What Do I Believe? 5 Questions to Help You Decide if There’s a God

I had an impromptu conversation with a good friend a while ago. She’s in her thirties, highly intelligent and inquisitive about life. She grew up going to church but stopped after high school. Since then, by her own admission, she hadn’t thought much about God until recently. She said she had a question for me. It went something like this:

“When I’m in nature, I feel like there’s something else out there with me. It’s like I’m sensing something bigger than myself but I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure if I think that’s God or something else. How can I tell?”

She knew that I believed in God and that I enjoyed wrestling with philosophical, theological, and intellectual questions. Over the years, I’ve had these kinds of discussions with many people from all across the theological belief spectrum. What I shared with her seemed to really help so I decided to pass it on here for two reasons. First, if you have the same question, I hope it helps you too. Second, I believe that the method I used to respond to her can be applied to almost any issue of belief we may face.

A clarification before going any further. The point of this post is not to try to prove the existence of God or to convince anyone to believe like I do. I consider myself a “faith and reason” person, meaning that I believe in God because of some very personal, subjective experiences I’ve had and also because of some intellectual reasons that I find compelling. But sharing those is not my goal here. I just want to give one of many potential frameworks that you could use to address the God question if you are like my friend.

Sometimes when we’re wrestling with what we believe about something, having someone else ask us specific questions about that topic can help clarify our thinking. So I asked her a series of questions:

1. Do you think what you’re sensing is a mindless natural force like, for example, electricity? Or do you think it has a consciousness and is self-aware? (In her case, she thought what she sensed had a consciousness.)

2. Do you think what you’re sensing is higher, bigger, more advanced or more powerful than you? (She did.)

3. Do you think what you’re sensing is a creative force that has something to do with the existence of the world? Of us? (She did.)

4. Do you think what you’re sensing is a good, positive, loving force or a bad, negative, malicious one? (She thought it was good and loving.)

5. Do you think what you’re sensing is aware of you and wanting to connect with you somehow? (She did.)

On the basis of her responses to those questions, I said something like this:

“If I understand you correctly, you believe that what you’re sensing has a consciousness, is higher than you, is creative, is loving, and wants to connect with you. What you’re describing sounds a lot like what I think of as God. I don’t care what you call it. If that term has negative baggage for you, call it whatever you want. But to me it seems like you believe in God.”

You may read those questions and have different answers than my friend did, which lead you to a different conclusion. Either way, I think the “is there a God” question is an important one for each of us to answer one way or the other. Why? Because it has pretty big implications on your worldview, the way you see life and your place in it. And your worldview has a huge impact on your choices and actions, on how you live and who you become.

As you continue on the journey to a better you, I encourage you to answer these questions for yourself. Use this query technique to clarify your thinking in other areas as well. If you do, you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.