A week ago, I travelled from Chennai to Arakkonam, a railway town roughly eighty kilometres away. Accompanying me was Krishna, someone I hold in the highest regard. We first met three years ago when I was working for an edtech company. He was my reporting manager. At first, I found him intimidating, for his commanding presence and exceptional communication skills naturally inspired a certain awe. But over time, I came to know him as an extraordinarily empathetic individual, deeply invested in the well being of the people around him. Every conversation with him left me with something new to reflect upon, and even today, I remain astonished by his remarkable ability to manage time and responsibilities with effortless precision.
As we travelled to Arakkonam on a suburban train, our conversation drifted toward questions of being, consciousness, death, and the existence of God. I once considered myself an ardent believer. However, my exposure to epistemology gradually compelled me to reassess many of my assumptions. While I do not claim with certainty that God does not exist, I no longer subscribe to the idea of an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent creator in the traditional sense. Yet that does not mean I am closed to the possibility altogether. In fact, after speaking with Krishna at length, I realised how many unexamined assumptions I had been carrying within me for years. It seemed increasingly important that I confront them honestly rather than continue living in quiet intellectual inconsistency.
Like many others searching online for deductive arguments that might establish the existence of God, I too had wanted certainty. I told Krishna that I considered myself a seeker, that if compelling evidence for God were ever presented to me, I would willingly revise my position. After all, my philosophy has always rested upon the principle that beliefs must remain open to revision in light of new evidence.
When I described myself as a seeker, Krishna immediately replied, ‘Then you will remain a seeker for the rest of your life.’
At the time, I did not fully grasp the significance of what he meant. But reflecting upon it now, I realise that I had long been operating under a powerful assumption: that God, if real, must necessarily be demonstrable through argument and evidence. Perhaps even many celebrated atheist debaters, figures such as Matt Dillahunty, share this assumption without fully recognising it themselves.
But what if God is not something that can be proven in the conventional sense? What if divinity, if it exists at all, is not something to be argued into existence but something to be experienced? I have heard countless people recount deeply personal spiritual experiences, and I have often dismissed such testimonies too quickly. Lately, however, I have begun to wonder whether that dismissal itself may constitute a kind of intellectual unfairness. Is it necessarily irrational to take lived experience seriously simply because it cannot be universally verified?
Many atheists argue that even if God exists, such a being is unworthy of worship because the world is saturated with suffering. Yet I find myself questioning whether suffering is entirely objective. Is suffering always inherent in events themselves, or is it partly shaped by interpretation? Death, after all, remains the great equaliser. It is the one inevitability from which none of us can escape. And if mortality is the single reality common to all human beings, perhaps learning to confront it meaningfully is more important than winning abstract metaphysical debates.
Krishna took the argument even further. ‘I do not care about confirmation bias,’ he said. ‘If believing in a higher power gives me peace, joy, and psychological stability, why should I be troubled by the possibility that the belief may be false? Why must everything meaningful be reduced to proof? What if God simply cannot be confined within the limits of argument?’
The more I reflected upon his words, the more persuasive they seemed. Belief undeniably gives many people strength. It provides direction, confidence, and a sense of purpose, even in a universe that may itself possess no intrinsic purpose at all. If a shared sense of belief allows people to live more meaningfully, why should one dismiss it merely because it cannot be conclusively demonstrated?
Increasingly, I have come to feel that understanding one’s own nature may matter far more than settling the question of God’s existence. My cousin, a teacher who believes she has been protected by a higher power through several near tragic experiences, once told me that obsessively investigating whether God exists misses the point entirely. ‘The real question,’ she insisted, ‘is discovering who you truly are.’
She offered me an example that has remained with me ever since. When someone dies, we say that the person ‘is gone,’ even though the body remains before us. If the individual were nothing more than the body, why would we speak this way? Why do we not continue relating to the body as though the person were still present? The body decomposes, yet we feel that something essential has departed. ‘We cannot merely be the body,’ she said. ‘Something beyond it exists, and that reality can only be apprehended through sadhana.’
I do not know whether her conclusion is true, nor do I know how one might definitively investigate such claims. Yet I find myself grateful for having shed at least some of my earlier presuppositions. I now try to approach these questions with greater openness. While I may not accept every testimony or spiritual claim uncritically, neither do I wish to dismiss them outright.
More importantly, I have begun to wonder whether the pursuit of happiness and inner contentment may itself be a worthy guiding principle. If belief in a higher power genuinely helps human beings cultivate resilience and bliss, perhaps the value of that belief lies not merely in whether it can be proven, but in what it enables people to become.
