“For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
Those words come not from a devotional moment among believers, but from Paul’s address to philosophers in Athens. Surrounded by sceptics, thinkers, and religious pluralists, Paul does something striking. He does not argue for God’s existence. He does not offer proofs or demand assent. Instead, he gestures toward something his listeners already know—their own lived reality.
In him we live and move and have our being.
In other words: whatever we mean by “God,” we are already immersed in that reality. God is not a hypothesis to be tested, but the ground in which life itself unfolds.
Recently, while watching a conversation between Alex O’Connor—known online as The Cosmic Skeptic—and Bear Grylls, I was struck by a similar shift in tone. Alex, long admired for his articulate critique of Christianity, spoke candidly about finding the story of Christ more plausible than he once had.
Not because of new empirical evidence.
Not because of miracles or archaeology.
But because of the unmistakable shape of the story itself.
A story that has somehow generated a movement marked—however imperfectly—by forgiveness, compassion, care for the poor, hospitals, abolition, art, music, and an enduring concern for human dignity. A story that refuses to die, even when its messengers betray it.
Listening to him, I found myself thinking again about how strangely inadequate our usual question sounds:
Do you believe in God?
In an observable universe containing something like two trillion galaxies, the idea that tiny, short-lived creatures like ourselves should reduce the mystery of existence to a yes-or-no opinion feels oddly small. It turns wonder into a debate, depth into a position, and mystery into a tribal marker.
It often leads nowhere.
Perhaps a better place to begin is not belief, but wonder.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
How is the universe intelligible at all?
Why does it give rise to consciousness—to beings who know that they exist, who can love, suffer, hope, and ask questions about meaning?
Physically, we are tiny. Cosmically, almost negligible. And yet we know that we are small. We are capable of awe. We can recognise beauty, feel compassion, and grieve what is lost.
The universe has somehow produced beings who can wonder about the universe.
That alone should give us pause.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:
“We are the bees of the Invisible.
We wildly gather the honey of the visible,
to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.”
Our experiences—joy and heartbreak, love and loss, longing and fear—are the “pollen” of the visible world. Somehow, they are gathered up and transformed into meaning. Consciousness does not feel like an accidental froth on the surface of matter. It feels closer to the point of the whole thing.
This is often where spiritual reflection truly begins—not in argument, but in experience.
As Richard Rohr has frequently observed, people rarely begin to think deeply about God through abstract reasoning alone. It is usually great love or great suffering that opens the door. Falling in love. Losing someone we cannot live without. Illness. Failure. The shattering of an illusion about ourselves or the world.
These moments crack open the shell of certainty and force us to ask questions that belief-statements cannot answer.
And it is often at this point that someone will say, “I don’t believe in God.”
When I hear that now, I find myself wanting to ask—gently, not defensively:
What kind of God don’t you believe in?
Because very often, the God being rejected is one I don’t believe in either.
A God who is a cosmic policeman.
A God obsessed with control, punishment, and boundary-keeping.
A God made in the image of our fears, prejudices, or need for certainty.
Sometimes what I suspect people mean is: I don’t believe in the kind of God I imagine you believe in.
But of course, they cannot know that. And neither, if I am honest, can I fully know it myself—because whatever faith I have is not static. It is always in formation, shaped by love, loss, learning, and the slow schooling of life.
This is where Christ becomes meaningful to me.
Not as a proposition to be defended, but as a lens—a way of seeing what reality might be like at its deepest level.
In Jesus, the divine is not revealed as domination or coercive power, but as relational presence. Compassion. Self-giving love. A willingness to suffer rather than to inflict suffering. A refusal to secure life by sacrificing others.
Jesus is not a theory about God.
He is a disclosure of the depth and direction of reality itself.
A universe in which love is not incidental, but foundational.
In which power is redefined as service.
In which the deepest truth is not force, but faithfulness.
If that is so, then the question is no longer “Do I believe in God?”
The question becomes:
What kind of story is reality telling?
What spirit animates us?
What kind of people are we becoming?
What is love doing here?
Those questions are large enough for galaxies.
And they are large enough for Christ.
Belief is not the starting point.
Recognition is.
For many people, the difficulty is not simply believing in God, but sensing what belief might demand of them. Attached—instinctively or through long conditioning—is the feeling that to acknowledge God is to accept responsibility: for how one lives, how one loves, and what one can no longer ignore. Richard Wurmbrand captured this with rare honesty in his autobiography In God’s Underground. He admitted that he did not want God because he did not want suffering. He wanted comfort, security, travel, and ease—not prison cells and persecution. And yet he sensed God gently drawing him nonetheless, almost pleading: “Do not fear the Cross; you will find it is the greatest of joys.” Wurmbrand’s story exposes something many of us recognise but rarely admit: disbelief is sometimes less about truth and more about fear—fear of what love might cost.
Perhaps what many people are resisting is not God at all, but a premature demand—before they have discovered that the Cross is not imposed by love, but borne with us.
If that is so, then disbelief may not be the opposite of faith, but the ache for a truer one.
If these reflections resonate, I’ll be exploring similar themes here—faith beyond fear, God as revealed in Jesus, and the slow work of reimagining belief.
© Jeremy Marks, Substack, December 2025