Is It Possible to Outgrow God?

The framework has had a strange and clarifying effect on my spiritual belief system: it allowed me to move past the idea of God.

I don’t experience this as rebellion or loss. I experience it more like maturation.

I now think of God in the same way I think of Santa Claus. They are temporary structures that help people make sense of the world.

Santa Claus offers children wonder, excitement, curiosity, generosity, and a feeling of magic in everyday life. As children grow older, they learn that there is no man in a red suit breaking into houses on Christmas Eve. But ideally, they don’t lose the wonder that Santa introduced to them. The story falls away; the feeling remains.

I see God the same way.

God offers explanations for why things happen, how the world came to be, and a sense of safety in difficult times. For many people, this remains a valid framework for their entire lives and that’s fine. It works.

For me, it stopped working.

I grew up Roman Catholic. I read the weekly readings at Mass, taught Sunday School, and participated actively in the church. When I lost my son at 26 weeks gestation, I didn’t lose my belief in God, but I did begin to question what I’d been taught about them.

Religion, as I had known it, no longer made sense.

I moved into spirituality over a decade ago and then, eventually, I stepped out the back door of that too. What finally replaced both was something much simpler: causal chains.

Causal chains made reality make sense in a way religion and spirituality could not.

Religion struggles to explain trauma without invoking a cosmic battle between God and the Devil. It is a kind of eternal game of cops and robbers where God is supposedly all-powerful, yet somehow perpetually failing to stop harm.

If God is truly omnipotent, why is evil so persistent?

Causal chains dissolve that contradiction.

If an event is simply the next coherent outcome in a chain of prior conditions and relationships, then even an atrocious experience does not require a supernatural explanation. It happened because, given everything that came before, it was the only thing that could happen.

That may sound cold, but to me it is actually relieving.

Experience does not need moral justification. Any attempt to justify it usually just adds another layer of pain. Sometimes the experience itself is enough.

Causal chains are not moral. They don’t care about good or bad, just as hurricanes don’t care whether they destroy your house. They simply follow the logic of existing conditions.

Cause and effect behaves like weather, not like a judge.

So, can you outgrow God?

Yes, when God is replaced with something that makes more sense and does not require an omnipotent being to run the show.

There is nothing mystical or cosmic about this view. It is simply patterns and sequences unfolding over time. These patterns can help us understand experience, or we can layer stories on top of them. That choice belongs to each person.

For me, structure replaced story.

And that has been enough.

Love to all.

Della

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