There are several important points embedded in that statement, and it’s worth unpacking them carefully. First, we need to ask: What do you mean by “God”? And equally importantly: What do you mean by “real”?
The word “God” carries a vast range of meanings across cultures and traditions. For some, God is a personal being—an all-powerful creator who intervenes in history, listens to prayers, and judges moral behavior. For others, “God” is more abstract: a symbol of the ground of being, the source of all consciousness, or the unfolding intelligence of the cosmos. And beyond the monotheistic image, we find entire pantheons of gods and goddesses across human history—each one “real” in the sense that they inhabit myth, ritual, art, and belief. They shape human lives, inspire ethical codes, and form the basis of civilizations.
In this sense, gods are real because people believe in them. Their reality exists in the psychic, cultural, and historical dimensions. They are real as archetypes, real as agents in literature and sacred text, and real in the sense that they have shaped human experience for millennia. Whether or not they correspond to discrete metaphysical entities is a different question—and one that, arguably, lies beyond the scope of certainty.
Then there are traditions—especially within mysticism, non-dual philosophy, and some forms of panentheism—that speak of God not as an external being, but as the all. In these traditions, everything is God, or God is within everything. The notion of separateness collapses. In this context, asking whether God “exists” in the conventional sense becomes a kind of category error. It’s like asking whether space exists, or whether consciousness is “real.” God is not an object in the universe but the very condition of the universe—and of our awareness.
To borrow an image from physics, just as we cannot directly observe dark matter or dark energy, yet we infer their presence through their effects, perhaps our inability to “see” God says more about the limitations of perception than about the nature of divinity. Some traditions say, “You are That,” or “You are It,” pointing not to a being outside us, but to an essence so near that it escapes objectification. We look for something “other,” but if the divine is not other—if it is the ground of our very being—then no external proof will ever suffice.
So yes, in the empirical sense, perhaps we do not know whether God exists “out there” in a measurable way. But that doesn’t mean the question is meaningless—it means we need to expand our understanding of what kind of knowledge, and what kind of reality, we are talking about.
