I’m not a religious person. I think there are traces, but more or less, I’m not a religious person. I have few traces remaining, thanks to the fact that I grew up in a religious household, and my parents are still deeply religious. Depending on the day you ask me, and depending on what I’ve read the previous day, I might call myself spiritual, atheist, hard or soft determinist. But religious I am not.

That said, I think one of the closest instances I’ve come to seeing God is when reading the sublime verses in a poem. Tagore, Dickinson, Mary Oliver, William Blake. You can’t help but take a shovel and pitchfork to the hardened layer of rationalist sediment on your psyche, uproot it all, and make way for some other feeling, some non-cold feeling of vibrancy. Though with poetry, I think I’m more inclined towards what Baruch Spinoza had to say: that God and Nature are one and the same thing.

And when you lie down on your back on a beautiful warm summer night, and gaze up at the heavens to see fluffy white clouds parting to reveal a crescent moon and distant stars, you know you are in the presence of something truly grand. I don’t know if that is an all-knowing deity, wise and powerful, magic wand in hand, stirring things up. But this, to me, is also feeling the hand of God.

I resonate with what Elizabeth Bruenig is saying:

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.
This was not always apparent to me.

I came to this understanding through trial, error, and my own brushes with scientific rebuttals to the existence of God.