A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

On more than one occasion, atheists have told me that belief in God is irrational. The certainty with which they declare that God does not exist has always struck me as curious. Many of these same individuals insist that they believe in science rather than myths or fairy tales.

Yet science, properly understood, is built upon intellectual humility. It follows the evidence wherever it leads, acknowledges the limits of present knowledge, and remains open to new discoveries.

That is why I find absolute certainty about God’s nonexistence difficult to reconcile with the scientific spirit. Science is extraordinarily successful at investigating the natural world, but it cannot evaluate what lies beyond nature itself. It can explain many of the mechanisms by which the universe operates, but it cannot answer why there is a universe at all, why its laws are so remarkably ordered, or why anything exists rather than nothing.

Those are philosophical questions, not scientific ones.

To say that God has not been detected by scientific instruments is one thing. To conclude that no God exists anywhere is quite another. That is not a scientific conclusion; it is a philosophical assertion.

The late UK Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (z”l) expressed this distinction beautifully: “I do not believe in the same God in whom atheists do not believe.”

The God of Judaism is not a supernatural being somewhere within the universe waiting to be discovered. He is the eternal source of existence itself — the One who transcends space, time, matter, and energy. As the Torah declares, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis is not intended to explain how the universe came to be; it answers the deeper question of why there is a universe at all.

For me, belief in God rests not upon a single argument but upon what philosophers call a cumulative case. The universe had a beginning. Its physical constants are exquisitely fine-tuned for life. Consciousness emerged from matter. Human beings possess reason, recognize objective moral truths, appreciate beauty, and continually search for meaning. None of these realities alone proves God’s existence. Together, however, they point toward a transcendent intelligence far more convincingly than the belief that everything arose from nothing through blind chance alone.

For my part, I do not claim to possess empirical proof of God. I simply find that belief in a Creator best explains the evidence before us. Contrary to what some atheists would have me believe, I do not find it rational to conclude that everything that exists created itself from nothing.

Reason is one of humanity’s greatest gifts, but it is not without limits. The finite human mind cannot expect to comprehend every aspect of an infinite reality. There will always be questions beyond the reach of scientific experimentation and logical deduction — not because they are meaningless, but because they transcend what reason alone can establish. Recognizing those limits is not intellectual surrender; it is intellectual humility. Faith begins where reason has carried us as far as it can go.

When I look into the night sky, I do not merely see billions of stars scattered across an indifferent universe. I see a cosmos of breathtaking order, beauty, and intelligibility — a universe governed by elegant mathematical laws that make possible: life, consciousness, love, and moral responsibility. Every new scientific discovery deepens rather than diminishes my sense of awe. The immensity of the universe does not make God smaller; it makes Him infinitely greater.

Rabbi Sacks once observed, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” Both pursuits are essential. Science reveals the grandeur of creation; faith reveals its significance.

King David captured that truth three thousand years ago: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.” I cannot prove God exists with a telescope or a microscope. But the more I contemplate the majesty, beauty, and astonishing coherence of the cosmos, the more compelling I find the belief that creation points beyond itself to its Creator.

Steve Wenick is a freelance book reviewer for HarperCollins Publishing and Simon & Schuster. His articles, reviews, and letters have appeared in The New York Times, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Voice of Southern New Jersey, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.