John Lennon probably said it best: “Imagine there’s no country, and no religion too.”
Let us take that sentence literally for a moment and let our image of God disappear with a snap of the fingers, as if erased by Thanos in the Avengers. All ideas of and about God vanish. No
higher powers, no rituals, institutions, religious texts, or representatives. Even the very impulse to use the word “God” as a meaningful category disappears. No heaven in the back of our minds.
No transcendent address. A global, synchronized outage of God. All metaphysical fog has lifted. No religious wars, no dogmatic tribunals, no moral theater staged before an invisible audience.
Only humans. Systems. Causes. Consequences.
The question such a scenario inevitably evokes is this:
Where could God secretly be hiding such that, despite total absence from our cultural norms, established convictions, linguistic patterns, ideological frameworks, and habits of thought, he would
nonetheless – almost inevitably – have to re-emerge? Why might we, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) our enlightenment, prove incapable of banishing him for good?
On a quiet night, you sit there and notice a small crack as you begin to hope. You plan the coming weeks and months, look at a child you want to protect, a relationship you want to save, a body that is growing older. You tell yourself: “It’ll be fine – at least I hope so.”
And in that very moment you realize: something is missing. A kind of metaphysical credit. An advance payment on a world that somehow responds. It feels empty… hopeless. Hope is left standing
naked in the room, without a counterpart, without an echo, without a metaphysical resonance chamber.
Between hope and fulfillment there is something. Not information. Not statistics. Not planning – but a gap.
And the longer you move through this world, the clearer it becomes: these gaps do not disappear simply because “God” has been eliminated. On the contrary, they only become visible then, because “God” whether one is an enlightened atheist or a believer, has for millennia fulfilled at least one crucial function: he was the word with which humans inhabited those in-between spaces that cannot be closed by control, knowledge, or power.
So what do we do with the gaps that God once occupied, now that we have made him disappear? These gaps are not merely open questions of natural science that will eventually be solved. They are structural in-between spaces of human action.
Kant once asked: What may I hope for?
Today, after God’s abdication, we must ask anew:
If you hope – what exactly are you hoping for if the world is nothing but causality?
If you ask – to whom are you addressing yourself if there are only processes?
If you accuse – what are you accusing, if there are only rule violations?
If you forgive – what exactly are you doing, if the past cannot be erased?
In classical critiques of religion, we often encounter the “God of the gaps.” “God” is invoked wherever people could not explain something: lightning, illness, the cosmos, fate. This form has indeed historically receded, because science has done outstanding work here.
But in this article, “God” is to be understood differently: as a name for the in-between space.
Not as an answer.
Not as an explanation.
But as a placeholder for what remains unavailable within a process.
Temporal Gaps
Hope ↔ Fulfillment
Hope is not a plan. Hope is the act of treating the future as inhabitable even though you do not control it. If you attempt to rationalize hope completely, all that remains is probability calculation. That is useful, but it does not replace its existential function: hope sustains even when the statistics are poor.
In a fully de-divinized world, hope becomes either a private quirk or a PR strategy. But humans do not abandon hope. Instead, they construct narratives that re-legitimize it.
And it is precisely here that something “divine” begins to sprout again, not as proof, but as a social necessity. A society that must keep the future inhabitable invents semantic and ritual forms to allow hope to be more than self-deception.
Promise ↔ Fulfillment
A promise is always a risky bridge across time. No institution can reliably ensure that people keep promises. Contracts can sanction, but they cannot produce fidelity.
The more complex a society becomes, the more it depends on “invisible” binding forces: trust, integrity, loyalty, conscience. For a long time, “God” was a condensation of these forces: the ultimate witness, the final anchor, the instance before which one cannot talk oneself out of responsibility.
When that instance is removed, the need remains. And that need generates substitute forms: secular sacrality, new myths of loyalty, moral absolutisms, identity religions.
Normative Gaps
Is ↔ Ought
No value follows from facts. From “this is how it is” one cannot derive “this is how it should be.” This is not a lack of education, but a logical boundary. You can have all the data in the world and still not automatically derive “dignity,” “justice,” or “human rights” from it. You can justify them, defend them, institutionalize them but their claim remains suspended in an in-between space: more unconditional than mere convention, yet less provable than physics.
Historically, “God” was one solution: values hold because they are anchored in the ultimate. in something no longer open to relativization.
When God disappears, the normative tension remains and seeks stabilization. If it does not find it in reflected ethics, it finds it in other kinds of dogma.
Accusation ↔ Consequence
Between the accused and the consequence of accusation lies more than procedural logic. Accusation is rarely mere administration. It is often a claim: “It must count that this does not simply remain as it is.”
If everything is translated into pure functionality, accusation becomes compliance: rule violation, sanction, file closed. But people want more than file closure, they want recognition of wrongdoing, they want it to count.
If this “counting” is not robustly explained and practiced in secular terms (for example through restorative justice, transparent norms, cultures of public reasoning), space opens again for metaphysical inflation.
Forgiveness ↔ Reparation
Reparation can replace losses, but it cannot erase the past. Forgiveness is an act that goes beyond logic: it creates a future that does not follow from the past.
If you remove this category from a society, you replace it with two extremes:
hardness (nothing is forgiven) or arbitrariness (nothing matters). Both destroy social cohesion.
New forms of “forgiveness” then emerge, often ritualized or morally over-elevated. And once again, something slips in that structurally resembles religion: purification, atonement, guilt, confession.
Causal Gaps
The better we explain causes like biography, trauma, genetics, environment, incentive structures, the stronger a tension arises: how can responsibility be more than a useful construct?
In practice, responsibility is indispensable. Without it, law, morality, and self-regulation collapse. But in theory, it becomes harder to justify.
“God” was one solution: freedom as a gift, responsibility before a final judge.
Without “God”, the gap remains: you cannot fully derive responsibility from causality, yet you cannot live without it. Societies do not resolve this through “more data,” but through narratives, institutions, and cultural techniques.
If these techniques are missing, responsibility turns either into an ideology of hardness (“your own fault”) or into deterministic cynicism (“couldn’t have acted otherwise”). Both generate social instability that could in turn, generate renewed longing for an ultimate authority.
Social Gaps
Claim ↔ Recognition
Dignity is a claim that becomes socially effective only through recognition. Recognition cannot be forced without destroying it. That makes dignity fragile.
Religions offered a trick: dignity is guaranteed because it is bestowed by God.
If that guarantee is removed, dignity must be stabilized differently maybe legally, culturally, linguistically, institutionally. If this does not happen, transcendent substitute guarantees re-emerge, because people do not wish to live permanently in a world where dignity appears endlessly redefinable.
Love ↔ Reciprocity
Love is risky because it cannot be enforced. Between devotion and response lies a gap that cannot be technically closed.
Here too, “God” often functioned as a secondary safeguard: love as part of a larger framework of meaning. Without that framework, love can become very free or very fragile.
Societies respond with rituals, meaning-offers, symbolisms that make this fragility bearable. If these are not consciously shaped in secular terms, they quickly tip back into sacralization.
Why these gaps may force “God’s” return as a social phenomenon
Not because “God” can be proven true, but because a society without stable ways of dealing with these gaps becomes a society in permanent overheating.
If normative gaps are not stabilized in secular ways, moral hysterias emerge.
If temporal gaps are not made culturally inhabitable, cynicism or messianic longing appears.
If social gaps are not institutionally buffered, identity cults, tribalism and substitute religions arise.
“God” then returns not necessarily as church religion, but as a diffuse ultimate instance: as new sacred concepts,
untouchable dogmas, moral purity regimes, metaphysically charged politics. After elimination, God does not return because people are too stupid.
He returns because people must act even though not everything closes.
The way out: Closing the gaps differently than through “God”
1. Enlightenment as Gap Competence
We must learn to distinguish which questions are empirical and which are structural. Where we cannot do this, we oscillate endlessly between naïve faith and naïve cynicism.
Gap competence means:
– accepting that not everything is provable without fleeing into mysticism
– accepting that values do not come “from data” without slipping into arbitrariness
2. Education as Linguistic Precision
Many “returns of God” are actually language problems: one senses something unavailable and only has the old word for it.
By refining language, you can say:
“I have hope” instead of “I know it will turn out well.”
“I forgive” instead of “It wasn’t that bad.”
“I uphold values” instead of “That’s just how the world is.”
You give words to the in-between space without deifying it.
3. Institutions that civilize the unavailable
Not all gaps can be closed, but they can be shaped fairly:
– restorative and transparent justice (accusation ↔ consequence)
– social security and health culture (hope ↔ fulfillment)
– democratic deliberation and public justification duties (is ↔ ought)
– rituals without metaphysics: farewell, reconciliation, transitions (death, guilt, new beginnings)
4. Mature practices instead of consolation systems
A secular engagement with gaps is not cold but demanding. It requires practices:
– reflection and psychological self-knowledge (inside ↔ outside)
– ethical education and moral reasoning (is ↔ ought)
– forms of community that do not rely on enemy images (claim ↔ recognition)
– art and symbolic work that open spaces of meaning without presenting them as truth
In this way, you achieve what religion often provides but without the cost of dogmatic ultimate claims.
“God” is not the answer to what we do not yet know. “God” is the name for what does not fully close between us, our actions, and the world.
If we learn to inhabit these in-between spaces with clarity, language, institutions, and mature practices, we do not need to resurrect “God”, not because the gaps disappear, but because we become capable of living within them without turning them into idols.
That would not be a return of faith, but a progress of maturity.
by mario
