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I grew up in Seattle in the 1970s, long before it became the tech-and-hipster boomtown it is today. Our city’s only real claim to fame in those days was the Space Needle, a 605-foot observation tower that had a revolving restaurant at the top and that had been built for the 1962 World’s Fair. The tower got its name from the fair’s theme: “Living in the Space Age.”

One of the most prominent visitors of the World’s Fair was the Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth. Asked by a reporter about his experience in space, his response made headlines. “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there,” Titov said. “I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God.”

This was, of course, a way for Titov to promote his government’s official atheist position inside America—a little jab at the Soviet Union’s primitively religious Cold War foe. But it was of a piece with a very common viewpoint, Eastern and Western, then and now: If you don’t observe something and can’t physically find it, then it is fair to assume it doesn’t exist. If you insist on that thing’s existence because you feel it, believe in it, or have faith in it, you are deluded or a fool.

[Listen: Can religion make you happy?]

No matter your stance on religion, the Titovian philosophy is a foolish position. Indeed, life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.

It might strike you as unscientific to believe in the unseen, but the truth is the opposite: A good deal of the way today’s scientists understand the world operates at a purely theoretical level. Take modern physics: For many decades, particle physicists have studied the building blocks of matter—the atoms that make up molecules; the protons and neutrons inside atoms; the quarks that make up protons and neutrons. Quarks are so small that they cannot be observed at any visual scale; they are understood to be pointlike entities that have zero dimensionality. And yet, no physicist believes quarks don’t exist, because the theoretical and indirect empirical evidence that they do is overwhelming.

Although some components of the material world are too small to see, the existence of such facets of reality beyond human perception enjoys widespread and uncontroversial belief. Multivariate calculus, for example, is a rudimentary mathematical tool commonly learned at school that can solve real-life problems such as how to optimize the schedules of, say, five people at once. Yet when it involves more than three variables, calculus is operating in a dimensionality that cannot be depicted graphically in any conventional way. This makes scientific sense, too, because neuroscientists have shown that we can think in dimensions higher than those we can actually see. That itself constitutes a belief in an unseen—indeed, unseeable—reality.

Beyond the abstract realms of mathematics and physics, the natural sciences (such as zoology and biology) offer similar proofs. We know for a fact that senses beyond the five that humans possess exist for other species. Sharks have specialized sensory organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which give them electroreception, the ability to detect electrical fields generated by the muscular and neural activity of other living organisms. Jewel beetles have infrared organs that register the radiation emitted by fires. Many snakes have a sense similar to infrared vision, which enables them to perceive a thermal image of potential prey.

Humans lack these senses, but to assume they don’t exist would be silly, even dangerous. Similarly, we have no reason to believe that the world of science has exhausted the fields of material reality that are beyond our sensory perception. On the contrary, the most logical and rational assumption we can make is that we are surrounded by forces and entities of which we are completely unaware—and which are as yet undiscovered.

All of this scientific knowledge would have been dismissed in the past as crazy fiction, primitive superstition, possibly even a sign of demonic possession. This fact should instill in us some humility about ideas outside current scientific understanding that concern things we can’t see but that others perceive as real and claim indirect evidence for.

Take, for example, this definition of faith in the existence of God, from the Bible: “the assurance of what we hope for and the conviction about things that cannot be seen.” This is a belief held not only by the unschooled, but by many of history’s most esteemed scholars and thinkers. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle made the case for the existence of God as the unseen “first mover,” the necessarily uncaused, prior cause of all other things. More than 1,400 years after Aristotle, the medieval Muslim scientist and philosopher Ibn Rushd (known in the Western world as Averroes) defended the Greek philosopher and refuted the argument, common then and today, that the visible presence of evil proves the nonexistence of God. “What happens contrary to providence is due to the necessity of matter,” he argued, “not to the shortcomings of the creator.”

This can’t simply be dismissed as premodern thinking. In a 2009 survey, the Pew Research Center found that among scientists who belonged to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, just over half (51 percent) believed in “some form of deity or higher power.” Defying the general trend that young adults are becoming less religious than their elders, scientists under 35, who have grown up amid the latest breakthroughs, were the most religious in the survey: 66 percent were believers, as opposed to 46 percent of scientists 65 and older.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to make life more transcendent]

Some modern scholars have gone so far as to try to blend the science of the unseen with the realm of the supernatural. Robert J. Marks, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University, suggests that God (the Christian God, in this case) exists in higher dimensions than we can see, making him real in our lives but completely invisible to our physical senses. An alternative proposition, advanced by three Harvard cognitive-science researchers, is that God is perceptible only to human intuition—a sixth sense, in effect.

We cannot expect ever to settle the argument over the existence of God. Just as we should continue to question theories, hypotheses, and assumptions in every field of science, we should interrogate religious and philosophical beliefs. By the same token, however, we should also exercise skepticism about our unbeliefs based on what we cannot perceive directly. To dismiss something for the fact of its invisibility is a mistake. Instead, intellectual integrity should make us open to indirect evidence that comes from beyond the realm of ordinary observation.

I learned that viewpoint, in fact, from someone who lived only a couple of miles from the Space Needle: my father. A brilliant mathematician and statistician, as well as a lifelong but not uncritical Christian believer, he pondered the vexing questions of evil and randomness his whole life. He embodied for me someone whose intellectual openness also involved religious activity in the form of daily prayer, contemplation, service, and worship. He died many years ago, so I can’t check this, but I have a dim memory of him weighing in on Titov’s argument about not finding God in space. “It’s like saying Picasso doesn’t exist because he can’t be found inside Picasso’s paintings.” Amen.

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