Are there enlightened people who don't believe in God?

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This, like all cross-religion questions, needs the terms to be defined before a reasonable answer can be given.

God is a Western concept. To learn about God you need to understand Abrahamic scripture, primarily the Hebrew Bible. Most believers in Abrahamic scripture consider the Christian New Testament to conclude the story began by the Hebrew Bible.

Enlightenment is an Eastern one, less well-understood in the West. Ideas and pathways to liberation / enlightenment come from all over Asia. It is a bit like Hinduism in that many concepts, even those who compete with each other, all get lumped under the same umbrella.

There is an Eastern conception of God, and a Western conception of enlightenment. Both of these conceptions are almost completely divorced from their Western counterparts. Just like how Westerners almost never bother visiting or even carefully studying Eastern religion before adopting Buddhist ideas, most Easterners never really study the Bible. As a result understanding of the terms is limited, though of course nothing is stopping anybody from doing deeper study.

Before answering your question, I want to really hammer home just how much work it is to study religion. I personally do not do much in the way of academic-style study. Instead I just kind of fake-it-until-i-make-it using an alternative source of truth and knowledge. This source is mysticism, which is a fancy word for meditating and thinking about meditating.

So, keeping track here, there are three avenues of spiritual knowledge available. Eastern religious traditions, Western religious history and philosophy, and mysticism. Each one is about as hard as the others and takes about as much time.

All of this study and experience leads to a particular event in life that is generally called spiritual awakening. In the East, where techniques often blend meditation with more physical disciplines like yoga, awakening opens the mind up to abilities and perceptions that were previously hidden.

In the West, one is awakened to the knowledge and presence and communion with the agency known as God. One’s life and being are revealed to be gifts from, and ultimately belonging to, God. The presence of God is universally humbling to everyone who has experienced it. One then continues their old life, albeit amplified and with much more meaning and significance attached to everything.

For Westerners, God is really all that is needed. Awakening to God is enough. But in the East, awakening does not necessarily produce liberation. More work is needed, more spiritual purity is to be obtained.

I think the reason for this difference ultimately boils down to the influence of philosophy on religion. Westerners seem more acquainted with abstract ideas like psychology, allegory, and faith.

Whereas Eastern spirituality and spiritual seekers have always struck me as very physically-focused. Christians are generally accepting of one of two narratives concerning divine miracle: That they either happened as described in scripture or are allegorical, intended to speak to spiritual and psychological truth. But Easterners demand that gurus demonstrate what are called siddhis. A personal demonstration of spiritual command over reality.

My own experience with siddhis is that it is possible to develop them, but it takes a very long time to master them, such that you can display them on command. Time that your average Western seeker, me included, just won’t ever be able to put in, for more reasons than the obvious. It’s quite uncommon even in the East.

So, with all that groundwork laid, let’s approach the question. An Eastern seeker of enlightenment will assuredly have heard of God, but won’t have the necessary study or the ability or the inclination to develop the understanding of what God truly is. So his spiritual enlightenment is unlikely to involve or include God.

Whereas a Western seeker interested in Buddhism typically is disinclined to learn about Abrahamic theology for various reasons. It’s again, highly unlikely that they will ever have a Western-style spiritual awakening to the Presence of God, even should they manage to find Eastern enlightenment. What Presence they do manage to find, they won’t attribute to God or use any kind of Western framing to understand that Presence.

I suppose it is possible for a Western seeker to believe in God without having had the spiritual awakening to faith in God, and then manage to practice enough Buddhist dharma to get enlightened. It’s hard to imagine this happening in significant numbers. One’s spiritual orientation, whether to the East, to the West, or to materialism, rejection of spiritual reality, seems to be pretty fixed in most people. They may convert, some people even convert many times in their lifetime, but it’s the very rare seeker that can not only apprehend that this stuff is all the same in the end, but also can effectively engage spirituality using a “best of both worlds” approach.

Yours truly seeks unity and fluidity between all three approaches.