The recent death of theologian Gabriel Vahanian, one of the prominent members of the so-called "Death of God" movement of the last century, prompts us to think about a point he made in his 1964 work, Wait Without Idols.  In this, Vahanian, presenting some of the points he made in his even earlier work The Death of God:  The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, states, "God is not necessary but he is inevitable."
     If we can set aside the ontological argument for the necessity of God (briefly, if God is the greatest being (or as Alvin Plantinga puts it, "maximally" greatest being) that we can think about, then there can be nothing greater than God.  God is therefore necessary, and God must therefore exist) for a moment, we can learn a rich truth from Vahanian's observation.
    And that truth is this.  When we look at the broad span of human adventure and achievement, even if we do not believe that God is necessary, we must conclude that regardless of what we may believe personally, God is inevitable.  In every culture, in every time, people have demonstrated that, try as they might, they cannot live without the idea of God.  Though there have been (and still are) people who choose to not believe in God or conclude that the very idea of God has no content, most of us, though we may have vastly different opinions about who God is, even they must eventually admit that the notion of God becomes, after a fashion, inevitable.  Maybe we cannot live with it, but we cannot live without it, either.
     Consider these words from Bertrand Russell:

     "Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God, and
      to refuse to enter into any earthly communion--at least that is how I should express it if I thought there
     was a God.  It is odd, isn't it?  I care passionately for this world and many things and people in it, and
     yet . . . what is it all?  There must be something more important, one feels, though I don't believe there
     is."

     Atheist that he proclaimed himself to be, Lord Russell still could not divest himself of the need to confront the notion of God.  Regardless of what we believe, in the end, the idea of God, however we define it, becomes inevitable.  Whether we accept it as meaningful or not, we cannot think about life without it.  Inexorably and inevitably, and regardless of how we deal with it, we must, at some or many points in our life, face--and deal with--the idea of God.