Oct 7, 2026 · @Johnbritto. K
The question “Does God exist?” is as old as humanity’s first long look at the night sky. But hidden inside it lies a deeper, more personal question: if God exists, can He actually be known? This reflection walks through reason, conscience, longing, suffering, Jesus and faith—and ends with a surprise I did not expect when I began.
“Is there a God?”
It is one of the simplest questions a child can ask, and one of the deepest a thinker can spend a lifetime on. Some answer yes because of faith, some because of experience, some because they see design in creation. Others remain honestly unconvinced.
Over time, I have come to believe that “Does God exist?” is not the most important question. It is the doorway to a more searching one: if God exists, can we know Him—not merely believe that some higher power is out there?
What follows is my attempt to walk through both questions honestly. Faith, I have found, does not ask us to switch off our minds. Faith and honest questioning can walk together.
Part One: Signposts That Point Toward God
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
The universe exists. Stars, oceans and living things exist—and so do you, reading these words.
Science brilliantly describes how the universe behaves and develops. But one question lies beyond its reach: why is there a universe at all?
Everything we observe depends on something else for its existence. Trace that chain back, and either it has no foundation at all, or it rests on a reality that depends on nothing—eternal, necessary and self-existent. For me, that reality is best understood as a Creator. This does not tell us everything about God, but it makes the question of God reasonable rather than fanciful.
2. Why is the universe so finely ordered?
The universe runs on consistent laws, reliable enough for us to land spacecraft on other worlds. More striking still, many physicists have noted that certain fundamental constants of nature fall within a remarkably narrow range that allows stars, chemistry and life to exist at all. This is often called fine-tuning.
Could it all be chance? Some propose natural explanations not yet discovered, or countless universes in which ours happened to be the fortunate one. Those possibilities deserve an honest hearing.
But it is no less reasonable to conclude that the order we see reflects a Mind. In everyday life, when we meet order and purposeful arrangement, we look for an intelligent source. Why should the universe be the one exception?
3. Why are we conscious at all?
There is a mystery even closer to home: you.
Your brain is physical matter. Yet you do not merely process information like a calculator; you experience love, beauty, sorrow, wonder and hope. Science has learned a great deal about the brain, yet how physical processes give rise to inner experience remains so puzzling that the philosopher David Chalmers called it the “hard problem” of consciousness.
If consciousness is more than matter in motion, our inner life may be a quiet pointer to a Mind behind our minds.
4. Why do we feel bound by right and wrong?
Most of us know that cruelty and injustice are wrong. We do not merely mean, “I dislike cruelty,” as we might dislike a certain food. We mean, “Cruelty is wrong”—for everyone, everywhere, whether or not anyone agrees.
If moral truth is more than preference or social habit, where does its authority come from? Christianity answers that goodness is rooted in the very character of God.
Our conscience is not infallible. Yet the experience of moral obligation raises a searching question: why do human beings feel answerable to something greater than themselves?
5. Why does the human heart remain restless?
Almost everyone knows this experience. We reach the goal, gain the possession, win the recognition—and a quiet ache returns. Is this all there is?
Some sixteen centuries ago, Augustine of Hippo opened his Confessions with words that still ring true: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Hunger points to food; thirst points to water. It is worth asking whether our deepest longing—for meaning, for permanence, for a love that never fails—points to Someone who can truly satisfy it.
6. What about suffering?
This is the hardest question of all, and it deserves humility rather than a tidy answer. If God is loving and all-powerful, why do innocent people suffer? Why do children fall ill? Why do floods and earthquakes sweep away whole communities?
There is no shallow answer, and anyone who offers one has probably not sat long enough beside someone in pain.
What can be said is this: suffering is a real challenge to faith, but it does not logically disprove God. And our very protest against it tells us something. We experience cruelty and injustice not merely as unpleasant facts, but as things that ought not to be.
Above all, Christianity does not offer a God who explains suffering from a safe distance. It makes a startling claim: God entered our suffering. In Jesus, He knew hunger, grief, betrayal, injustice and death on a cross.
And that brings us to the question on which everything else turns.
Part Two: From Knowing About God to Knowing God
7. If God wanted to be known, where would we look?
Suppose God exists. Would He remain a distant idea, inferred from the stars but never met? Not if He is personal. A God who desires relationship with the people He made would make Himself known.
Christianity claims that He has—through creation, conscience and Scripture, and above all through a person, Jesus Christ. The question then changes from “Does some higher power exist?” to “Who was Jesus?”
Jesus lived, taught, gathered disciples, was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and died. His followers, who had scattered in fear at His arrest, then became convinced that He had risen from the dead—and several of them went on to suffer and die rather than deny it.
Paul was candid that everything rests here: “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14, NIV). But if Jesus truly rose, death does not have the final word, and God has not stayed distant. He has entered our history with a name and a face.
8. Is faith the opposite of reason?
Faith is often mistaken for believing without evidence. Christian faith is better understood as trust: committing ourselves to what we have good reason to believe is true.
We live this way every day. We trust people because of their character and track record. We make life’s biggest decisions—whom to marry, which path to follow—without mathematical certainty. Even a criminal court, deciding questions of life and liberty, asks for proof beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond every conceivable doubt.
So the better question is not, “Can I prove this with absolute certainty?” but, “Is there sufficient reason to trust?” For me, faith lives where evidence, reason, experience and trust meet.
9. Can we know God, not merely know about Him?
Here the question becomes personal. Knowing about someone is not the same as knowing them. I could read a hundred biographies of a person without ever sharing a meal with them.
Christianity insists the same is true of God. He is not merely an idea to be studied but a Person to be known. On the night before He died, Jesus prayed: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3, NIV). Eternal life is defined not as information about God, but as knowing Him.
This insight is not Christianity’s alone. The Mundaka Upanishad, a classical text of Indian philosophy, distinguishes a “lower” knowledge—which includes even the study of the sacred Vedas—from a “higher” knowledge by which the Imperishable itself is reached.¹ Jesus told the scripture scholars of His day something strikingly similar: “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39–40, NIV).
It is possible to know a great deal about God and still not know God.
10. What if we are already known?
Here is the surprise I did not expect when I began. I had framed everything as our search: can we find God, can we know Him? The Christian story turns that question upside down.
Writing to the Galatians, Paul begins a sentence and then corrects himself mid-thought: “But now that you know God—or rather are known by God…” (Galatians 4:9, NIV). Our knowing God is not the first move. His knowing us is.
Jesus described His own mission the same way: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10, NIV). We are not the only seekers. Long before we set out to look for God, God has been looking for us.
Faith, then, is not an anxious climb toward a God who hides. It is a homecoming to a God who already knows our name.
Where This Leaves Me
Having weighed existence, order, consciousness, conscience, longing, suffering and the claims of Jesus, I find God far more than a comforting possibility. I believe that God is real.
Not because every mystery is solved. Not because a laboratory can prove Him. And not because every objection has vanished.
I believe because these signposts, taken together, form a powerful cumulative case. Like the strands of a rope, no single one carries all the weight; woven together, they hold. The world makes far more sense to me with God in it than without Him.
The Next Step
So the deeper question is no longer “Is there a God?” It is this: if God exists—and already knows me—what will I do with that?
We can spend a lifetime debating. Or we can take the next step. We can seek. We can pray. We can read the Gospels for ourselves and meet Jesus in His own words. And we can say, simply and honestly:
“God, if You are real, help me to know You.”
It may be one of the most sincere prayers a human being can pray, and it carries a promise: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13, NIV).
Faith does not begin with having every answer. It begins with the courage to ask the right question—and the humility to let ourselves be found.
A Thought to Carry With You
The universe may raise the question of God.
Our conscience may point toward His character.
Our restless hearts may reveal how much we need Him.
Jesus reveals His heart.
And faith opens the door—only to discover that God was already knocking.
If God is real, perhaps the greatest discovery of our lives is not merely that He exists, nor even that He can be known, but that we have been known and loved by Him all along.
Over to You
Can a person move from believing in God to actually knowing Him? What has helped you most on that journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Notes for Readers
¹ The Upanishads are philosophical texts of the Hindu tradition, composed in Sanskrit over several centuries in the first millennium BCE. The distinction between higher knowledge (para vidya) and lower knowledge (apara vidya) appears in the Mundaka Upanishad, 1.1.4–5.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV).
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