Read andreflect, consider, revisit, returnreflectconsiderrevisitreturn

A question about God is never asked from nowhere. The word arrives with language, culture, memory, doctrine, skepticism, imagery, and experience.

That does not make belief false or disbelief false. It means that before asking what God is, we can ask what we are already bringing to the word. Are we imagining a person, a cause, a moral authority, a presence, a metaphor, a particular tradition’s claim, or an impossibility?

Different starting assumptions can produce arguments that sound like disagreements about reality while partly being disagreements about the question itself.

Humility does not require abandoning conviction. It asks us to notice the lens through which a conviction became intelligible. The question about God may remain open, as may the question of how we know what we think we know.