Why do people not believe in God?

Judaism

“How long, O LORD, shall I cry, And Thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto Thee of violence, And Thou wilt not save.”

Habakkuk 1:2 · JPS 1917

Jewish scripture is full of people arguing with God. The prophet Habakkuk opens his book: “How long, O LORD, shall I cry, And Thou wilt not hear?” (Habakkuk 1:2). Job demands an answer and gets one. The Talmud tells of rabbis who out-argued a voice from heaven, saying the Torah “is not in heaven” but given to people to interpret, and God laughs, “My children have defeated Me” (Bava Metzia 59b).

Judaism tends to put practice before belief. A Jew who doubts is still a Jew, still welcome at the Passover table, where children are told to ask questions. Many Jews describe themselves as unsure about God and deeply committed to Jewish life.

Christianity

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., XCVI (1850) · original English, public domain

Thomas would not believe until he had touched the wounds, and Jesus did not turn him away. Jesus added: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29). Christian writers have long treated honest doubt as part of faith. Blaise Pascal wrote that there is enough light for those who want to see, and enough darkness for those who do not.

After the death of his closest friend, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote In Memoriam (1850), a long poem of grief and doubt that Queen Victoria kept by her bed. Its most quoted lines, below, are often read as permission to question.

Islam

“Will they then not meditate on the Qur'an, or are there locks on the hearts?”

Qur'an 47:24 · Pickthall (1930)

The Qur'an asks people again and again to think: “Will you not use your reason?”, “Will you not reflect?” Some of the Prophet's companions once told him they had thoughts about God too terrible to say out loud. He replied that their distress at those thoughts was itself “clear faith” (Muslim 132).

The great scholar al-Ghazali went through his own crisis of doubt around 1095. At the height of his fame in Baghdad, he could no longer trust what he had been taught. He lost the ability to speak and left his post. Years later he described it in his autobiography, Deliverance from Error, and said certainty came to him not from argument alone but as a light God cast into the heart. The Qur'an also says “There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejecteth false deities and believeth in Allah hath grasped a firm handhold which will never break. Allah is Hearer, Knower.” (2:256, Pickthall).

Without religion

“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X (1748) · original English

Many non-religious people say they do not reject God so much as find no good reason to believe in one. For them, honesty means not claiming more than they know. Others are confident there is no God, and many simply never think about it. Stephen Bullivant's research calls many of them “nonverts”: people who drifted rather than argued their way out. Humanists stress that a good life does not need religion. Kindness, honesty and meaning are open to everyone.

Sikhi

“By thinking, He cannot be reached, even by thinking a hundred thousand times.”

Guru Granth Sahib, ang 1 (Japji, pauri 1) · our rendering

Guru Nanak spent years in debate: with yogis in the mountains, with pandits and with qazis. The Sidh Gosht in the Guru Granth Sahib records one of these exchanges. The opening of the Japji says plainly that God cannot be reached by thinking alone. Sikhs speak of faith as something lived through honest work, sharing and remembering God, rather than proved.

Hindu traditions

Hindu tradition has always made room for questioning, including schools of thought that did not accept a creator God, such as Samkhya, and the materialist Charvakas, who rejected the gods altogether. One of the oldest hymns in the world, the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda (10.129), ends by wondering whether even the one who watches over creation knows how it began. “Perhaps he knows, or perhaps he does not.”

Beyond the Abrahamic faiths

In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha tells villagers who are confused by rival teachers not to accept anything just because of tradition, scripture, logic or a teacher's reputation. They should test it, and when they know for themselves that something leads to harm, give it up; when it leads to good, take it up. Buddhism is not built on belief in a creator, so for many Buddhists the question of God is simply set aside.