Is Belief in God Irrational?
Why belief in God may not conflict with rational thought.
Posted May 17, 2026 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins has argued that everyone is an atheist. “I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.” By this he means that he goes on to deny one additional god, namely that of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph, as described in the Bible.
Dawkins does not exactly categorically deny the existence of God, any more that he denies the existence of “Thor, fairies, leprechauns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we cannot disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.” If there were a god, he asserts, there should be empirical evidence of divine existence, and because we lack any observable, measurable data to support such a hypothesis, atheists are eminently reasonable in denying it.
Is belief in God irrational? As Dawkins indicates, the lack of empirical evidence warrants consideration. What is God like? How much does he weigh, what are his physical dimensions, what color is he, what are his GPS coordinates, and is he hot, cold, or room temperature? From one point of view, anything that lacks such attributes cannot be said to exist. But this suggestion immediately lands us in a bind. Would we say that there is no such thing as the number two, the color red, or justice?
Clearly, most of us not only accept but vigorously defend the existence of immaterial things. Take love. We cannot store love in a safe or prominently display it on our mantel. It is not the sort of thing we can point to, like an object. And yet we believe as surely as we believe in anything in it and its power to shape events, relationships, and people. If we did not believe in love, we would find ourselves unable to account for many of the things in life that mean the most, from friendship , marriage , and family to mercy and forgiveness .
More broadly, Dawkins assumes that everything that is can be known scientifically, suggesting that a universe with a god would look completely different from one without, and the difference between the two would be a scientific one. If there were at least one god, he implies, we could detect and prove the existence of such a deity using scientific methods, because science is the only way we really know anything. We may believe in things on other grounds, but the ones we really know, he asserts, are accessible to science.
Yet what if science is but one way of knowing? It is possible to describe or analyze America’s pastime, baseball, in scientific terms. A physicist could, for example, explain what is happening on the playing field in terms of Newton’s laws of motion, as could a chemist or a biologist in their terms. But if such scientific accounts were all we could know about the game of baseball, watching or playing a game would hold no more interest than gazing on pedestrians moving along a crowded sidewalk.
There is, in other words, more to a baseball game than scientific principles. Those who know the game can say with confidence who won and lost, who played well and who played poorly, and whether the game was ho-hum or a barnburner, even though every player and every team was obeying the exact same scientific laws throughout. Baseball games, Shakespeare plays, and human relationships exhibit meaning that extends far beyond the limits of a scientific account. We know more than science can say.
To assert science as the sole means by which we can know anything would be to lapse into a kind of idolatry. By either excluding from knowledge all that is not accessible to science or saying that it is only through science that we can know, we would be making of science a false god. Science itself cannot prove it. And we do not need a tape measure, a stopwatch, or an MRI scanner to know that we love someone. To insist that we produce such evidence would be to seriously misunderstand what it means to love and be loved.
Dawkins might say that we cannot prove that God created the universe, but this is letting theists off easy. For the notion that God had to act only once, at the beginning, perhaps 14 billion years ago, seriously underestimates the extent of the divine contribution. In fact, the world was not only created but is continuously being sustained and hence re-created every moment of every day. The fact that there is something instead of nothing and that this something is the world we know is always a wonder.
To stridently deny the existence of God is to make human reason the measure of all things. It is to suppose that only that which we can catch in our cognitive net is a fish—that is, real and true, and all else mere superstition . Yet how reasonable is it to suppose that all of creation, everything that is, should be amenable to our intellect, our senses, and our puny range in space and time? What if there are phenomena that we cannot perceive, forces at work that we cannot detect or analyze, and purposes in play that lie far beyond human ken?
If this were true, then knowledge of some things might be possible only under conditions of revelation. If that which is far higher, larger, more enduring, complex and beautiful than we can discover by our own lights is to be known by us, it must reveal itself to us. Otherwise, looking at things solely through a scientific lens, we would be in the dark. The central question is this: Do we take the strident path and grope in the dark, or do we instead proceed with humility and gratitude for the light that shines?
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Richard Gunderman, MD, Ph.D. , is Chancellor's Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and Health Studies at Indiana University.
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