Why you cannot prove G*d exists

Students often ask me, “Do you believe in the existence of G*d?” Sometimes the question is sincere and searching. Sometimes it comes with a sharper edge, as though they are trying to work out whether I can be trusted before they have even heard me teach. That is understandable. Some students arrive already wary of professors, having been warned by conservative religious parents or pastors that people like me are hostile to faith. In such cases, the question is doing more than asking about G*d. It is also asking who I am and and revealing something about the student as well. So I do not rush to answer.

I usually pause, and I pause for a philosophical reason. Much depends on what the student means by G*d. Two people can use the same word and be talking about very different things. One may mean a supernatural being who intervenes in the world from outside it. Another may mean the ground of being. Another may mean the deepest reality disclosed in love, or truth, or beauty, or consciousness. Unless we have at least some rough agreement about what we mean, the question cannot be answered clearly. My first response, then, is often another question: what do you mean by G*d?

I was reminded of this recently when I read a book review in The Atlantic. The essay was Elizabeth Bruenig’s “The Evidence That God Exists,” published on March 26, 2026. It discusses a recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, God, the Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, published in English on October 14, 2025. I should be clear that I have not read the book itself. I have only read the review. Still, even at that distance, what interested me was not only the boldness of the claim, but the kind of reasoning involved.

If we ask whether G*d exists, philosophy requires that we also ask what kind of reasoning could possibly lead someone to that conclusion. In broad terms, there are three familiar kinds of reasoning: deductive, inductive, and abductive.

Deductive reasoning is the kind most people associate with formal proof. It begins with premises and asks what must follow from them. A simple example would be this: all pugs have very curly tails, Willow is a pug, therefore Willow has a very curly tail. If the premises are true, and if the argument is valid, the conclusion follows necessarily. There is no gap between premises and conclusion. This is very strong reasoning. It gives certainty, at least in principle. But it only works when the premises are secure and the terms are clear. As it happens, Willow’s tail is not very curly! The first premise “all pugs have curly tails” is, in fact, false.

Inductive reasoning works differently. It does not aim at certainty, but at probability. It looks at patterns, repeated experiences, and accumulated evidence, and then draws a likely conclusion. If every morning in my experience the sun has risen, I reasonably expect it to rise tomorrow. If a medicine helps large numbers of patients in repeated trials, we conclude that it is probably effective. If most pugs I have ever met have very curly tails, then I might reasonably expect Willow’s tail to be very curly. Induction is central to science and to ordinary life. It is not absolute proof, but it gives us good grounds for thinking something is likely to be the case. Though sometimes we are surprised, as with Willow’s not very curly tail.

Abductive reasoning is less familiar to many people, though we use it often. It is reasoning to the best explanation. We begin with some feature of experience and ask what makes the most sense of it. A doctor, for example, listens to symptoms and asks what diagnosis best explains them. A detective gathers clues and asks what account best fits the evidence. Abduction does not produce certainty. It offers an interpretation that seems, at least for now, the most illuminating or coherent.

When it comes to the question of G*d, I do not think deduction gets us there. The history of philosophy contains many interesting deductive arguments for the existence of G*d, and they deserve careful study, but none compels assent in the way a geometrical proof does. Too much depends on premises that are already philosophically or theologically loaded. Nor do I think induction gets us there. Induction works best when we are dealing with observable patterns, measurable data, and repeatable evidence. But G*d, at least in any rich and serious sense of the word, is not an object within the universe to be measured alongside other objects.

That is why the more interesting category here is abduction. From the review, it seems to me that the book Bruenig discusses is unclear about its reasoning . Where it works best is in making an abductive argument, rather than as a proof that G*d exists. It seems to argue that certain features of reality, such as the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, life, and consciousness, are best explained by the existence of G*d. That is not deduction. It is not quite induction either. It is a claim about what best makes sense of things.

This is important because I think abduction is the only way one may responsibly come to affirm that G*d exists. A person reflects on the texture of experience: the reality of moral obligation, the power of love, the wonder of beauty, the persistence of consciousness, the depth disclosed in grief, in prayer, or in silence. None of these proves G*d exists. Yet for some people the most compelling way to make sense of such experiences is to say that G*d is real. This is not irrational. It is not a mere guess. It is an interpretation of reality—often shaped by tradition, story, religious background and language—that attempts to make the best sense of one’s experience of transcendence, longing, and existential unease.

My own developed view is shaped by a naturalistic panentheist perspective. I do not think of G*d as a supernatural being standing outside nature and occasionally intervening in it. I think of G*d as the Good in and through all things, the depth dimension of reality, the sacredness present within nature rather than beyond it. From that perspective, the question is not whether I can prove G*d as though proving a theorem. The question is whether the world, as I experience and reflect upon it, is better understood as disclosing a sacred depth. My answer is yes. But my yes is not deductive certainty, and it is not an inductive generalization. It is an abductive judgment, born of reflection on lived experience and on what, for me, best makes sense of the whole. Of course, destruction and evil are also present in the world, but that is for another day.

+Ab. Andy