chaos. To the agnostic, God is unknown and at the same time, beckoning.
To the indifferent –– like myself –– the question of God does not feel necessary, for life’s metaphysical weight is carried in other ways: in art, in love, in death, the unfolding of the world without push or pull. I may not call it God, nor do I care to name it, but I too, live with the unspoken. Regardless of where you stand, there is meaning that you are creating in our perpetuity of unknowing. This act of seeking, rejecting, pausing, intellectualizing, submitting is the act of being.
At their most honest and primal, these ways of living are not enemies. They are different ways of keeping company with the vastness of the unknown, and the serendipity of existing. And maybe, in the smell of beguni or in silent reflections, this human ache hums — not for answers, but for meaning.
