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People go astray in their search for God because they do not take the right starting-point. We should never begin by asking, “Is there a God?”—as though God could be something outside of ordinary experience; or, to put it in the old-fashioned way, something outside of Nature. If that is the question people insist upon asking, there can be only one answer. Nobody knows. For how can we know what lies outside our experience? And how can we imagine anything that is not known to us in the natural world? One may just as well ask an astronomer whether there are any stars outside the universe. He will answer that so far as he knows, nothing can be outside the universe. It is an empty question. And it is just as empty to ask whether there is a God outside of the world of life.

What we must ask then, is not whether there is a God, as though God could be something outside everything else, but what it is of which we have experience when we feel the power of truth, or the claim of justice, or the sense of beauty. It is certainly not the molecules of stone in a range of mountains that move our hearts with a feeling of wonder. And it is certainly nothing physical that makes us know that truth is important. Or that right is better than wrong.

We do have experience of something, whatever it is, that we have to call spiritual or else give it no name at all. And this something is just as real as the earth beneath our feet or the sky above us. If we believe in the reality of earth and sky, how can we avoid believing in the reality of this other something—because of which we can see the earth as beautiful and marvel at the starry vastness of the sky?…

There is no getting away from it; the spiritual is completely real. We never experience all of it at one time; no, but we never experience the entire physical universe either. Yet we speak of a physical universe….

But there is something further. The spiritual reality is alive. Whatever the mystery of aliveness may be, it is no more mysterious when we think of it as a whole than when we think of it in an individual living being. Truth lives in minds that are formed by it—or broken by betrayal of it. Beauty lives in hearts that respond to it. Justice is alive in generation after generation. The spiritual is a living reality.

And so we come to this: if the spiritual is real, and if we think of it as a total reality that includes all the spiritual qualities derived from it, just as the universe is a total reality, derived from whatever force it is that has produced it; and if we also see that this total spiritual reality is alive, what name shall we give it?

I confess that it seems to me most natural that we should call it God. Whatever there may be of God that is more than this—and I am not supposing for a moment that this of which we have experience is all of God that there is—this is God as we can know God.

This is the God without whom—or which—the scientist would never have in mind the power to search for truth, or the compulsion to be loyal to it. It is the God—the living spiritual reality—without whom the poet would never learn to write a single verse or hear the music of words uttered. It is the God from whom even the atheist cannot escape. But it is also the God of all of us—of everyone whatever.