📦 FREE shipping on orders over $30!
“I definitely think there must be something,” one of my friends said to me recently, as conversation drifted into discussion of God. “I just don’t know what it is.”
He’s not alone. Most people around us have a sense that there may be more out there than only what we can see or touch—not necessarily a God but something. This intuition is sometimes referred to as "somethingism." Somethingism is not a posture of commitment but simply of openness.
You can probably name the “somethingists” in your life: those who are neither atheists nor strong believers yet have an intuition of something more.
Over the past decade, I’ve helped facilitate hundreds of conversations with people who share this same sense, and have found a number of things which enable those conversations to be helpful. Here are four of them:
When talking about God, I often like to draw a circle, to represent the universe, and then to write the word “us” inside the shape and “God” beyond its exterior. Then I mark some lines indicating that God, while continuing somehow to relate to our reality, is not just another item on the inventory of objects found in our reality.
We are part of the reality God has generated. To be alive is therefore to experience God. That’s true of everyone, regardless of their opinion on God or their perspective on religion. Our existence is made possible only by him, and we—with our every contingent breath—inescapably brush up against the divine simply by being. There is no special action required on our part.
The Gospel writer John goes so far as to call Jesus “the true light that gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). For John, God is actively shedding “light” on everyone; reality, he implies, is suffused with a subtle undercurrent of divine invitation. We sense that there is something more because, as someone once described it to me, “God is flirting with us.” It’s not just that God did reach out to humanity in Jesus. It’s that he, the Jesus-shaped God, continues to do so even now.
People are not blank slates when it comes to God. We aren’t “bringing God to them,” and their experience of him doesn’t begin when we enter the room. So we can ask questions and hear about their experience. A few questions which I have found helpful in my conversations, and which are included in my book Somethingism, are…
A genuine curiosity about others, which these questions express, can help open up some deep conversations.
One of my friends, in his days as a religious-affairs journalist, was covering a press conference in a crypt, held by a future British prime minister. As people began their post-event dispersal, he sidled up to the politician and raised the question of God. “What,” he asked, “is your take?” The man looked shocked and exclaimed, “Are you actually asking me what I believe?” He ran his hand through his hair, hemmed for a moment, and then replied, “I’d say I believe, but it’s like trying to get a radio signal when you’re driving through the Chilterns”—a particularly hilly area of central England. “Sometimes you can get it, and sometimes you can’t, and you’re just left twiddling the dial.”
God may be part of every person’s experience. But they need that experience to move from intuition to clarity. Otherwise they, too, will be left twiddling the dial.
None of us, though, can find God on our own because God is not some element in the proverbial circle of the universe. He’s not like cheese or trees or neural circuits or dark matter or democracy. It’s not as if we might someday unscrew the appropriate cosmic panel and behind it find God, beavering away, keeping the whole thing going. Neither can we pierce beyond the circle and grasp at him.
The only way we could know about God would be if he showed himself to us within the space-time confines of the circle:
Christians would say he has done precisely this—“the true light that gives light to everyone ... became flesh and made his dwelling among us” in the person of Jesus (John 1:9, 14). So, while we may not be “bringing God to people,” we are sharing with them the news of Jesus. He brings their fuzzy sense of “something” into focus. “Can I share with you what comes to mind when I think of God?” may be a key question for us to ask in these conversations.
Loads of people pray. In Somethingism I tell the story of my dad, then an agnostic, praying for rescue while sharks circled nearby. Similar urgent prayers, often only whispered or thought, spring from most of us at some point. Job interviews, first dates, coursework deadlines and exams, or medical procedures and diagnoses—it doesn’t usually take a shark attack for us to ask God to enter a moment or situation.
But God is inviting us towards an encounter more profound than a cry for help in difficult moments. His invitation is something closer to opening a door and saying, Come in—you are welcome to be God not only of all reality but also of me.
Sharing our firsthand experience of knowing and following Jesus helps make this experience of life with God tangible for others. One of the turning points in my own story, in fact, was listening to two office workers at a prayer meeting share what God had done in their lives in the preceding week. “These people,” I commented to a friend afterwards, “ – they have something I don’t.”
Somethingism is a brilliant intuition – an amazing starting point for conversation. And as we ask questions, expecting God to already be at work, opportunities will emerge to share the revelation of God in Jesus, as well as our own experience and story. And, as we do so, may God do surprising things around and through us.
If you want to think about this further, maybe check out my short book Somethingism, which I wrote both as a way for people to begin exploring their own sense of more and also to help Christians looking for fresh ways to articulate their own faith to those around them.
Luke Cawley is the director of Chrysolis, a non-profit which helps churches and organizations develop innovative projects that engage with the people and culture around them. He has written or coedited several books, including Campus Lights: Students Living and Speaking for Jesus Around the World (Muddy Pearl, 2019), a journalistic account of God’s work in universities across the globe, and The Myth of the Non-Christian: Engaging Atheists, Nominal Christians and the Spiritual but Not Religious (IVP, 2016) — a practical guidebook to contextualised apologetics. Luke also serves on the leadership team of a growing local church in the south-west of England.
