On the question of God

Ever since I can remember, I have never believed in the idea of God. Even when I was very young, I denied God. Not because I knew for sure that God didn’t exist, but simply because I wanted to be a rebel. Or at least that’s how I interpret it now.

Some people have called me arrogant, or someone with a “God complex.” That’s their prerogative. What I’ve understood about myself is that I don’t accept things easily. I’m critical in my worldview. If someone is popular or accepted as “great,” I won’t accept it just because everybody else does. My brain works in too many if this, then that loops. So when I deny someone or something, I’m not claiming I’m superior to them.

I’m a science lover. I’ve loved science since I was a kid. I remember one weird dream from when I was probably in class 3 or 4 that perfectly captures how obsessed I was with God and science. In the dream, Lord Vishnu appeared in all his glory, with the Sudarshan Chakra, halo, multiple hands, and told me:

“Science has made so much progress. It’s the era of science, and science is superior to gods.”

Now obviously, this makes no sense. If anything, it strengthens the idea of God rather than disproving it. But dreams are weird, and I was a kid. Still, I remember it vividly. Even back then, I was making gods kneel in front of science in my dreams.

At that time, my head was filled with myths and mysteries of the universe, and with questions like: God didn’t make technology, humans did, so why does everybody believe in different gods? It was overwhelming for my little brain. I went through a phase where I sort of “believed” in God, but not your god or my god. I believed in everybody’s god.

While sitting on my school bus, whatever temples, mosques, churches, gurudwaras, even graveyards I saw through the window, I would join my hands and pay my respect. For me, it was simple: either all gods exist, or none do.

This was also the time I learned about our place in the universe. Earth. Solar system. Milky Way. Universe. And then the obvious question: what is the universe in? What holds the universe? Lying in bed at night, I short-circuited my brain with existential crises. I had the same problem with God. Okay, I accept this God, but who were their parents? And who created them? And so on.

None of these ideas gave me satisfactory answers. But I chose science, because it was more evidential and less contradictory. It didn’t have all the answers, but it had the most rational ones.

That’s how I eventually chose a side on the question of God. Science, at least indirectly, dismantles the human idea of God, so for me it was a no as well.

Throughout school, I built on this idea. God doesn’t exist. Maybe superior alien species colonized us. Maybe that’s why Greek gods, Indian gods, Persian gods have similarities. This was before I read history and understood how myths actually form. Eventually, I reached a stage where the question of God itself felt pointless, and I gave up on it.

By college, my approach shifted again. I moved from not believing in God to not caring even if God exists. This shift came from realizing how ignorant I was, and how everybody else was just as ignorant. People believe for or against God because they believe so. None of the parties have hard proof, yet all are firm in their convictions. I was no different.

Every religious theory of the origin of the universe is nonsensical in the same way as Lord Vishnu blessing me with science in my dream. The most widely accepted scientific explanation, the Big Bang theory, says the universe originated from an extremely dense, hot state around 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. That’s fine, until you ask where that initial state came from. Where did it exist, especially when space and time themselves didn’t?

There are no answers to that yet. At that point, even science hits a wall.

But that’s not science’s failure. That’s its biggest success. Science allows its most cherished theories to be questioned, attacked, disproven, and replaced. It doesn’t get offended. That’s why it has progressed for centuries.

The real problem is the scale of the universe. It’s absurdly huge and mostly empty. The observable universe alone is about 93 billion light-years across. Light is the fastest thing we know, and even it would take 93 billion years to cross it. And that’s just what we can observe. The actual universe could be vastly larger.

Our galaxy has roughly 100 to 400 billion stars. Our Sun isn’t special. The nearest star is 4.24 light-years away. These numbers don’t really help your intuition, so here’s an analogy.

If the Sun were the size of a basketball, Earth would be a grain of sand orbiting about 30 meters away. Most of that space is nothing. On that same scale, the nearest star would be thousands of kilometers away, farther than crossing an ocean, with nothing in between. Scale that up to the Milky Way, and then to the observable universe, and our entire galaxy becomes microscopic.

Microscopic. In the observable universe.

At that point, how confident do you really want to be about statements for or against God?

Over time, I’ve realized that God may very well exist. The probability isn’t worse than us living in a simulation. But it is certainly not your god or my god. Human gods are bigoted, ignorant, and repressive because they are reflections of humanity itself.

So what do I believe in?

I believe in the idea of God only as an open question. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in worshipping anyone. And if tomorrow God appears with divine proof, I would still rebel. Partly just to be different. Mostly because I don’t matter.