I cannot count how many times I have been told, usually by well-meaning Christians, that “everyone believes in something.” The line is often meant to corner me: they believe in God, and I, as an atheist or agnostic, supposedly “believe in science.” It sounds like a fair comparison on the surface, but it has always struck me as profoundly misleading. To “believe in science” is not like believing in God. It is more like saying one believes in history, or in mathematics, or in literature. Science is not a creed but a method. It does not demand assent to a set of doctrines but invites participation in a process of inquiry. To conflate science with belief is to misunderstand what science is — and, equally, what faith is.
Apologetics thrives on this misunderstanding. It presents itself as the rational defense of belief, as though Christianity and science were simply rival hypotheses competing in the same arena. But apologetics does not begin with a blank slate. Its starting point is always the conviction that God exists and that Christianity is true. From there it gathers philosophy, history, and selective evidence to reinforce what is already assumed. It offers reassurance, not discovery. To the believer, this is deeply satisfying. To the outsider, it can feel like circular reasoning dressed up in philosophical language.
Science, by contrast, begins with the question, not the answer. It does not seek to defend what is already assumed but to test what might be true. Theories in science are provisional, open to falsification, always subject to revision. Its humility is its strength. As Karl Popper argued, a claim is only scientific if it can, in principle, be proven wrong. This is the opposite of apologetics, which treats questions as threats and answers as non-negotiable. Science moves forward precisely because it admits ignorance, because it allows itself to be corrected by evidence.
Where does that leave me? Somewhere in the middle. I do not believe in the Christian God, and I do not frame mystery in terms of the supernatural. But I also do not live without wonder. For me, awe belongs equally to the stars, to the cathedral, to the poem. I find beauty not in revelation from beyond the world but in the artistry of those who inhabit it. I am, in this sense, religious but not spiritual. Religious, because I value ritual, story, community, and the art humanity creates around its deepest longings. Not spiritual, because I do not see these as proof of invisible forces or divine intervention. My beliefs are bound to the natural world, yet I am willing to admit that I do not know its limits.
This essay is an attempt to trace that position more fully. I will begin by looking at apologetics, the art of defending faith by marrying it to reason. I will then turn to science, the practice of inquiry that refuses to let answers harden into absolutes. Between the two lies the human impulse of wonder, which both traditions channel in different ways. From there I will reframe religion not as revelation but as art — as the work of human hands shaping awe into story, ritual, and symbol. Finally, I will describe my own stance, what I call the religious imagination: a way of honoring ritual and meaning without clinging to dogma. Where believers see the hand of God, I see the hand of humanity. That difference is profound, but it does not rob me of awe. It simply locates it in a different place.
Faith Seeking Understanding
Apologetics
From the beginning, Christianity has been engaged in the work of apologetics. In the book of Acts, Paul stands at the Areopagus in Athens and debates philosophers, presenting the Christian God as the “unknown God” whom the Greeks worship without knowing. This was not just proclamation but persuasion, an early effort to show that the Christian God stood above all other gods. Apologetics in this sense was never about discovering new truth but about translating and defending belief within the intellectual world of the time. It offered Christianity a way to engage with competing systems of thought and assert itself as supreme.
As Christianity developed, this impulse only grew stronger. Justin Martyr and Augustine argued that Christianity was not irrational but the true fulfillment of philosophy. Augustine’s use of Platonic thought and Aquinas’s Aristotelian “Five Ways” are classic examples of this effort to place Christian faith in conversation with reason. Their project was to marry revelation with logic, showing that belief in God was not opposed to human wisdom but its highest expression. In an era when philosophy was the dominant intellectual authority, apologetics became the bridge that allowed Christianity to claim not only divine truth but also rational legitimacy.
That same desire carried into modernity. In the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis became perhaps the most widely read apologist in the English-speaking world. His Mere Christianity presents belief as both rational and morally compelling, offering simple but profound analogies — such as his famous “trilemma” that Jesus must be Lord, liar, or lunatic. For many, Lewis gave faith intellectual dignity without losing its imaginative or pastoral warmth. He continues to be the gateway author for countless seekers who want Christianity to feel reasonable as well as meaningful.
In more recent decades, other figures have taken up the apologetic mantle. William Lane Craig defends the Kalam cosmological argument in public debates, while Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict presents the Bible and resurrection as historically reliable. Ravi Zacharias became a global speaker known for presenting Christianity as intellectually robust, engaging skeptics with a polished rhetorical style. Even Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, though less formal, functions apologetically by presenting Christianity as authentic and culturally relevant rather than rigid or institutional. All of these voices, in their own way, work to show that faith can be made credible in the modern world.
At its heart, then, apologetics is an attempt to reassure: to show that belief is not blind but has intellectual and moral grounding. It serves multiple functions — defending the faith against critics, inviting skeptics to consider its claims, and offering believers the comfort that their convictions are not irrational. From Paul in Athens to Lewis at Oxford to Craig in modern debate halls, the pattern is the same. Apologetics seeks to place God above all rivals, whether those rivals are the gods of Greek philosophy, the doubts of Enlightenment rationalism, or the critiques of modern secularism. It is the art of making faith appear not only true, but also reasonable.
My Turning Point
For a long time, apologetics gave me comfort. I read C.S. Lewis with delight, listened to Ravi Zacharias’ polished rhetoric, and pored over Josh McDowell’s insistence that the Bible could be treated as reliable history. Driving to school, I’d tune in to Answers in Genesis, absorbing arguments about the age of the earth, the fossil record, and the authority of scripture. I wanted to believe that faith could be reasoned out, that Christianity could stand in the modern world not just as conviction but as intellectual truth. Apologetics gave me a scaffolding that seemed strong enough to carry the weight of my questions.
But even then, cracks were forming. One Wednesday night at church, we were discussing the possibility of life on Mars and what that might mean for Christians. My pastor, with sincerity, said: “I don’t know if we’ll find life, but if we do I know they’ll need Jesus.” That sentence lodged in my mind. At the time, I didn’t leave the faith — far from it. I stayed, I prayed, I grew deeper into my religious community. But the crack was there. The neat scaffolding of apologetics no longer felt as secure. The answer had been provided before the question was even considered.
College made the crack widen. In Sunday School one morning, the lesson turned to the genealogies of Adam and Noah. I was taught that a particular name in that list signified the end of Pangea — that the splitting of the continents could be found coded in scripture. I was baffled. I didn’t agree, and I said so. That moment became the turning point. Not only was my dissent unwelcome; it was grounds for exclusion. Because I was not a young-earth creationist, I was asked to leave the church I had made my home.
That experience transformed the rest of my life. It was no longer just the logical weakness of apologetics that unsettled me — it was the realization that apologetics had become a gatekeeper. Its purpose was not to explore truth, but to enforce orthodoxy. In that moment, I felt that wonder itself had been shut down. Questions about life on other planets, the age of the earth, or the mysteries of the cosmos were not opportunities for discovery but threats to be managed. Apologetics, which once promised me a bridge between faith and reason, revealed itself as a wall meant to keep curiosity out. The dam broke, and in its place I found myself drawn to a different posture: not defending an answer at all costs, but living with the questions, letting wonder remain open, and trusting inquiry more than certainty.
Critique and Reframing
Looking back, what strikes me most about the apologetics I consumed in the late 1990s and early 2000s is how much of it operated less as inquiry than as performance. Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict claimed to rest on historical proof, yet its arguments assumed the very reliability of scripture they were meant to establish. Ravi Zacharias dazzled with eloquence, but I began to notice how often his sweeping statements blurred over real answers and were more rhetorical gymnastics meant to avoid hard questions. William Lane Craig’s cosmological arguments impressed me with their tight logic, yet I could not escape the sense that they only worked if one already accepted a Christian framework. Even Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz or Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, two books I genuinely enjoyed for their honesty, felt like a softer form of the same impulse: not proof in the strict sense, but reframing Christianity to sound more authentic and culturally relevant.
C.S. Lewis’s work reveals this pattern clearly. His famous “trilemma” — that Jesus must be either Lord, liar, or lunatic — is compelling only because of what it leaves out. Lewis intentionally omitted a fourth option: legend. He avoided the messy reality of how stories evolve in transmission, how decades of oral tradition could transform a teacher into a miracle-worker and eventually into a divine figure. By the time the Gospels were written, the memory of Jesus was already refracted through layers of retelling, translation, and interpretation. Early Christianity was not a single unified vision but a fractured, contested movement. Even Peter and Paul struggled to agree on who Jesus was and what his life and death had meant. To present a neat logical puzzle in place of that complexity is not reasoning but simplification — a way of making belief appear airtight while ignoring the cracks in its own foundations.
This is, to me, the essence of apologetics: it convinces as much by what it avoids as by what it says. Apologists speak of “progressive revelation,” as though Christianity naturally unfolded from shadow to fulfillment. Scholars, however, might call the same process syncretism — the blending and reshaping of ideas from Judaism, Hellenism, mystery religions, and competing sects of early Christianity. Where apologetics sees divine continuity, history often shows human adaptation. The story of Christianity’s rise is one of diversity, conflict, and gradual synthesis. Apologetics trims that down to a single straight line, reinforcing faith but obscuring the complexity of its development.
The more I engaged with these voices, the more I realized that apologetics was not really about discovering truth. It was about preserving it. The method was circular: assume Christianity is true, then gather philosophy, science, or experience to shore it up. To someone inside the fold, this is deeply reassuring. To someone already drifting toward the edges, as I was, it began to feel like a house of mirrors — impressive at first glance, but unable to withstand close inspection.
And yet, with time, my view has softened. I no longer see apologetics merely as manipulation or dishonesty. I see it as a profoundly human project. It is the effort of people who want their faith to stand with dignity in a skeptical world, who long to reconcile the deepest commitments of their hearts with the tools of their minds. In that sense, apologetics is not proof of God’s hand but of humanity’s. It is evidence of our drive to preserve meaning, to weave reason and story together so that faith feels less fragile. Where believers see apologetics as revelation, I now see it as artistry: an expression of the human need to make faith reasonable, even when reason cannot fully bear its weight.
Inquiry as Open-Ended Method
A Human Response to the Natural World
From the beginning, human beings have sought to make sense of the world around them. In the earliest myths, thunder was the voice of the gods, disease was the work of spirits, and the movement of the heavens reflected divine order. These stories were not foolish or primitive; they were earnest attempts to explain a mysterious and often terrifying world. They reveal that the impulse toward understanding is as old as humanity itself. What changed over time was not the desire to know, but the tools we developed for knowing.
Gradually, explanation shifted from myth to observation. Farmers noticed the rhythms of the seasons and began to chart the skies. Physicians in the ancient world observed symptoms and experimented with remedies. Greek natural philosophers, such as Aristotle, sought to understand nature as a system governed by causes rather than by capricious divine will. These early efforts laid the groundwork for what would later become the scientific method: careful attention to the world as it is, testing ideas against experience, and revising conclusions when they fail. Science arose as a structured way of paying attention.
What makes science distinctive is not that it answers every question but that it admits when answers fail. As Karl Popper argued, a theory is scientific only if it is falsifiable — if there is some possible evidence that could prove it wrong. Richard Feynman once put it more simply: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” By this he meant that science proceeds on the assumption that no authority is final, no conclusion untouchable. This humility is not a weakness but a strength. It allows knowledge to grow, to self-correct, to remain open to the unexpected.
In this sense, science is not merely a body of facts but a posture toward the world. It begins not with an answer, but with a question. Where apologetics seeks to defend faith against challenge, science seeks to learn from challenge. The two are animated by different impulses. Apologetics shores up certainty; science accepts provisionality. Both respond to the human need to make sense of the world, but they do so in radically different ways.
Science as Understanding Without the Supernatural
If the distinguishing feature of apologetics is that it defends belief in God, then the distinguishing feature of science is that it does not need God at all. Scientific inquiry looks for explanations within the natural world itself. Where the ancients imagined angels pushing the planets across the heavens, astronomy discovered the laws of gravity and motion. Where disease was once attributed to demons, medicine identified microbes and genetics. What was once the domain of the supernatural has steadily been reinterpreted in the language of natural cause and effect. This shift did not strip the world of wonder; it gave us new ways to marvel at its complexity.
Science’s refusal to invoke the supernatural is not a denial of mystery but a discipline of method. Carl Sagan called it “the candle in the dark” — a way of resisting the easy temptation to explain the unknown by appealing to the unseen. To say that lightning is “just” electricity is not to reduce its power; it is to understand its mechanism. In that understanding lies its own form of awe. As Bertrand Russell observed, science is tentative rather than dogmatic; its answers are provisional, always subject to revision as knowledge grows. This is the opposite of apologetics, which treats answers as final and questions as potential threats.
The naturalistic method also frees science from the burden of making metaphysical claims. It does not have to decide whether God exists; it only has to ask how the world works. A believer may still see God behind the natural order, but science itself does not require that assumption. Its beauty lies in its modesty: it seeks what can be tested, measured, and shared. As Richard Feynman noted, science is built not on authority but on experiment. Evidence, not revelation, becomes the arbiter of truth.
For me, this is where science holds its greatest appeal. It does not shut down curiosity with a ready-made answer, nor does it ask for faith in what cannot be demonstrated. Instead, it opens a path for wonder to be experienced without dogma. The stars are no less beautiful for being burning spheres of gas; the cell is no less miraculous for being the product of chemistry and evolution. Science teaches me that mystery is not diminished by explanation but deepened by it. In understanding how the world works, I feel awe that does not depend on the supernatural — awe rooted in the natural world itself.
The Historical-Critical Study of Religion
The same posture that makes science powerful in the natural world — observation, testing, revision — has also been applied to religion itself. For centuries, the Bible was treated in churches as seamless revelation, a divinely dictated text without error or contradiction. But in the modern era, scholars began to approach scripture as they would any other ancient text. They asked who wrote it, when, why, and under what circumstances. They compared manuscripts, noted contradictions, studied historical context, and uncovered layers of development. This method, often called the “historical-critical” approach, treats scripture not as a timeless download from heaven but as the work of human hands shaped by culture and history.
This shift reframes the very thing apologetics avoids. Where apologists speak of “progressive revelation,” scholars often describe syncretism — the blending of traditions, ideas, and myths from Judaism, Hellenism, mystery religions, and diverse Christian communities. The New Testament is not a single story written in unbroken continuity but a library of competing perspectives. The Gospel of John does not sound like Mark; Paul’s letters do not sound like James. Even within the same tradition, there is debate, diversity, and development. To study these texts critically is to admit that early Christianity was not monolithic, but fractured, contested, and evolving.
Bart Ehrman has shown in detail how New Testament manuscripts reveal centuries of change — additions, omissions, and alterations made by scribes who were themselves interpreting as they copied. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, through the Jesus Seminar, argued that much of the Gospel tradition is metaphor and myth layered onto a historical figure. Elaine Pagels demonstrated the diversity of early Christianity through her study of the Gnostic gospels, which reveal radically different portraits of Jesus. Amy-Jill Levine has insisted that we read Jesus within his Jewish context, challenging Christian supersessionist interpretations. Beverly Gaventa and Michael Gorman have explored Paul not as a single, systematic theologian but as a voice struggling to make sense of Christ within different communities. John Collins has illuminated the apocalyptic imagination of Second Temple Judaism, while Richard Bauckham, from a more conservative stance, has argued for the credibility of eyewitness testimony. Each of these scholars approaches scripture with the tools of history, literature, and cultural analysis — not as sacred proof, but as human text.
What unites them is the same spirit that unites science as a whole: openness to evidence, attention to context, and willingness to revise conclusions. Their work does not ask, “How can we prove Christianity true?” but rather, “What can we learn about how these texts came to be?” That question leads to insights apologetics cannot allow. The Gospels may contain legend as well as history. Paul and Peter may not have agreed on who Jesus was. Early Christianity may have been one option among many competing Jewish and Greco-Roman religious movements which claimed Jesus. These conclusions do not destroy meaning; they deepen it by revealing how human communities wrestled with ultimate questions.
For me, encountering this scholarship was transformative. Where apologetics narrowed my imagination, the historical-critical method expanded it. It gave me permission to treat religion not as airtight revelation but as art, literature, and history — the record of human beings reaching for transcendence, shaping stories, and negotiating identity. If apologetics told me to stop asking, scholarship encouraged me to ask more. In this sense, biblical studies became science for me: inquiry into the human religious imagination, pursued with the same rigor and humility that science applies to the natural world.
Voices in Modern Scholarship
When I began reading beyond apologetics, I discovered a different set of voices — scholars who treated scripture not as a flawless deposit of revelation but as a human record shaped by history, culture, and conflict. These writers did not agree with one another on every point, but what united them was their willingness to let the evidence lead where it may. Instead of bending questions to fit predetermined answers, they opened the text to scrutiny and welcomed complexity.
Bart Ehrman was the first scholar who shook me. His work on textual criticism revealed that the Bible we have is not a pristine original but a collection of manuscripts copied, altered, and sometimes corrected by scribes over centuries. To me, this was not a reason to dismiss the Bible but to see it as a living tradition, constantly in flux. Similarly, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, through the Jesus Seminar, challenged the idea that the Gospels offered simple history. They treated Jesus as a figure layered in metaphor and myth, shaped as much by community memory and theological need as by biographical fact. Their work suggested that Christianity’s earliest generations were not passing along one unbroken truth but debating, reframing, and reinterpreting who Jesus was.
Elaine Pagels expanded that vision further with her studies of the Gnostic gospels. By showing how diverse early Christian thought actually was, she revealed that what we now call orthodoxy was only one of many possible paths. Amy-Jill Levine brought another corrective, reminding readers that Jesus and Paul can only be understood within their Jewish contexts. To read them apart from Judaism, as Christian apologists often do, is to miss the richness of the world they inhabited. These perspectives showed me that Christianity was not born fully formed but emerged from a contested and dynamic environment.
Other scholars brought more theological nuance to this picture. Beverly Gaventa and Michael Gorman have explored Paul not as a systematic thinker but as a writer adapting theology to varied communities, improvising his way through real pastoral conflicts. John Collins, a leading scholar of Jewish apocalyptic literature, situates texts like Daniel and Revelation in the turbulent political and cultural climates that produced them. And Richard Bauckham, though more conservative in approach, argued for the credibility of eyewitness testimony behind the Gospels. His work reminded me that even within critical scholarship, there is a spectrum of views — disagreement itself becoming part of the scholarly method.
What united all these voices was their refusal to simplify. They did not pretend that Christianity was a seamless story or that scripture was beyond human touch. They admitted the fractures, the contradictions, the plurality of voices. Some readers, especially in apologetic circles, call this a threat. But to me, it was liberating. It meant that doubt and diversity were not signs of failure but signs of authenticity — evidence that faith had always been negotiated, contested, and reshaped across time.
Reading these scholars was my first real taste of what science looks like when applied to religion. They treated scripture as data, subjected it to analysis, and let the conclusions emerge without fear of where they might lead. The result was not the destruction of meaning but a new kind of meaning: one rooted in history, culture, and human creativity. Where apologetics sought to close the circle, these scholars opened it wider. And in that openness, I found the kind of inquiry that apologetics had denied me.
On Science and Scholarship
What drew me to science after leaving apologetics was not a promise of certainty but an openness to questions. Apologetics had taught me that some answers were non-negotiable, that curiosity had limits, and that to ask beyond those limits was to risk exclusion. Science, in contrast, invited me to keep asking. It did not punish doubt; it assumed it. To live within a scientific worldview is to accept that knowledge is always provisional, always capable of being overturned by new evidence. Far from threatening, this posture felt honest, even liberating. It allowed me to be truthful about what I did not know without forcing me to defend what I could not believe.
Science also taught me that natural explanations do not diminish awe. When I look at the stars, I no longer see them as angelic fires set in motion by divine decree, but as nuclear furnaces millions of light years away. Yet that knowledge does not lessen my wonder; it deepens it. To imagine their scale, their age, their beauty, is to be humbled by a universe far grander than anything my childhood faith described. The same is true of biology, of physics, of chemistry. To understand how life emerges, how matter holds together, how time bends with gravity — all of this fills me with a reverence that does not require the supernatural.
The historical-critical study of religion gave me a similar kind of reverence. Instead of collapsing under the weight of contradictions, the Bible opened up when I read it as a human text. Scholars like Ehrman, Borg, Crossan, Pagels, and Levine showed me that scripture is not less meaningful for being complex; it is more meaningful. Its contradictions are not flaws but windows into the struggles of the people who wrote it. Its diversity is not a weakness but a sign of the richness of human imagination. To treat the Bible this way is to treat it with respect — not as untouchable revelation, but as the work of human beings reaching for transcendence.
In this sense, science and scholarship became partners for me. One revealed the natural world, the other revealed the human religious imagination. Together, they offered me a way of living without dogma while still honoring mystery. Where apologetics narrowed the field of vision, science widened it. Where apologetics demanded certainty, science encouraged humility. Where apologetics guarded the boundaries of belief, scholarship showed me how porous and creative those boundaries had always been.
For me, this is the heart of why I can say I am religious but not spiritual. I do not believe in the supernatural, nor do I frame my awe in the language of God. But I am still moved by ritual, story, and the human longing to make meaning. Science gives me a method for exploring the natural world; scholarship gives me tools for exploring the religious world. Both honor the same impulse: to ask, to seek, to wonder. And it is in that seeking, not in apologetic certainty, that I have found my home.
The Missing Middle
At the heart of both apologetics and science lies the same human impulse: wonder. Long before arguments were formalized or experiments conducted, people looked at the night sky, the turning of the seasons, the birth of a child, and felt awe. That feeling is universal. It is what Rudolf Otto called the numinous — the sense of mystery, power, and fascination that overwhelms us when we confront realities greater than ourselves. Albert Einstein once remarked, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” Wonder, in this sense, is the soil from which both religion and science grow. The difference lies not in the impulse, but in how that impulse is cultivated.
Religion channels wonder into the language of the divine. The starry sky is not simply beautiful; it becomes evidence of design. The conscience is not simply an inner voice; it becomes the whisper of God’s law written on the heart. Apologetics draws on this tradition, treating wonder as confirmation. Mystery is not something to be explored but something to be explained, and the explanation is always God. In this way, wonder becomes less a question than an answer. It is transformed into worship, ritual, and doctrine. For the believer, this is deeply reassuring: awe is not chaotic or meaningless but purposeful, a reminder of our place in a divinely ordered world.
Science, by contrast, takes wonder as a question rather than an answer. The night sky is not proof but a puzzle: what are stars made of, how far away are they, how do they move? The voice of conscience is not revelation but a phenomenon to be studied: how does morality evolve, how do societies shape ethics, how does the brain process right and wrong? Science treats mystery as an invitation to investigate, not as a conclusion to defend. Carl Sagan captured this when he wrote that science is a “candle in the dark,” a way of navigating mystery without surrendering to superstition. In this view, awe is not diminished by explanation; it is expanded. To know that stars are spheres of plasma burning billions of miles away does not make them less wondrous. It makes them more so.
Both religion and science, however, reveal something deeper: the human longing for meaning. We want to know not only how the world works, but what our place in it might be. Religion answers existential questions: Why are we here? What should we do? How do we live together? Science answers functional ones: How does this work? How can we predict outcomes? How can we cure, build, or explain? Both serve vital roles, but neither on its own can resolve the tension of being human. To live is to face not just facts but the hunger for significance, to ask not only what is true but why it matters.
For me, the middle ground lies in embracing wonder without forcing it into apologetic certainty. I do not believe mystery requires the supernatural, but I do not dismiss it either. Awe is real, whether it rises from the stars, a work of art, or a text passed down through generations. I do not frame these experiences as evidence of God’s hand; I see them instead as the handiwork of humanity reaching upward. Our rituals, our cathedrals, our scriptures are not proofs of divine revelation but expressions of human imagination. That recognition does not strip them of meaning; it makes them more meaningful, because it locates them where I believe they belong — in the hands of people trying to make sense of their world. And it is from here, in this middle space of wonder without dogma, that I turn to see religion not as revelation but as art.
The Religious Imagination
When people say they are “spiritual but not religious,” they usually mean they want the sense of transcendence without the constraints of institutions. For me, it is the reverse. I am not spiritual in the sense of believing in unseen forces or divine intervention. But I am deeply religious in the sense that I value the practices, rituals, and stories humanity has created to explore meaning. I am atheist/agnostic in belief, but I am religious in imagination. I find myself drawn not to spirits but to symbols, not to supernatural claims but to human expression.
To live with the religious imagination is to take seriously the ways people have ritualized their wonder. Lighting a candle, reciting a psalm, walking through the stations of a cathedral, or even sitting quietly in a circle of friends — these are acts of meaning-making. They do not require God to be present in order to matter. They matter because they shape us, because they give form to our longings, because they connect us to one another across generations. Religion, when seen this way, is not about proving what cannot be proven. It is about living within a shared grammar of awe.
This is why I can say I am religious, even as an agnostic. I do not need to claim certainty about ultimate realities to be moved by ritual or scripture. The psalms still sing as poetry; the parables still challenge as stories; the liturgies still resonate as carefully honed art. They are not divine revelation, but they are cultural treasures — the collective imagination of communities who sought to give voice to what it means to be human. To dismiss them simply because I do not share their supernatural claims would be to deny myself the richness of human culture.
For me, the religious imagination is also bound to the natural world. My faith, if it can be called that, is in the ground beneath my feet, in the cosmos unfolding above, in the fragile connections between people who make meaning together. I do not know the limits of this world, and I am humble enough to admit that. But I do not need to fill the unknown with gods in order to honor it. The natural world, with its complexity and contingency, is enough. Its beauty lies in its openness — in the fact that it continually exceeds our understanding and yet continues to sustain our awe.
To live with the religious imagination, then, is to inhabit wonder. It is to recognize that our stories, our rituals, our art, are not proofs of the divine but testaments to the human spirit. It is to participate in religion not as revelation but as creation, to find meaning not in certainty but in community, memory, and imagination. Where others see the hands of God, I see the hands of humanity — and I find that vision no less moving.
Two Visions of Awe
When I look back at my journey, I see that what separates me from the Christians I grew up with is not the presence of wonder but how we interpret it. They look at the stars and see the hand of God; I look at the stars and see the grandeur of nature itself. They read scripture as revelation; I read it as literature, a record of human longing and imagination. The same cathedral that inspires them as God’s dwelling place inspires me as a monument to creativity. The object of awe is shared, but the lens through which it is seen is not.
Apologetics taught me that believers crave certainty, that faith feels incomplete without the dignity of reason to back it up. Science taught me the opposite: that knowledge grows when we admit uncertainty and allow evidence to correct us. The historical-critical study of religion taught me that scripture is not a seamless divine gift but a human archive — diverse, fractured, and constantly reinterpreted. And art taught me that none of this diminishes beauty. If anything, it intensifies it. To see the human hand at work in religion is not to strip it of meaning but to relocate that meaning in the realm where it belongs.
For me, the religious imagination offers a way forward. I do not believe in the supernatural, nor do I seek proof of God. But I do value the rituals, symbols, and stories through which people have given form to their awe. I am religious in the sense that I participate in those cultural creations, not as revelation but as art. I am not spiritual, because I do not claim access to hidden realms or divine voices. My home is in the natural world, with all its limits and all its possibilities.
This does not mean I have lost anything. The believer and I may look at the same object and see different things, but we are both moved. The difference is where we locate the source of that movement. For them, it comes from God’s hand; for me, it comes from human hands reaching upward, shaping their longings into story, song, and stone. Both interpretations inspire reverence, but mine leaves me free to admit what I do not know, to honor the questions as much as the answers, to let wonder remain open.
In the end, what I have gained is not less awe but more honesty. I do not need apologetic certainty to find meaning, nor do I need supernatural claims to feel wonder. It is enough to see religion as art, science as inquiry, and humanity as the creature that turns mystery into meaning. Where they see the hands of God, I see the hands of man — and for me, that vision is no less sacred.
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