Here is a question that most people struggle to answer despite the answer being outright: Does God exist? Some say and strongly believe he does, while others strongly believe he doesn’t. Only a few people answer that question correctly. The correct answer is that WE DO NOT KNOW. People can convince themselves that he exists or doesn’t, but it is all unnecessary. Here is why:
Even if God existed, it is unlikely that we would understand “him” simply because “he” will likely be beyond our understanding. Consider the analogy of a chicken’s effort on understanding what grilling is. No matter how long a chicken tries to understand the fate of its mates, when the farmer takes them away, it cannot figure it out. Even if it watched a documentary of chicken being grilled, it would still not understand. No matter the amount of learning, it would not come close to understanding simply because the concept is beyond the chicken’s scope. Its scope of understanding is limited to the level of feeding on the grains supplied by the farmer. We are like chickens in this case. No matter the effort we put into studying the concepts of God, existence, or death, we are unlikely to comprehend them. Had we had the capacity, we could have most likely figured it out already. If it is the capacity that we lack, then any efforts are in vain, even though there is fun in trying.
Importantly, if a God existed, it is unlikely to be the one described in most religious ideologies. For instance, it is unlikely to be the God of Israel described in the Bible. This is because the God of Israel is described to operate within a limited scope that is not universal. A God would operate universally without being limited to a religion, a region, or even a planet. Read our article where we compared a God to a universal concept such as gravity, which, to a significant extent, operates uniformly without discriminating nationality, religion, beliefs, ethnicity, and life form or lack of it. For instance, oceans obey gravity, just as winds, rocks, bacteria, human beings, the dead, and the living. Had we not discovered gravity, we would be arguing that it is a God who holds the ocean together, makes rivers flow downstream, makes the winds flow from high-pressure zones, makes the rains fall, and makes fruits fall from trees. Before Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity, people theorized that objects fall to get back to where they belong. In their explanations, they thought that fire goes to heaven because that is where it belongs, while objects such as apples fall to the ground because they belong to the ground.
In most cases, what people refer to as God is a concept inside themselves rather than being external. This may be difficult to explain, but it is worth the effort. Nobody should tell you that God spoke to them. It is always an obvious lie, but we act as though we are convinced for the sake of kindness and civility. If anyone doubts this, they should question themselves in silence and tell themselves when God spoke to them. They do not need to answer anyone else but themselves. First, claiming that God spoke to you gives him human qualities, also termed personification. Why personify a concept so great? Would that not be downgrading it?
The God you think you seek outside is a concept inherent in humans. It is the concept that guides you through your routine. It tells you what you should be doing. It helps you distinguish between right and wrong. It makes you remorseful when going against it. Nobody should tell you that they can speak to it on your behalf, and no one should claim that certain laws were written by God.
Let us look at it this way, would you kill even if the Bible did not prohibit it? Did you need the Bible to know that stealing is wrong? If killing is bad even without God prohibiting it, then such prohibition is redundant, and it only restates the obvious. This applies to many other rules believed to be inspired by God. Interestingly, there are things that the Bible recommends, but the concept inside you prohibits you from abiding. For instance, the Bible states the following in Deuteronomy 25, verse 11:
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, 12 you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
Most of us know so well that such is not the right thing to do, and we would not do it whether the Bible recommends it or not.
In summary, the correct answer to the question of whether God exists is a resounding “WE DON’T KNOW.” The concept of God is most likely beyond our comprehension. Whatever explanations we have so far are way more superficial than deserve attention. In any case, the guiding spirit within us supersedes any other external concept introduced to us as a representation of God.
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