The comedian Bill Maher once said that agnostic people do not spend their time thinking about God.
Speak for yourself, Bill.
I think about God constantly. Not the God of any particular scripture or tradition. Not a God who takes sides in wars or answers prayers for parking spaces. Something harder to name and harder to dismiss. The question of whether anything exists that transcends the reality we are embedded in. And if so, what our relationship to it could possibly be.
That question has followed me from when I was a kid listening to Blasphemous Rumours and Sacred by Depeche Mode in the 80s to middle age. Agnosticism is not indifference. For me it is the most serious engagement with the question that intellectual honesty allows. I am not able to say for certain if there is a God or some form of universal consciousness or not. What I do believe is that every religion's attempts to describe or personify God diminishes the very infinite nature of God.
Here are my four postulates on the nature of God, as plainly as I can state them.
We are finite beings. We cannot step outside reality to observe it from a distance.
If God exists, God's nature would by definition be beyond anything a being inside reality could fully grasp.
Therefore neither confident belief nor confident disbelief is honestly available to us.
Every claimed revelation of God was received and interpreted by a finite human mind, which means it carries the same limitation as everything else we know.
This is the postulate that is rightly the most personal, because it applies to ancient traditions passed down by our ancestors through millennia, embedded into the fabric of almost every culture on earth.
What follows from these four postulates is not nihilism, or atheism. It is not the conclusion that the question does not matter. It is the conclusion that the question matters enormously, and that honest engagement with it requires sitting with genuine uncertainty rather than reaching for a resolution that is not actually there.
Passionate agnosticism. Not a shrug. A position.
I try to imagine God anyway.
What I reach for is an infinite consciousness with access to every thought and feeling that has ever occurred. In every human, every animal, every plant and fungus and bacterium, every artificial intelligence, perhaps even every electron. An awareness so total that nothing that has ever been experienced by anything has been lost to it.
Then I try to imagine what any individual finite being would be to that consciousness. What I am to it. What my small life, my questions, my grief and gratitude, would register as against the backdrop of everything that has ever existed feeling anything.
The imagination stretches. And then it collapses.
This is not a failure of effort. It is something more like hitting a singularity. The point in physics where the mathematics that describes everything else simply breaks down. Not because we lack data. Because the framework itself stops working. The equations that explain the universe everywhere else produce nonsense when pointed at a singularity. The mind that understands everything in its ordinary experience produces the same result when pointed at genuine infinite consciousness.
There is a tradition in theology that takes this collapse seriously. Apophatic theology, sometimes called negative theology, holds that the most truthful things you can say about God are what God is not. Every positive description immediately reduces the infinite to something a finite mind can hold, which means every positive description is already a distortion. Medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart built entire frameworks around the failure of imagination as the closest approach to genuine understanding.
The attempt breaks down by necessity. That breaking down might be the most honest theological experience available to us.
Our current understanding of how the universe might end offers three possible alternatives, and each one presses on the question of meaning differently.
In the Heat Death, expansion continues forever until all energy gradients disappear and nothing can happen anywhere. In the Big Rip, dark energy tears matter apart down to the subatomic level. In the Big Bounce, the universe collapses back into a singularity and begins again, erasing everything and resetting the probabilities from nothing.
If any of these is true, then every moment of consciousness that has ever occurred, every thought, every grief, every flash of beauty noticed by any being anywhere, leaves no lasting physical trace in the final state.
Unless something holds it.
That unless is where the four postulates leave me. Not with an answer. With the honest acknowledgment that a finite being embedded inside a reality with these possible endings cannot determine from the inside whether anything transcends the ending.
The imagination collapses at the singularity every time. I keep pointing it there anyway.
That is what agnosticism looks like when it takes the concept of an infinite Consciousness seriously.