ESSAY
A few months ago, I journeyed from Chennai to Arakkonam, a railroad town some 80 km away. Krishna, a man whom I hold in the highest regard, accompanied me. We met three years ago when I was working for an ed tech company. He was my reporting head. He’s a great speaker with such authority that I was initially intimidated by him; he naturally inspires a bit of awe. But as time passed, I learned he was an incredibly empathetic person who genuinely cared about the well-being of those around him. Talking to him always gave me something to reflect on. I’m still in awe of his amazing ability to juggle time and duties with ease.
On the way to Arakkonam by suburban train, our talk swirled around questions of existence, consciousness, death, and the existence of God. I used to be a forceful believer. However, exposure to epistemology gradually forced me to reconsider many of my assumptions. I don’t say with absolute certainty that God does not exist, but I no longer believe in a creator who is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent in the traditional sense. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely closed off to the idea. I realized, after talking with Krishna for a long time, that I had been carrying so many unexamined assumptions within me for years. It felt more and more important to face these things honestly, rather than to continue living in quiet intellectual inconsistency.
Something to Be Argued Into Existence?
Like so many others who may have searched the internet for deductive arguments that might prove the existence of God, I too had wanted certainty. I told Krishna that I considered myself a seeker, that if I were ever presented with convincing evidence for God, I would willingly change my mind. After all, my philosophy has always been based on the principle that beliefs must be revisable in the face of new evidence.
When I told Krishna that I was a seeker, he replied immediately, ‘You will be a seeker for the rest of your life.’
I didn’t understand the meaning of what he was saying at the time. But in retrospect I can see that I had been operating for a long time under a strong assumption: that God, if He existed, must be demonstrable by argument and evidence. Perhaps even many prominent atheist debaters, like Matt Dillahunty, share this assumption without fully recognizing it themselves.
But what if God is not something that can be proved in the usual sense? What if divinity, if it exists at all, is not something that can be argued into existence but rather something to be experienced? I have heard many people share very personal spiritual experiences, and I have too often dismissed such testimonies too quickly. But I have begun to wonder whether that dismissal itself is ever an example of intellectual unfairness. Is it irrational to take lived experience seriously just because it cannot be universally verified?
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The Great Leveler
Atheists frequently argue that if God exists, then such a being is not worthy of worship because the world is full of suffering. But I find myself wondering if suffering is entirely objective. Is suffering a function of the events themselves, or is it partly a matter of interpretation? Death is, after all, the great leveler. It’s the one thing we can’t escape. And if mortality is the only reality we all share as human beings, perhaps learning to face it meaningfully is more important than winning abstract metaphysical debates.
Krishna pushed the argument further. ‘I’m not concerned about confirmation bias,’ he said. If the belief in a higher power gives me peace, joy, and psychological stability, then why should I be troubled by the possibility that this belief may be false? Why do we reduce everything of value to proof? What if God cannot be limited by the bounds of argument?
The more I thought about what he said, the more it sounded well said. Belief, no question, provides many people strength. It gives confidence and a sense of purpose, even in a universe that may itself have no intrinsic purpose at all. If a common belief can help people to live more meaningfully, why reject it simply because it cannot be conclusively proven?
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Who Are You?
In my case, more and more I have felt that it is perhaps more important to understand one’s own nature than to settle the question of God’s existence. My cousin, a teacher who believes she has been saved by a higher power in several near-tragic experiences, once told me that obsessively investigating whether God exists is not the main issue. ‘The real question,’ she insisted, ‘is who are you really?’
She gave me an example that I have remembered ever since. When a person dies, we say that they ‘are gone,’ yet the body is still there in front of us. If the individual was simply the body, why would we speak this way? Why do we not go on relating to the body as if the person were still there? The body rots, but we feel something integral has been lost. ‘We can’t just be the body,’ she said. There is something beyond that, and that reality can be grasped only through sadhana.
A Worthy Guiding Principle?
I have no way of knowing whether her conclusion is correct, nor do I know how one might definitively investigate such claims. But I am thankful for having lost at least some of my earlier presuppositions. I now try to be more open in answering these questions. I carefully evaluate spiritual testimonies and claims rather than accepting or dismissing them at face value.
More to the point, I have started to wonder whether the pursuit of happiness and inner contentment might actually be a worthy guiding principle. If belief in a higher power does indeed help human beings develop resilience and bliss, then perhaps the value of that belief is not in whether it can be proved, but in what it allows people to become.
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But what if God is not something that can be proved in the usual sense? What if divinity, if it exists at all, is not something that can be argued into existence but rather something to be experienced?
~ B SUDHARSAN
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