Philosophy of Religion
What If God Is Something You Do, Not Something That Exists?
A growing movement of serious thinkers argues that the question 'Does God exist?' may be the wrong question entirely.
The Idea
Most debates about religion get stuck in the same groove: either God exists as a supernatural being who created the universe and intervenes in it, or God doesn't exist and religion is a sophisticated form of wishful thinking. Non-realism offers a third path — and it's more radical than atheism. Non-realist religion holds that religious language isn't making factual claims about an entity 'out there.' When someone says 'God is love,' the non-realist hears this not as a metaphysical statement — God exists and God has the property of being loving — but as an expressive, orienting statement: love is what we should treat as ultimate, as sacred, as worth organising a life around. God, on this reading, is a symbol that does real psychological and moral work, regardless of whether it corresponds to a being beyond human experience. The philosopher Don Cupitt, who spent decades as an Anglican priest before articulating this position, called it 'taking leave of God' — not abandoning religion, but abandoning the idea that religion is fundamentally about belief in supernatural facts. What remains is practice, community, ritual, and the deep human need to orient oneself toward something larger than personal interest. The traditions stay. The liturgy stays. The ethics stay. What goes is the metaphysical guarantee. This isn't watered-down religion or atheism with better music. It's a genuine philosophical position: that meaning is constructed rather than discovered, and that religious life is one of humanity's most sophisticated tools for doing that construction well.
In the World
In 1984, Don Cupitt published 'The Sea of Faith,' accompanied by a BBC documentary series, and triggered one of the more unexpected controversies in modern British religious life. Here was a Cambridge theologian and ordained priest arguing, on national television, that God is a human creation — a symbol projected outward, then mistaken for an independent being. The Church of England was not thrilled. But something else happened too. Thousands of people wrote in saying the series had saved their religious lives. These were churchgoers, clergy, people who had quietly stopped believing in a personal God who answers prayers and parts seas — but who still found the practice of faith meaningful, the community irreplaceable, the ethical framework valuable. Non-realism gave them a language for staying. Cupitt went on to found the Sea of Faith Network, which still meets today — a community of religious non-realists who gather to explore what faith looks like when you stop treating it as a set of truth claims about cosmology. They sing hymns. They argue about ethics. They sit with grief and mortality together. The only thing they've set aside is the requirement to believe that somewhere beyond human experience, a being is listening. What's striking is how this mirrors what many practitioners of Buddhism, certain strands of Judaism, and liberal Quakerism have always quietly done: treat religious life as a practice rather than a subscription to a metaphysical package.
Why It Matters
This idea cuts through one of the more exhausting features of modern life: the sense that you must either believe traditional religious claims literally or dismiss religion as pre-scientific nonsense. Non-realism breaks that binary. If you've ever found yourself moved by a religious ritual without believing its cosmology, or drawn to a contemplative practice without signing on to its theology, non-realism is a philosophical framework that takes that experience seriously rather than calling it confused. It suggests that what religion actually delivers — a sense of the sacred, an ethical orientation, a community of shared attention — doesn't logically depend on the supernatural scaffolding. There's also a more personal angle. The non-realist move asks you to take responsibility for what you treat as ultimate — what you actually organise your attention and choices around — rather than outsourcing that question to authority or tradition. That's a bracing invitation. Most of us have something functioning as our god: status, security, approval, achievement. Non-realism doesn't let you pretend those defaults are neutral. It asks you to choose deliberately.
A Question to Ponder
What are you actually treating as sacred in how you spend your time and attention — and is that something you would choose if you were choosing consciously?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable