Then words came. And with words came categories, and with categories came certainty, and with certainty came everything else. It wasn't until someone told us there was such a thing as God — or that there wasn't — that the question even entered our minds.

I grew up Muslim in the American midwest. Mixed ethnicity, misunderstood by most, belonging fully to neither world I was supposed to belong to. That experience taught me something early and indelibly: words are not neutral. Every identifying word you apply to a person or a thing fires up a constellation of assumptions in the listener's mind — assumptions they didn't choose and may not even be aware of. I learned to be careful with words because I saw what happened when other people weren't. I watched their definitions of a word shape their definition of me before I'd had a chance to say anything at all.

That lesson stayed. There can be no honest search for truth without carefully defined terms. And nowhere is the sloppiness of language more consequential than in the territory of belief.

So: what do we actually mean by God?

There is no universal definition. The commonly used ones are intentionally vague, which is part of the problem. If God means the bearded figure in the clouds, a divine author of contradictory ancient texts distributed to scattered tribes and expected to resonate across millennia — then no. I don't believe in that. But I've always suspected that the word, at its most honest, might be pointing at something else entirely.

When I sit with the concept seriously, stripped of its institutional baggage, what comes up is this: the deepest mysteries of existence. The interconnectedness of things that have no business being connected. The staggering fact that the universe exists at all, and that every question answered about it opens ten more. The strange suggestion, noticed by scientists and mystics alike, that there may be something like intelligence woven into the fabric of how things work. If the universe is infinite — and astrophysicists allow for this — then infinite things are possible, and some form of vast, impersonal, incomprehensible intelligence may be among them. That is not a belief. It is an openness. And I think the distinction matters enormously.

I don't identify as a theist because that implies belief in a god in some traditional sense, and I have no rational grounds for that. I don't identify as an atheist because, as the term is commonly understood, it asserts a confident disbelief — a certainty that nothing of the kind could exist — and I have no rational grounds for that either. Both positions claim more than the evidence allows. Both mistake a posture for a conclusion.

Agnosticism is the honest position. Not because it is comfortable — it isn't — but because it refuses to perform certainty it doesn't have. Thomas Huxley, who coined the term, put it plainly: agnosticism means a person shall not say they know or believe what they have no scientific grounds for knowing or believing. That applies equally to orthodox religion and to confident atheism. Both claim a certainty the evidence doesn't support.

Certainty generates courage, which is why people cling to it. Uncertainty generates fear, which is why agnosticism unsettles people who encounter it. To sit genuinely inside not-knowing requires a kind of courage that declared belief — in either direction — does not. It means accepting that the most important questions may not resolve in your lifetime, and choosing rigor over comfort anyway.

I am not anti-religious. I have no interest in dismantling other people's frameworks for meaning. And I am not without spiritual sensibility — the mystery of existence moves me as much as it moves anyone. I simply cannot claim to believe what I do not know, and I cannot unknow what I've learned about the words we use to talk about it.

My God, if that word must be used, is a placeholder for everything we don't yet have the concepts to describe. It is the question underneath the questions. It is the name we give to the shape of what we can't yet see.

That seems like enough.