Understanding God and the Sacred in Religious Philosophy

Does belief in God depend on what you already think God is? That might sound like a circular question, but it sits at the very heart of the philosophy of religion. Before asking whether God exists, philosophers argue you first need to examine what concept of God you are working with – because that concept shapes everything: how you worship, what counts as evidence, and even whether the question makes sense at all. Add to this the fact that some of the world’s oldest religions function entirely without a creator God, and you begin to see how rich and complicated this territory really is.

What does “God” actually mean? 🔗

The word “God” carries enormous conceptual baggage. Conceptions of God range across traditions and philosophies – from a powerful, personal creator to an impersonal absolute reality, from an omnipotent being who intervenes in history to a principle of being itself that transcends ordinary existence. What one person means by “God” may be unrecognizable to another, even within the same broad religious tradition.

In classical Western theism, the concept is fairly settled: God is typically understood as omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (perfectly good). Augustine of Hippo, writing in the 4th century, held that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally good, and the creator and sustainer of the universe from nothing (ex nihilo). This “perfect being theology” has dominated Western philosophy for centuries and remains the baseline for most arguments about God’s existence in that tradition.

But even within Western thought, the concept of God has shifted. The rise of Deism in the 17th and 18th centuries, inspired by thinkers like Lord Herbert of Cherbury, offered a leaner conception: Deists held simply that there is one supreme God who should be worshipped, that virtuous living constitutes that worship, and that God rewards good and punishes evil – with no room for revelation or miraculous intervention. Newton and Kepler’s ordered universe seemed to point to a reasonable, rational God rather than a personal one.

Why your concept of God determines your belief 🔗

This is the philosophical crux. If you define God as a perfect being who created the universe and cares about individuals, then questions about God’s existence carry one set of implications. If you define God as Paul Tillich did – as the “ground of all being,” the very power of existence itself – then, as Tillich famously argued, God does not “exist” the way objects exist, because that would make God finite. To ask whether such a God exists is to misunderstand the concept entirely.

This matters practically: jumping straight to proofs of God’s existence, without first clarifying what God you are trying to prove, risks arguing past the point. The ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the teleological argument each presuppose a particular conception of divinity. They may succeed or fail depending entirely on whether you accept that conception to begin with. Philosophy of religion, at its best, insists on clarifying these concepts before evaluating the arguments built on top of them.

The concept of the sacred: beyond God 🔗

Not all religious traditions center on a personal God. This is where the concept of “the sacred” becomes essential – it serves as a broader, more inclusive category that can apply across traditions, including those with no deity at all.

The most influential philosophical account of the sacred comes from the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto. In his landmark 1917 work The Idea of the Holy, Otto argued that the defining feature of religious experience is not a set of moral rules or doctrines, but an irreducible feeling he called the numinous. Otto described this experience using the Latin phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans – an awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery. The sacred, in his account, presents itself as something wholly other: something that simultaneously provokes dread and irresistible attraction.

Otto’s framework was deliberately broad. He argued that the numinous is not based on rational thought or sensory experience, but is encountered directly as something outside the self – present and felt as objective reality. Crucially, he believed this kind of encounter was present not only in Christianity but across the world’s religions, from animistic traditions to the Bhagavad Gita. The sacred, for Otto, is religion’s universal core.

The sacred as power and otherness 🔗

Philosopher Gerardus van der Leeuw extended this analysis in his 1933 work Religion in Essence and Manifestation. For van der Leeuw, the sacred is, above all, power – but not an ordinary kind of power. He stressed its remoteness: no matter how often one encounters it, it never becomes routine or familiar, but always remains a dangerous, exceptional “Other.” Encounters with the sacred are marked by amazement, fear, and above all, awe.

This understanding of the sacred as irreducibly other, as something set apart from the ordinary world, maps well across traditions. A sacred river, a holy text, a site of pilgrimage – none of these are sacred because of their physical properties alone, but because they are experienced as touching something beyond ordinary reality. The sacred in this broader sense extends beyond any deity to include scriptures, prophets, rituals, and holy places – from Jerusalem to Mecca to Varanasi.

Religions without a creator God: Buddhism and Jainism 🔗

One of the most philosophically significant facts about world religion is that some of the oldest and most sophisticated traditions operate without a creator God at all. Buddhism and Jainism are the clearest examples, and both challenge the assumption that religion is inherently theistic.

Buddhism: liberation without a creator 🔗

The Buddha himself rejected the idea of a creator god, and later Buddhist philosophers argued that belief in an eternal creator is not merely unprovable – it is an active distraction from the path to enlightenment. In Buddhist thought, gods may exist as powerful beings, but they are not creators or sustainers of the cosmos, and they are subject to impermanence like everything else. The central concern of Buddhism is not theological but soteriological: how does one end suffering? The answer lies in understanding the nature of craving and ignorance, not in pleasing or petitioning a deity.

For Buddhists, the ultimate goal is nirvana – liberation from suffering and the cycle of rebirth. Morality is a means to achieve this, not a divine command. This makes Buddhism, in philosophical terms, functionally atheistic, even if it does not explicitly deny the existence of any divine beings. The tradition’s engagement with the sacred is real and profound, but it is oriented toward truth, liberation, and self-mastery rather than toward a creator God.

Jainism: self-mastery and the rejection of divine creation 🔗

Jainism takes an even more explicit philosophical stance. Jain scriptures firmly reject God as the creator of the universe. According to Jain doctrine, the universe and all its constituents – souls, matter, space, time, and the principles of motion – have always existed. They were not created and cannot be destroyed. No omnipotent being governs or judges them; instead, all constituents are regulated by universal natural laws.

Yet Jainism is not simply atheism in the modern Western sense. Jainism does believe in God – not as a creator, but as a perfect being: a soul that has destroyed all its karmas, attained liberation, and exists in a state of infinite knowledge, infinite vision, and infinite bliss. Any soul can, in principle, achieve this state. In Jain thought, God is the ideal of what a human being can become; the liberated soul is divine. This is why Jain philosophy gives complete moral and spiritual responsibility to the individual – karma operates independently, without divine intervention, and each being is the master of its own destiny.

Both Buddhism and Jainism arose in the 6th century BCE as reactions against Brahmanical orthodoxy, and both emphasized non-violence, self-discipline, and individual effort over ritual sacrifice or divine grace. What unites them philosophically is an emphasis on salvation and self-mastery as the highest religious goals – goals that do not require, and in some formulations actively resist, a theistic framework.

What this means for belief in God 🔗

The existence of non-theistic religions is philosophically important for more than historical reasons. It demonstrates that religion as a category – with its structures of the sacred, of ultimate concern, of transformative practice – does not logically entail belief in a creator God. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, a religion can involve teachings and practices about an ultimate, sacred reality that calls for reverence or awe, without that reality being a personal deity.

This has a direct bearing on how one approaches the question of belief. If a person’s concept of God is that of an omnipotent personal creator who intervenes in history, then classical theistic arguments – the cosmological argument, the teleological argument – become directly relevant. But if one’s concept of the divine is closer to Tillich’s ground of being, or the Jain ideal of liberated selfhood, or the Buddhist notion of nirvana as the highest reality, then the traditional proofs of God’s existence simply do not address the question that matters. The philosophy of religion increasingly recognizes this diversity, engaging seriously with Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and other traditions alongside the Abrahamic ones.

The upshot is clear: asking “do you believe in God?” without specifying what is meant by “God” is philosophically premature. The question that comes first is always: what is your concept of the divine? What do you understand by the sacred? And what kind of relationship to ultimate reality are you actually seeking? Those prior questions do not just frame the debate – they largely determine its outcome.

What do you think? If the concept of God you hold determines whether traditional proofs of God’s existence are even relevant to you, does that mean belief is more a matter of prior commitment than rational argument? And does the existence of deeply spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Jainism that function without a creator God change how you think about what religion fundamentally is?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptions_of_God
2. https://iep.utm.edu/god-west/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religion
4. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/mysterium-tremendum-et-fascinans
6. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2025/05/24/otto/
7. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/phenomenology-of-religion/v-1/sections/the-sacred
8. https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2018/philosophy-paper-ii/sacred-holy-god-object-religion
9. https://iep.utm.edu/religion/
10. https://qz.com/india/1585631/the-ancient-connections-between-atheism-buddhism-and-hinduism
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism_and_non-creationism
12. https://www.jaina.org/page/ConceptofGod
13. https://jainworld.jainworld.com/jainbooks/images/26/JAINA_ATHEISM.htm
14. https://iep.utm.edu/jain/