Unseen, Yet Real: What the Blind Teach Us About God

People who are blind from birth often learn about colors through association. Red is explained as the heat of fire, blue as the coolness of water, green as the texture of leaves beneath the hand. Over time, these associations become familiar, almost intimate. And yet, no matter how rich the descriptions are, there is a quiet truth beneath them all: they do not truly know what color is. Not because they lack intelligence or imagination, but because color is a visual experience—and that experience has never been theirs.

Still, most people born blind do not deny the existence of color. They do not conclude that color is a collective illusion simply because they cannot see it. Instead, they accept a humbling reality: the world contains truths that exceed their personal capacity to experience. Their limitation does not negate reality; it merely defines the edge of their perception.

Faith, in many ways, lives in this same space.

A common objection to belief in God is simple and confident: “I have never seen Him.” But this objection assumes that seeing is the highest, or only, form of knowing. God, however, is not introduced in religious thought as an object meant to be observed. He is not a physical entity waiting to be discovered by the eye. From the beginning, the idea of God belongs to the unseen—not as a flaw, but as a defining feature.

As the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:

“You will not see your Lord until you die.” (Sahih Muslim)

This is not a statement of distance, but of category. God is not hidden in the way a lost object is hidden. He is unseen in the way meaning is unseen, in the way love is unseen, in the way consciousness itself cannot be pointed to, yet cannot be denied.

Like color to the blind, God is approached through أثر — through effect. Through order instead of chaos. Through moral weight instead of moral emptiness. Through the strange human insistence on asking why, even after how has been answered. Through moments of awe that arrive uninvited, and through inner experiences that feel more real than anything touched by the hand.

Many believers do not claim to understand God. In fact, genuine faith often begins where comprehension ends. There is an old spiritual humility in admitting that the mind has limits, just as the eye does. The Qur’an captures this restraint with striking clarity:

“They cannot encompass Him in knowledge.” (Qur’an 20:110)

This is not a call to abandon reason, but a call to recognize its horizon.

We already live this way more than we admit. We trust in love without fully defining it. We live by meaning without ever holding it. We believe our thoughts are real, though no one has ever seen one. Human life is built upon realities that cannot be reduced to sensory proof.

So perhaps belief in God is not about seeing more than others, but about demanding less from sight itself. Perhaps disbelief is not always the absence of evidence, but the refusal to accept that some truths announce themselves differently.

In the end, faith does not say, “I see, therefore I believe.” It says, “I recognize that not all that is real is meant to be seen.”

And maybe wisdom begins there—at the moment we stop insisting that reality must fit inside our senses, and allow ourselves to stand humbly before a world far deeper than our ability to fully understand it.