No, not everyone knows God is real

Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo, face detail of God. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is more or less a dogma among some people that deep down everyone knows God is real. Aside from the question of what role that would leave for faith (which cannot exist without doubt--some people confuse faith with certainty), another question is what is means to know that God is real.

This is trickier than it sounds for skeptics and believers alike. Belief has several important shades of meaning, depth, and conviction. Is belief assent or agreement with an intellectual proposition such as "Korea is currently divided into two nation states and is located on a peninsula south of China" or is it an opinion such as "Rat terriers are the best dog breed"? Is it an intuition or a choice?

And upon what is a particular belief grounded? Is it an assumption you picked up as habitus because the people around you seemed to think and act like it was true? Has it been confirmed by your own experiences, and how do you know your perceptions and conclusions surrounding your experiences weren't biased by your pre-existing beliefs or those of the people you've encountered in your life?

This is especially tricky when it comes to belief in God because of differing perceptions on the nature of God and how God interacts with people. If God is within then is that warm glow you feel in your chest a sign? If God is without, then was your prayer answered when you asked for something and it happened? Or was that just a coincidence? And on it goes.

Then there are categories of connections to the divine such as peak experiences and a sense of the numinous. These can include the sensation or perception of non-dual unity with the universe, possession by absolute acceptance and bliss,  an overwhelming sense of wonder and awe generating a sense of connection to a larger mystery. And while they don't have to be interpreted as incontrovertible proof of a higher power, arguably these events are less ambiguous than other experiences that are taken to be signs of God.

Still, there are those who have no convincing sensations, serendipitous occurrences, or extraordinary shifts in conscious awareness. They have no felt sense of the presence of God and no intuition of an overarching purpose to either the universe or their own lives. And regardless of whether the personal testimonies of others or intellectual arguments about the reality of God sound convincing, there is nothing of substance upon which they can sincerely claim to know that God is real.

Let's explore some common themes that arise when expressing such lack of knowledge of God's reality.

The benefits of letting go of God can include coming closer to God

[The following is taken from a larger conversation originally conducted elsewhere. It has been edited for congruity and sensibility, including some new text, but the integrity of its original meaning is left intact.]

People sometimes mention letting go of God. But what does that mean? Was God in your pocket? Maybe on your iPod? Did you set God out with the trash? What you let go was an idea about God. A conception of God. A way of relating to God.

People will often keep struggling to hold on to this perspective, but intellectual honesty often wins out because there were things that didn't work with their expectations and assumptions, including their interpretation of what God and religion is supposed to be and what is valid or invalid in assessing such requirements.

I cannot go into everything I've written on the matter, but I went through the same thing, as have thousands of others. For whatever its worth, here are a very few of the things I have encountered and pondered along the way:

Do atheists encounter God when they stop believing in God?

"In the New Testament faith means surrender to God. Those who say, 'I can't believe in this God,' usually mean, 'I cannot accept the particular tenets of the religion of my childhood. They were not something I feel I could identify with.' But that does not mean that they don't have faith. An atheist is really someone who has another religion. For them God is not God. But since God transcends all concepts anyway, it really does not matter that much whether you think of God as God or God as not God. For faith it does not matter, because even if you have a belief system that calls the Ultimate Reality by some other name or label, anything you can say about God is more unlike God than God actually is." -- Fr. Thomas Keating in  Divine Therapy & Addiction

If we take what Keating says seriously that many people are asking for something based on a specific preconception of who and what God is and how God operates. If I haven't written it somewhere before, I would expand this and say if you have experienced true joy, beauty, the thrill of discovery, freedom or liberation from shackles of the body, heart or mind, then you have awoken to/realized part of God (or your experience within God).

Take this quote by Robert Ingersoll which sums up what many agnostics and atheists feel:

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural--that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world--not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live to my own ideal--free to live for myself and those I loved--free to use all my faculties, all my senses--free to spread imagination's wings--free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope--free to judge and determine for myself--free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past--free from popes and priests--free from all the "called" and "set apart"--free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies--free from the fear of eternal pain--free from the winged monsters of the night--free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought--no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings--no chains for my limbs--no lashes for my back--no fires for my flesh--no master's frown or threat--no following another's steps- -no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

It sounds like many people may perceive (an aspect of) God but don't realize it because of their certainty about who or what God is. (This isn't an attempt to impose God on those who claim to not believe, it is a perspective that assumes the reality of God and the sincerity of atheists.)