On the Inner Authority We Once Called God

The thing I keep running into

There have been moments in my life where I knew something before I could explain it. Not intellectually — not as an argument — but as a kind of immediate signal. A sense that something was off. Or that something mattered. Or that a line had been crossed. Sometimes it showed up as discomfort. Sometimes as clarity. Sometimes as a calm refusal to participate in something that otherwise “made sense.” What’s strange is that this signal often arrives before my thoughts. Before justification. Before narrative. And just as often, it contradicts what would be easier, safer, or more convenient to believe. I’m not talking about instinct in the narrow sense, or emotion in the dramatic sense. This feels quieter and older. Harder to manipulate. Less impressed by clever reasoning. For a long time, I didn’t have language for this. I only noticed that when I ignored it consistently, things in my life degraded — not all at once, but in a subtle, accumulating way.

The narrating self and something older

Over time, I began to notice a distinction. There is the part of me that narrates: the storyteller. The one that explains, rationalizes, defends, plans, and justifies. This part is useful — essential, even — but it is also reactive. It shows up after something has already happened. And then there is something else. This other thing doesn’t argue. It doesn’t persuade. It doesn’t explain itself. It simply signals alignment or misalignment — sometimes through the body, sometimes through a sudden quiet certainty, sometimes through resistance that refuses to soften no matter how well I talk myself into something. I’ve hesitated to name this, because naming it risks distorting it. But for the sake of discussion, I’ll call it an inner authority — not because it commands, but because it feels binding in a way explanation does not. Once this distinction becomes visible, it is difficult to ignore. The question then shifts from whether this inner authority exists to how it should be understood.

A hypothesis: did we once call this “God”?

At some point, I began wondering whether humans have always encountered something like this. Long before psychology, neuroscience, or even precise language, people still had inner experience. They still felt conviction, guilt, reverence, and obligation. They still sensed when something was right or wrong, coherent or corrosive. What if, lacking the tools to describe this inner authority as inner, people described it as other? What if God — or at least part of what people meant by God — emerged as a way to relate to this authoritative, non-verbal dimension of human experience? A way to make sense of it. A way to transmit it across generations. A way to give it weight. I’m not claiming this proves God doesn’t exist. I’m not trying to reduce religion to psychology. I’m asking something narrower and more tentative: Could some of what we call “God” be a symbolic externalization of a real inner faculty that humans have always had but never fully understood? Could some of what we call “God” be a symbolic externalization of a real inner faculty that humans have always had but never fully understood?

What this explains well

This frame explains some things surprisingly well. It helps explain why God is so often described as personal — as knowing, judging, caring, and calling — because this inner authority often feels personal. It addresses you, not abstractions. It helps explain why God’s voice is so often associated with conscience, and why moral violations feel like breaches of integrity rather than mere rule-breaking. It helps explain why moral intuitions converge across cultures despite different beliefs: don’t murder, don’t betray trust, don’t desecrate what binds the group together. And it helps explain why God feels both intimate and beyond control. This inner authority feels like me — and yet not something I can command at will. Taken together, these features suggest that whatever this authority is, it is not incidental. It plays a structural role in how humans orient themselves toward action, responsibility, and one another.

Where the hypothesis breaks

But this explanation doesn’t close the case. It doesn’t fully explain why this inner authority has the weight it does. Why it resists convenience. Why it so often opposes short-term advantage. Why it seems oriented toward long-term coherence rather than immediate payoff. One possibility is that this authority reflects long-horizon pressures — not just individual survival, but species-level viability. Trust, truth-telling, restraint, and integrity aren’t always adaptive locally, but they are stabilizing over time. That might explain why violating this inner authority often “works” in the short term and corrodes things in the long term. Still, something remains unresolved. The experience of obligation itself — the sense that some things are owed, not merely preferred — does not dissolve easily into explanation.

The hardest question: why believe tomorrow is better?

This leads to the most difficult part of this inquiry. I live by a small set of personal rules. One of them is simple to state and hard to justify: Believe tomorrow is better. This is not optimism. It is not prediction. It is not denial of suffering or entropy. It is a commitment — a stance toward the future that makes effort, honesty, and care intelligible. Biology alone does not fully ground this. Evolution can explain why hope persists, but not why it should be trusted. History does not guarantee it either — progress is uneven and reversible. And yet, abandoning this belief collapses something essential. Without it, responsibility thins out. Meaning becomes optional. Integrity loses its force. At this point, I find myself unable to proceed without assuming some form of order — some structure in reality that makes coherence, effort, and truth not pointless in principle. For many people, that order is named God. I am not certain what to name it.

Where I’ve landed — for now

I do not claim to have resolved the question of God. What I am attempting to preserve is something prior: the integrity of the inner signal that tells us when an action aligns or deviates, when coherence is being maintained or eroded. This signal does not yield easily to explanation, and it does not disappear when explanation fails. If God exists, this inner authority may be a conduit, a reflection, or a participation in something beyond the individual. If God does not exist, it nevertheless remains a real and consequential feature of human experience — one that grounds obligation, constrains action, and gives weight to the idea that some choices matter more than others. Either way, this authority cannot be dismissed without cost. To ignore it is not merely to abandon belief, but to thin the very structure that makes responsibility, integrity, and long-term coherence intelligible.

This inquiry remains open.

But the demand it points to does not.