How to Talk About "God" After You Stop Believing in God
5 ways I still like the word "God"
I was talking with a friend recently and we both had this same sentiment:
“I no longer believe in God the way I was taught, but I also don’t want my kids to inherit a flattened, disenchanted world.”
We wanted to know what words and frameworks would help our children feel that life is meaningful, relational and mysterious, and worthy of reverence - without lying to them or ourselves.
So naturally, I needed to flesh out this idea to see how I feel about this word God.
Primarily, because I want to know how I’d like to use this word with my kids.
But as I sit with it, it’s also about how I want to use it for myself.
In many ways, I miss using the word “God.” I miss having a pronoun for Reality. I miss dialoging relationally with the Mystery. I miss personifying Reality.
Is this a longing for innocence? Maybe. But I think it can also be a step of maturity - learning to return to simple language without returning to simplistic beliefs.
I think about people like Paul Tillich saying, the “God beyond God” or Meister Ekhart’s prayer, “God rid me of God.”
Even for those of us who have moved beyond a literal/theistic meaning of the “God” word, it may still be helpful to explore how that word can still be a skillful symbol - one that doesn’t try to pin the mystery down, but helps us relate to it.
I think “God” is a great proxy for something deeper: How do we name what is ultimately unnameable? (Without becoming dishonest, rigid or naive.)
The word “God” isn’t just theological. It’s a relational technology. A container for awe, fear, trust, surrender and love.
So here what I’d like to do is capture some ideas that are not meant to DEFEND the God word or DISCARD it. But some ways we might use it more consciously, lightly and skillfully.
As the Taoist say, words are fingers pointing to the moon. They can never be the moon itself.
I like to think about words as doorways. It matters less what the door is made of than whether it opens and takes us somewhere meaningful.
Here are some ways we might use “God” for our kids - but also ourselves - that is not about BELIEVING IN God and more about RELATING TO Reality.
“God” as Developmental Scaffolding. Words function differently at different stages of human development. Kids learn to think relationally and literally/concretely before abstractly.
For a child, “God” can mean safety, care, belonging and moral orientation. For an adult, it can become metaphysical, symbolic, problematic.
So here, we might think more about when a word is helpful scaffolding - and then when to take that scaffolding down. Noticing when it becomes a crutch and released (not rejected).
A word can be true at one stage and limiting at another.
“God” as a Relational Placeholder. The word can allow us to practice relationship with life itself. Not because life IS a person - but because humans are relational creatures. Abstractions doesn’t form the heart - especially for kids.
Love, trust, grief and gratitude don’t form well in abstraction. We need a way to experience life as responsive, not mechanical.
So using “God” this way doesn’t claim that reality is a person - it allows us to practice relationship with reality. So we might say - it’s not an ontological usage, but a formational usage.
So we may ask: Is this word helping my child learn trust, gratitude, humility, and care - or fear, control and shame?
“God” as Depth of Reality. The word can point to the intuition that Reality is more than what is visible, material. There’s a transcendent depth to what is going on.
In this usage, “God” is not a being WITHIN the universe, but a word that points towards the DEPTH of the universe itself. It keeps people from collapsing the world into productivity, utility, consumption, mere survival.
I think this usage will be incredibly important over the next decade as AI will force ethical questions about what Life is: can we upload a person’s consciousness to the singularity? Or is there a transcendent depth to Life that bits and bytes of information cannot capture? Does life and consciosness emerge from material, or is consciousness/Spirit fundamental to Life?
“God” as Values Orientation. This one has to be used carefully. “God” can orient values WITHOUT reducing them to rules. Not “do this because God says.” But more: “This is aligned with Love, the grain of Life, with God.”
Here, we are using “God” to point to the direction that Life is trying to move. Do we believe Life is indifferent to values? Or is there fundamental values baked into Life - things like Love, Justice, Compassion, Unity? If so, then “God” can be a signifier of values that we believe are fundamental.
“God” as Cultural and Ancestral Bridge. For better or worse, “God” is a deeply inherited word. But if we use it consciously, it can connect children to ancestors and deep stories. It can allow dialogue with grandparents and tradition. It can provide continuity without demanding literal agreement. It can allow cross-cultural conversation about big ideas. I think this can allow for a greater sense of belonging - not just in Life/Realty, but in our place historically, ancestrally.
That’s what I’ve got for now.
I’m enjoying exploring how we can use “God” less about a claim about what exists and more about how humans have learned to relate to existence.
Here, the question is less whether the word is true, and more whether it is helping us live truthfully.
We could also look at what the fundamental disagreements about God / Reality we are really discussing when we argue about theology / metaphysics.