The Impossible Question
Is there a God? Few questions have commanded more attention throughout human history, inspired more art, provoked more wars, or provided more comfort and distress in equal measure. It’s a query that has haunted and inspired us since we first developed the capacity to wonder about our existence.
We might approach this question with remarkable confidence—whether as fervent believers or committed atheists—but such certainty doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to truth. The reality remains stubbornly elusive: we cannot definitively prove God’s existence, nor can we conclusively demonstrate God’s absence.
This leaves us in an interesting position. Rather than trying to settle the question with absolute certainty, we might more fruitfully explore what we mean when we speak of “God” and what our conception of divinity reveals about our deepest needs and aspirations.
Beyond Traditional Narratives
The scientific understanding of our universe has rendered many traditional religious creation narratives untenable as literal accounts. We now know with reasonable certainty that the universe began approximately 14 billion years ago, that our planet formed about 4 billion years ago, and that Homo sapiens emerged around 150,000 years ago.
It was only about 70,000 years ago—a mere instant in cosmic terms—that our species experienced what historian Yuval Noah Harari calls the “Cognitive Revolution.” This remarkable development gave us the capacity to create and believe in shared fictions—stories that exist neither as physical objects nor observable phenomena, but as collective beliefs that can unite people who have never met.
As Harari notes: “Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.'”
This capacity for shared fictions enabled unprecedented cooperation among humans. It allowed us to organize ourselves into increasingly complex societies and to create meaning in a universe that offers no obvious explanations for our existence.
The Purpose of Our Myths
Mythology arose, at least in part, as an attempt to answer questions that seemed otherwise unanswerable: Why are we here? What created everything? What happens when we die?
These stories weren’t merely explanatory; they were instructive. They taught moral lessons, established social norms, and offered comfort in the face of suffering and mortality. Most importantly, perhaps, they provided a sense of meaning and purpose—the feeling that human life matters in a cosmos that can often seem indifferent to our presence.
Science has gradually replaced many of mythology’s explanatory functions. We now have evidence-based accounts of cosmic origins, planetary formation, and human evolution. Psychology offers increasingly sophisticated insights into consciousness, behavior, and wellbeing.
But science, for all its explanatory power, has been less successful at providing the sense of meaning and moral guidance that religions traditionally offered. This may explain why, even in societies with high scientific literacy, religious belief persists. Science answers “how” questions admirably, but struggles with questions of “why.”
God in Our Image
Religious texts often suggest that humans were created in God’s image. The Book of Genesis states: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”
But if we look at how gods have been portrayed across cultures and throughout history, we might reasonably conclude that the relationship runs in the opposite direction: gods are consistently created in human image. Greek deities exhibited human emotions and flaws, but with amplified powers. The God of the Old Testament is frequently depicted as an elderly bearded man. Hindu gods often appear in humanoid form with enhanced attributes.
Even the qualities we assign to gods—knowledge, power, presence—are human attributes extended to their logical extremes. We know things, so God knows everything. We have power, so God is all-powerful. We are present in one place, so God is present everywhere.
This observation isn’t meant to dismiss religion but to understand it more deeply. Perhaps when we speak of God, we are speaking—in a symbolic, magnified way—about ourselves, or more specifically, about human potential.
God as Our Highest Potential
What if, rather than being created in God’s image, the concept of God represents our image of what humanity might become? What if God symbolizes not an external deity but our highest potential—individually and collectively?
When we pray or engage in religious practice, perhaps we are engaging in a dialogue with an idealized version of ourselves. The version that is wiser, more compassionate, more just than our current self. The self we aspire to become.
This doesn’t mean that God exists only as a psychological projection. It means that the concept of God might function as a repository for our noblest aspirations—a way of imagining and working toward human potential that transcends our current limitations.
The mystic traditions within many religions hint at this understanding. They speak not of a God entirely separate from humanity, but of a divine presence within us, waiting to be recognized and realized. As Lord Mahavira, the spiritual leader of Jainism, described the state of nirvana: “There is a safe place in view of all, but difficult of approach, where there is no old age nor death, no pain nor disease… Those sages who reach it are free from sorrows.”
The Evolution of Belief
Religious ideas, like biological species, have undergone a kind of natural selection. Those that provided the greatest social cohesion, psychological comfort, and moral guidance tended to survive and spread.
The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have been remarkably successful in this evolutionary contest, collectively claiming the allegiance of roughly four billion people today. One reason for their success may be their distinctly humanistic element. While they feature miraculous events and divine interventions, these traditions place significant emphasis on human agency and potential. They tell stories of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things through faith, courage, and moral conviction.
As we move further into an age of scientific understanding, traditional religious narratives may continue to lose their literal persuasiveness for many people. We see this trend already in the growing numbers of individuals who identify as non-religious.
The challenge for such individuals is to find sources of meaning, purpose, and moral guidance without the structural support that religion traditionally provided. Without careful attention to these needs, the drift away from religion can sometimes lead toward nihilism—the sense that nothing ultimately matters or has purpose.
The God Within
Perhaps the most profound insight we might take from religious traditions is not their specific theological claims but their recognition of human potential. When religions speak of divinity, they may be pointing toward capacities within us that we have not yet fully realized.
In this view, God is not an entity to be discovered “out there” but a potential to be realized within ourselves and our communities. The divine is not separate from humanity but represents humanity’s highest possibilities.
This doesn’t mean each individual human is God in a simplistic sense. Rather, it suggests that what we’ve traditionally projected onto an external deity—wisdom, compassion, creativity, justice—are qualities that exist as potential within the human community. The “kingdom of God,” to borrow a phrase from Christian tradition, might be understood not as a supernatural realm but as a state of human society that fully embodies these qualities.
This perspective offers a middle path between traditional religious belief and stark atheistic materialism. It acknowledges the profound insights contained within religious traditions while interpreting them in a way that’s compatible with our scientific understanding of the world.
The answer to “Is there a God?” might then be: Yes, there is—and that God is the manifestation of our highest potential, speaking to us across time from a future we have not yet realized but can work to create.
Instead of looking upward for salvation, we might look inward and outward—to ourselves and to each other—recognizing that the divine qualities we’ve long attributed to God are actually aspirational qualities of humanity itself. The truest scripture might indeed be the entire spectrum of colors and natural beauty all around us, which neither speaks nor tells—allowing us to draw our own conclusions.
Our task, then, is not to worship or placate an external deity, but to listen to the best parts of ourselves and humanity—the parts we once dressed up and called “God”—and to work toward embodying those qualities more fully in our individual lives and our collective existence.
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