The World Is Neither Black Nor White, It's Grey
On Religion, Existentialism, and Life's Complexities.
The Verdict You Haven’t Earned
How many of your strongest opinions are about situations you have never actually been inside of?
I ask because the older I get, the more I notice that certainty and proximity are inversely related. People with clean, confident opinions about hard situations are almost always people who have never had to live inside one.
I was one of those people.
Simple Questions Are Usually Wrong Ones
Growing up watching Yoruba movies on Africa Magic, there was always that woman. The one in the abusive marriage who wouldn’t leave. I watched those scenes as a child with the quiet contempt reserved for things you don’t understand but are certain you would handle differently.
Leave. Obviously. If someone is hurting you and love has packed its bags, what else is there to decide?
It took years before I understood what I was actually doing in those moments. I wasn’t analyzing her situation. I was replacing her situation with a simpler one I had invented, and then judging her for not solving the invented version.
The real version is different.
Here’s what my two-second verdict didn’t account for: what if every material fact of her life is tied to that man. Her children’s school fees. The roof. Food on the table next week.
What if there is nowhere to run to? What if her family, the first place she would go, sees a returned daughter as a problem to be sent back? What if the women in her community who left before her showed her, through their own endings, that the exit doesn’t lead where she hoped?
I could go on and on.
Though this is not a defence of staying.
It is a question about what we think we’re seeing when we look at someone else’s life and immediately know what they should do.
The answer, usually, is that we are seeing very little, filling the gaps with our own assumptions, and calling the result obvious.
The woman in the marriage is not the point. She is an example of the point.
The point is this: anytime we encounter something complex, we reach for the nearest binary, and we call that understanding. Stay or go. Guilty or innocent. Believer or heretic. Right or wrong. God or no God. We are deeply, almost pathologically, committed to two-option thinking. And the world, real life, actual people in actual situations, keeps refusing to cooperate with that.
Language Only Lives at the Edges
The world is not two things. Life is not binary.
Not in relationships, not in politics, not in how people make the choices they make. It is a spectrum with a thousand different positions we don’t have names for. We call it grey because we only built language for the edges.
And because we only built language for the edges, we reduce everything to them. We compress, we simplify, we pick a side. And then we forget we did that, and we start defending the reduction as if it were the thing itself.
This happens everywhere. But nowhere is it more visible, or more consequential, than in how humanity has tried to understand the divine.
Look at what the world’s major spiritual traditions, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, actually produced over centuries of human beings trying to understand God, the sacred, the divine, whatever you want to call it.
Underneath all the differences in language and ritual and geography, you find the same division showing up again and again. The same argument, dressed in different clothes, fought in different centuries, never fully resolved.
Two ways of thinking about what is holy.
Two ways of thinking about where meaning lives.
Two camps. Always two. The people who say the divine is up there, beyond this world, transcendent, unreachable by ordinary life. And the people who say there is nothing up there at all, only this world, only what you can touch and measure and survive on.
Both camps are certain. Both camps are at war with each other. And both are working from the same flawed premise: that it has to be one or the other.
Both convinced they are right. Both, I would argue, missing something.
The Upward and the Downward
Let me give the two camps their names.
The first is the Ascending path. This is the spiritual impulse that looks upward, that locates God or meaning or truth somewhere above and beyond ordinary life. It is the part of Christianity that talks about heaven, the part of Islam that points toward Jannah, the part of Buddhism that seeks liberation from this world rather than deeper engagement with it.
The Ascending path is suspicious of the physical. The body, desire, the senses, all of it treated as noise at best, obstruction at worst.
Their mantra: “This world is a temporary thing. The real one is elsewhere.”
The second is the Descending path. It goes the other direction entirely. It is not interested in elsewhere. It is rooted in the here, the concrete, the world you can actually verify. It looks at the Ascending position and sees not spirituality but escape. A story people tell themselves because the truth, which is that this might be all there is, is too difficult to sit with.
These two ways of thinking have been in conflict for as long as humans have been asking the question.
The Ascending types are, at their worst, fanatics. So captured by what lies beyond this world that they lose their grip on this one.
The Descending types are, at their worst, nihilists. So committed to what can be proven that they have closed the door on everything else.
They despise each other for what the other is missing.
The Ascending camp looks at the Descenders and finds a poverty of imagination, a refusal to look beyond what can be measured.
The Descending camp looks at the Ascenders and finds a refusal to look clearly at what is actually in front of them. People who left the building. Who outsourced accountability for this world to the next one.
Neither is entirely wrong about the other.
And if you are being honest, which most people in both camps are not, both accusations land.
The Case Against God Is Real
I understand the nihilist. Genuinely. I understand why they stopped believing. Because the world, when you look at it without softening the lens, is a brutal place in ways that do not reconcile easily with the idea of a God who is both good and all-powerful.
Every year, roughly 5 million children under the age of five die from hunger, dirty water, and diseases that cost less than a dollar to prevent, while the richest man in the world is worth close to a trillion dollars. 700,000 of them die a month.
In the time it took you to read that sentence, another one is gone.
The 1994 Rwanda genocide killed eight hundred thousand people in one hundred days. Eight thousand people a day. With machetes. Neighbours killing neighbours.
In 2004, a single tsunami killed two hundred and thirty thousand people in the time it takes to make breakfast.
Forty million people are currently living in conditions that qualify as modern slavery. Not historically. Now. Today.
Ten million people die of cancer every year. Roughly three hundred thousand women are raped every year in conflict zones alone. One in three women alive today will be physically or sexually violated at some point in their lives. The Congo has been consuming itself in war for nearly thirty years. Six million dead. Sudan. Yemen. Myanmar. Gaza.
I could go on.
Where is God in any of that?
It is not an unfair question. It is the most serious question any sane, thinking person can ask. And the Ascending camp has never answered it in a way that actually satisfies. They offer mystery. They offer purpose beyond our understanding. They offer the next life.
The Descending camp looks at that answer and sees people choosing comfort over honesty.
It is not a rhetorical question either. It is the question. And the nihilist is not asking it to be difficult. They are asking it because they looked at the world clearly and found that the math does not work.
A God who is good and all-powerful and present does not produce this world. So either God is not good, or not all-powerful, or simply not there.
The nihilist picks the third option because it requires the fewest assumptions.
The Case for God Is Also Real
And yet.
The same universe that contains all of that suffering also contains something the Descending camp has never been able to explain away.
In the 1940s, a French mathematician named Émile Borel proposed a thought experiment. Suppose you gathered monkeys equal in number to the atoms in the observable universe, roughly 10 to the power of 80, and set them all typing randomly, trying to produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The number of possible permutations of thirty thousand keystrokes on a fifty-key typewriter is 10 to the power of 50,969. There have only been 10 to the power of 17 seconds since the Big Bang. There are only 10 to the power of 80 particles in the entire known universe.
Forget the math. If you are not nerdy like me, just feel the size of this gap:
The probability of an army of monkey producing the hamlet is less probable than every single person in Surulere, Ikorodu, and Ikeja flipping a coin at the same moment and every single one landing heads.
And Hamlet is one book.
The human eye, a single cell, the precise distance between the earth and the sun that makes liquid water possible, none of these are simpler than Hamlet. The human cell is more complex. The conditions required for liquid water on earth are more precise. The immune system, the double helix, the specific gravitational force that keeps atoms from collapsing, all of it more specific, more improbable, more exact than anything Shakespeare ever wrote.
Chance does not explain this. Not at any scale the universe has had time to run.
So both camps are looking at the same universe. One sees the suffering and concludes there is no God. The other sees the structure and concludes there must be. They are using the same evidence and reaching opposite conclusions.
And both conclusions feel airtight to the people holding them.
Asking Who Is Right Is the Wrong Question
Which one is right?
is the wrong question.
Not because the answer is unknowable, but because the question assumes the answer has to be one or the other. And that assumption is exactly what we have been circling from the beginning.
Here is what is actually true: the brain does not experience reality directly. It processes it. And processing has always required simplification, because raw reality in its full complexity is not something the human mind can hold all at once. So we compress. We reduce. We build models that are accurate enough to be useful and simple enough to run.
The most honest version of this is the binary system at the foundation of every computer ever built. Zero or one. On or off. When early engineers were deciding how to build thinking machines, ternary computing was on the table. Three states instead of two, theoretically more efficient, mathematically sound. They chose binary anyway, not because it was truer, but because it was manageable and easier to understand.
The entire digital world, everything running on every screen you have ever looked at, is built on a simplification that was chosen for convenience.
Physics teachers do the same thing. “Neglecting air resistance” appears in almost every introductory mechanics problem involving falling bodies. Not because air resistance is fake. Because including it turns a clean equation into something far messier than the lesson requires. The simplification is useful.
But the object falling through actual air has not read the textbook. It is subject to everything the equation left out.
We are neglecting air resistance when we ask whether God exists.
Because the question, in the form we keep asking it, assumes a binary answer. Either there is intention behind the universe or there is not. Either suffering is permitted by a good God or it proves there is none. Either the structure is designed or it assembled itself by chance.
But the universe was not built around the constraint that its answers need to fit inside a human preference for resolution.
The Hyena Is Not the Villain
Go to the Sahel and watch a hyena bring down a zebra foal. The mind assigns roles immediately. Villain. Victim. The foal is innocent. The hyena is brutal. It is obvious.
Except the hyena has cubs. Three of them, none of whom have eaten in four days. The foal’s death is the only reason they survive the week. And those cubs, when grown, will regulate the prey population in ways that keep the entire ecosystem from collapsing. The grass, the insects, every animal downstream of that balance, all of it connected to a kill that looked, from one angle, like pure cruelty.
Duality is not a feature of the savanna. It is a feature of the observer.
And if that is true in the savanna, it is true everywhere else. Including here.
The religious traditions built on the Ascending path were not lying. They were pointing at something real: the structure, the improbability, the sense that existence is not random. And the people who looked at genocide and famine and concluded there is no God were not being cynical. They were being honest about what they saw.
Both are working from true observations. Both are drawing conclusions that only hold if you agree to ignore the other half of the evidence.
The universe is not dual. It is what you might call polychromic. Not black and white, not even grey, but a spectrum so wide and complex that any two-state description of it is, by definition, a simplification. The Ascending and Descending paths are not two options. They are two points on a line with a thousand positions between them and beyond them, most of which neither camp has names for.
Which brings us to faith.
Choosing to believe in something is a choice. And not choosing to believe is also a choice. The fanatic and the nihilist, the ascender and the descender, are all, in the end, making a decision about which part of an incomprehensibly complex reality to face.
None of them are facing all of it. None of us can.
So does God exist? Is Jesus Christ God? Is Islam the way? Is Buddha the path to liberation?
I genuinely don’t know.
And I have grown deeply suspicious of people who are certain either way. Not because certainty is always wrong, but because on this specific question, certainty is almost always a sign that someone has stopped looking.
What I think we can do, the only honest position I have found, is faith held alongside epistemic humility. The willingness to choose a direction while remaining honest about the fact that your direction is not the whole map. Faith is not the problem. The problem is faith that has forgotten it is faith, that has dressed itself up as fact and started treating every other position as a failure of intelligence or courage.
The error is never in making a choice.
The error is in mistaking your choice for the only one that exists.
Everyone Is the Hyena
I want to come back to where we started.
That woman in the Yoruba movie. The one I called naive from the safety of a living room couch, with no children, no debt, no life that depended on a man I had not chosen to love.
I had a verdict in seconds. It took me years to understand what I had actually been doing, which was looking at a situation shaped by forces I could not see and deciding it was simple because simple was easier to judge.
Everything I have argued since is a longer version of that same lesson.
The nihilist who lost faith is not spiritually lazy. The believer who holds on to God is not delusional. The hyena is not cruel for killing the foal. She is a mother trying to keep her children alive.
This is the part that feels most true and most difficult at the same time.
No one is simply good. No one is simply bad. People are capable of both, always, in proportions that shift with everything that has ever happened to them. Every option they ever did or did not have. Every version of their life that circumstances made possible or impossible.
Change the circumstances and you change the output. The hyena is brutal or the hyena is a mother, depending entirely on where you are standing when you ask the question.
And where you are standing is always partial.
That is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be acknowledged.
What I am asking for is not a new philosophy. It is just honesty about the limits of the one you already have. Hold your faith. Hold your convictions. Hold your verdicts about people and God and how the world works.
But hold them as what they actually are: a position on a spectrum, not a view from above it. A choice made by a being who cannot see everything, not a truth delivered to someone who can.
Again, The error is never in choosing. The error is in forgetting that you chose.
The cure, as far as I can tell, is simple and difficult in equal measure. Look longer. Hold your judgements more loosely. Ask, before you seal the verdict, what you might still be leaving out.
Because the world is not black or white.
And neither is anyone living in it.
We are all, every one of us, somewhere in the grey. Navigating a reality too wide to see all at once, making choices from a compressed map, hoping the simplification holds long enough to get us through.
The least we can do is remember that about each other. And extend to other people the same complexity we would want them to extend to us, because we are, in ways we cannot fully see, exactly as complicated as they are.
~ Abimbola
Hi Reader, I’m Abimbola. This is my honest attempt at documenting my two cents about the complexities of life. Perhaps you’ll find some things written here untrue. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. You are both the judge and the jury.
I write when I feel like it, which means I can’t promise you a schedule. Writing has become an art and a compulsion for me, less about consistency and more about saying something worth saying. If you enjoyed this and want to avoid missing the next one, you should probably subscribe below.
And by the way, don’t take the writer as seriously as his writings. He is also a playboy, a techie, a humourist, an avid reader, a self-acclaimed scholar, and a trying lover.
You distracted me with your postscript-especially the “trying lover” aspect because when did you start trying?😂
Anyway, I have learned to hold my judgments more loosely. And, the world is more Rainbows than black or white or grey.😂