By: Ken O’Donnell
Source: The Daily Guardian 
Dated: June 7th, 2025

The question of God's existence has fascinated human beings ever since they started to ponder and later write down what was happening to them. The ancients depicted our world as one full of traps that take us away from the promise of a better life and spiritual development. Fear and threats were built into everything. The way around this was to propitiate the gods, remain devout and reverent in the hope that things would somehow become better. Adequate crops, sufficient rain, and victory in battle - these were the signs that the gods were smiling.

Nowadays, the history of many traditions is in front of us. We can see that most of them try to reach out for something beyond the world of the five senses and its inherent materialism. Even though they believe in something beyond, many feel that there is no reasonable way to discuss what is loosely called the "spiritual realm."

There is definitely a spiritual reality and it has a similar coherent foundation for its existence as the physical one. This is particularly true related to God. People ask, “How can we prove that God exists when we cannot see spirit?” The modern world is so obsessed with the ‘material’ that we cannot seem to think about anything beyond it.

Science has correctly rejected many superstitions inherited from our ancient past. Even so, there is still a lot of what is called blind faith about what God does and does not do. On the other side, science has steered heavily towards pure pragmatism, thereby creating its own form of blind faith. 

There are two basic premises related to this:

1. Human beings can understand the universe in its entirety and science is the only means that can show the way. We eagerly await new discoveries that will, at some unknown future date, provide us with a full explanation of our existence.
2. The world that we see, hear, touch, smell, feel, and measure is the only "real" world. People take birth, die, and there is nothing else. Therefore, we think we may as well eat, drink, and make merry as much as we can while we are here.

This type of thinking has encouraged a general preoccupation with the senses and their objects, and an indifference to the things beyond them.

From Einstein, we know that time and space are inseparable. But where does the dimension of consciousness come into the way we see the material world? Everything that happens has a time and place. And it also has a reason.

It is in this dimension of consciousness that we can explore the spiritual realm, and everything related to it. This includes knowledge of the soul, God, the soul’s relationship with God and the material world, and our existence beyond here. None of these aspects can be measured by any instrument of science, however sophisticated it may be.

We can understand the existence of the soul and God, but we cannot really prove it in a way that would satisfy the logic of science. This does not mean that we must give up a rational approach to understanding God and God’s importance. The major difficulty is that the experience of both the soul and God are completely subjective.  We can only check spiritual matters in the laboratories of our minds and hearts.

Ken O’Donnell is an author
and the director of Brahma Kumaris services in South America.