"It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why…The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation."
2/8/09
Is God real or a figment of our imagination? By Bernalt Velasquez
The other day an atheist told me that the reason why religion came into existence is because humans have a fear of death and suffering, and a longing for purpose and meaning, thus we use our imagination to create God (or religion) so that it may ease our fear of death and suffering and give our lives some purpose and meaning. Here is a quote from an article in the New Scientist that captures this atheistic thought:
This is a common thing that atheists and agnostics tell me. They also say that religion is for the weak - people who cannot bear the "truth" that God doesn't exist. Atheists love to use this to argue against the existence of God, but I believe that you can easily turn it around. I think that a healthy fear of death and pain, and a longing for meaning and purpose is something that God gave to us in order to seek Him; it doesn't have to be a weakness or some negative characteristic. It is a "natural spiritual hunger." Just like we have our physical hunger for food, we have a spiritual hunger to make sense of life by seeking The Transcendent. Would someone call me a weak and deluded if I wanted to eat food after not eating for a week?!! Just because we seek to know what will happen after we die and what life is all about, it doesn't mean that we are weak; we are just spiritually hungry. Every man and woman is endowed with this characteristic. It was placed there by God. It is not a weakness; it is perfectly normal. By denying the existence of God is analogous to starving yourself. What do you people think about this? I am eager to read your comments on this matter.
Thanks and God bless!
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9 comments:
Inferences that try to biologically explain away man's inclination to encounter the trascendental are not new. I remember reading not many years ago in a Discover or Newsweek magazine an article on the relationship between brain activity and spirituality. A group of researchers monitored the brain of individuals from various faiths while they engaged in worship, and discovered that there are special areas of our brain that are especially active when we have a spiritual experience. Of course, their conclusion was similar to the one mentioned in the article quoted in this post: a connection to evolution.
So why try so hard to connect our spirituality to evolution?
It boils down to man's (including you and me) inclination to suppress the truth of God [Romans 1]. But let's look at the problem a little bit more. What's the problem with the logic behind the correlation? It goes back to Anonymous' post on the difference between empiriological science and historical science. That our brains react to spiritual experience or vice versa is empirical. That man has an inclination to explain things that are beyond their understanding using transcendental images is a widely accepted and experienced fact. But that this mental search for the spiritual evolved over time, that is an inference, and a wild one at that, with little scientific support.
Unfortunately, I have to tenderly criticize my friend Bill's thoughts on his second comment to Anonymous. Bill, you're my brother in Christ, but if you don't my commenting, the idea that we should unchallengeably accept an inference because a particular theory is widely accepted by a community of scientists is a blinding of our reason. Now, I'm not saying this because I'm a fundamental Bible-thumper, but because it is by reason that various scientific theories are presented, and by reason that people accept or don't accept them. In fact, theories that are widely and dogmatically accepted in science are often discarded years later. There are various examples of this in history (e.g. determining which molecule made up genetic material, the kingdoms of taxonomy, the model of the atom, etc.)
So when someone presents data, and then makes an unsupported assumption based on that data, there is no reason why I should accept it. Sure, I don't hold a doctorate degree. But I understand science enough to know how it works. And there are plenty of people that do hold doctorate degrees (Christian and non-Christian) that disagree with many of the same points that the majority of scientists agree with. Most theories and models that are discarded are often the result of one or two individuals challenging the widely held idea.
But it doesn't surprise me that an evolutionist attempts to explain away everything (e.g. morality, spirituality, etc.) in light of evolution. Though I love my Catholic brothers and expect to see them in heaven, the crux of evolution (pun intended) is that God is not required in any way in order for us to exist. The idea that theistic evolutionists have proposed (i.e. God intervening at various key moments during the evolutionary process) is a blatant distortion of the theory of evolution, and a distortion of the of the Bible.
The point is this, if you approach any serious, intellectual evolutionist with the idea that the unexplainable leaps in evolution occurred thanks to a divine act of God, at best he will ignore what you have to say, and at worse laugh in your face and ridicule you. Why? Because you're right back where you started, trying to explain what we don't understand by using the transcendent! The overwhelming philosophy of modern science is that if we research long enough we will eventually be able to explain what we don't know without having to conjure up images of gods intervening in our affairs. You can't pick and choose what you like or don't like about evolution like a buffet table. Certainly, not if you want to be taken seriously by an evolutionist.
I can accept hard data from modern science. But to accept any interpretation of that data, I need to use my reason. The evolutionist is just as biased as the theist when it comes to interpretation. The difference is that, by the grace of God, we have been warned.
"Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen." Romans 1:25
We should not be surprised that those that don't believe in God attempt to explain away the spiritual. I did that for years. I still fight the tendency. Many of us do so also.
So here's the fact, our bodies are wired for the spiritual. Here's one interpretation: that exists because of our biopsychological evolution. Here's another interpretation: God created our spirit and body so interlinked that one does not function without affecting the other. Neither of these interpretations are supported by empirical science.
Interesting response that you have there, Remy. My intent in typing up this post was to address the question of WHY we have this inclination toward the transcendent (God). An atheistic evolutionist can perhaps tell me HOW religion was developed in the course of human evolution, but WHY did human evolution take that course rather than some other course? Why did the fear of death, and the longing for purpose and meaning enter the human psyche during this part of their evolutionary history? In my understanding, atheistic naturalism does not have an adequate answer for WHY? It is mind boggling to those who believe in an atheism.
Whether you are looking at this question from the perspective of a young-earth creationist, old-earth creationist, progressive creationist, intelligent design adherent, theistic evolutionist, or an atheistic evolutionist, the big question still remains: WHY do we have this inclination to the transcendent. It makes sense in a theistic framework of why we have this inclination to the transcendent. Like I said in my original post, God designed that. Every human has it; every human longs for the eternal, the transcendent. I cannot believe that a mindless, random kind of evolution in an atheistic universe could bring about this spiritual hunger. As said before, a healthy fear of death, and a longing for purpose is part of this spiritual hunger. Everybody has it, and deals with it in some way, whether by allowing God to satisfy their hunger, or trying to satisfy with something finite. It is there and we cannot deny it. We must humbly accept that we have this spiritual hunger and let God satisfy it.
In my original post, I have quoted something from an article from the "New Scientist" in which the author claimed that religion is an invention of the mind because it is a way to deal with difficult situations in life. I just wanted to mention that this same author, in his attempt to further prove his point, said this:
"People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters, and fantasy partners"
I think what he is trying to say is that if adults can have relationships with "imaginary people," perhaps God may be the most sophisticated imaginary person.
What are your thoughts about this?
It's very interesting what you say about God being the adult version of the imaginary friend. The reason why many young kids come up with imaginary friends is because there is an adult or person in their lives that is missing or absent. There is an emptiness they are trying to fill.
When my parents' divorced I started talking to my stuffed animals. One in particular I would take to school with me to talk to and to comfort me. I would wish them good night everyday before I fell asleep. I found out later that many children of divorced parents do these kinds of things. I was subconsciously trying to cope with the emotional, spiritual, and physical tear that the divorce was causing.
Perhaps many of us turn to God, or gods for the same reason. Trying to fill a void. We have a sense that there's something not right with the way things are. Things shouldn't be this way. And as so many apologists have expounded, including C.S. Lewis in "Mere Christianity," this sense that things aren't right, that they should to be different, is evidence for the eternal, God.
I'll use a version of Lewis' example. If people are born in darkness and live in darkness they would never desire the light because they cannot fathom its existence. The same way none of us can fathom a color that has never existed before and is not a combination of colors already in existence. We cannot fathom what is not there. But the mere fact that we can fathom the eternal is evidence of its existence.
So perhaps people are trying to fill a void. I believe that is true. But the fact that we can fathom something eternal means that yes there is an answer to our existential angst. And we can be grateful that God did not leave us to blindly run into the answer, but came down to show us the way.
He made it as obvious as He could in His sovereignty through His death on the cross and resurrection. As apologists let us do what our brother and fellow apologist Ravi Zacharias urges, remove the obstacles that keep people from seeing the cross directly. If Christ be lifted up, He will draw all men to Himself. (John 12:32)
Dear Berny,
The very definition of what it means to be human involves God. God enters the meaning of being human. We ALL have a God-given radical capacity (“supernatural existential” or potentia obedientialis), and by this our human existence is qualified from the start. This radical capacity is why we can get BEYOND ourselves and reach out toward the Transcendent, the Absolute, and toward that which elevates us to a new level of existence, to grace, which is a sharing in the life of the Absolute. Thus, to raise the problem of God is to confront the problem of human existence—the question of human existence (anthropology) implies the question of God (theology).
But how can the divine be so central to human existence if so many human persons are unbelievers? The reality of God is rejected or ignored by so many! If humans are by nature the capacity for God (“supernatural existential” or potentia obedientialis), why is not the radical capacity for grace we ALL have not universally actualized? Why are there unbelievers?
Things are even more complicated, for UNBELIEF—which is a negative concept—IS ALWAYS RELATIVE. The presupposition of unbelief is that something positive is negated. From the vantage of a religious faith (e.g., Christian, Jewish, or Moslem, etc.), unbelief is denial of God or avoidance of God. But to another way of looking at things, religious traditions themselves may be forms of unbelief. The positivist can see religious faith as a stubborn refusal to believe in the sound conclusions of scientific experimentation. And the Marxist ideologue may interpret religious faith as the refusal to accept the dialectical process of history or the classless society. We should not naively lump unbelief into a generalized mass—there are different kinds and different degrees of unbelief as there are different sources for it.
If we equate atheism with “unbelief” we would do well to distinguish classical atheism (an outright denial of God), agnosticism (the refusal to decide whether to believe in God or not—in fact a decision in which one decides NOT to believe in God), positivism (the rejection of all reality that cannot be verified by scientific testing), excessive humanism (exaggeration of our capacity to control the universe through technology and the exercise of reason and free will), the rejections of false notions about God (of which the atheist assumes to be official doctrine), the transfer of ultimate concern from God to material things (or from the Transcendent to the totally immanent), and the transfer of blame for social evil from individual, institutional, environmental forces to God as the one who spoils the struggle for liberation by shifting our attention from this world to the next.
And while we should admit that those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and attempt to dodge religious questions are not following the dictates of their consciences, and thus, are not exempt from blame, must we not too accept that believers, also, frequently bear the blame for the situation of atheism? Christians are somewhat guilty for the above mentioned forms of unbelief to the point that we neglect our own education in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in our religious, moral, or social lives, for in this we CONCEAL the authentic face of God and religion rather than REVEAL it.
Sociologist Robert Bellah recognized that the phenomenon of unbelief, until the 18th century, was isolated in relatively small groups of cultural elites and intellectuals. But when these classes expanded (via education and rise in literacy) in the 1800s, the larger public began to show a fuller appreciation for the dignity of the individual and the importance of free inquiry as well as a reaction against authority (or at least authoritarianism). This was accompanied by a shift in philosophy to the subjective from the objective. Belief became more about personal decision, and less an imposed system.
The change was swift and widespread, so much in fact that many rationalists in the 1800s predicted the death of religion. Why were they so wrong? These antireligious forces made the same mistake believers often do: they confused RELIGIOUS BELIEF with COGNATIVE BELIEF. If cognitive belief collapses, thought the atheist rationalists incorrectly, religious belief will certainly follow suit.
The fact is that the vast majority of religious people throughout the history of the world have NEVER regarded COGNITIVE, INTELECTUALIZED BELIEF as essential to their religious lives. Rather they embrace EMBODIED TRUTH which is NOT transmitted through definitions and logical demonstrations, but through narratives, images, and rituals. To overcome unbelief, Berny, it is MORE IMPORTANT to present a witness to a LIVING and MATURE FAITH, one that penetrates the believer’s ENTIRE LIFE, activating him or her toward justice and love than to give a proper presentation of Church Teaching or what the Bible says. Fundamentalism is a foundry for atheism. I hope we read this last paragraph well.
According to scholars like Bellah, faith is DEEPLY EMBEDDED in our existential situation, a part of the very structure of human experience—this insight of Blaise Pascal (d. 1662) and Søren Kierkegaard (d. 1855) as well as connected to the thought of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Thus religion is not “a matter of objective-cognitive assertion which might conflict with science, but a symbolic form within with which one comes to terms with one’s fate” (The Culture of Unbelief, p. 46). Faith must be therefore AN INNER REALITY, and the belief that follows from faith is inner-directed. But that cannot mean that faith and belief are purely private! Such faith and such belief RELATE us to others, to the total human community, and amen to the whole universe—delivering us even to the point of sacrificing our lives for others.
How we define “unbelief” determines how we determine just how widespread it is. In one sense, everyone is a “believer”; after all, everyone believes in something important. Insofar as people express their belief, are they not “religious”? Take the context of the United States—do we not see issuing forth the civil religions of “democracy”? Here one’s search for personal authenticity is linked with a sense of national identity and national purpose. During the Kennedy Administration we might see the Peace Corps as a major instance of this reality—here we see a secular monastic order, bearing a vow of poverty and heroic devotion to the service of others.
However, should you take “belief” to mean some explicit affirmation or acknowledgement of the reality of God or Jesus Christ, then we would admit that unbelief would be more prevalent, and considerably so. In fact then there would be as much unbelief around as there are persons and institutions which say, or imply, that they completely prescind from the reality of God. And, taken in this sense, the phenomenon of unbelief, we would admit, is certainly more in evidence now than in previous ages—again, due to advancement in education generally, but particularly in literacy and communications, and because of the contemporary philosophical shift to the “subject.”
So this is why the obverse side of the problem of God is the problem of the unbelieving person. Only when it is CONCRETELY stated in such terms does the problem of God—of belief and unbelief—become a problem. According to Sacred Scripture and the kind of philosophical theology present in Transcendental Thomism, the Presence of God is integral to the very structure of human existence. Thus, the person who does not “fear God” (in the biblical understanding of responding obediently to the presence and call of God) somehow does not exist, and that person’s nature is somehow less than, or other than, human. But we SEE that unbelievers DO exist—he or she is THERE. This is EXACTLY the problem. We will not solve that problem, Berny, not on this blog, and not with reason. Berny: there are some things that are a “given” of reality, things about which we can do NO MORE than ACCEPT as part of our human, historical situation and deal with them as intelligently and as constructively as possible.
Belief in God is belief in the worthwhileness, the intelligibility, and the purposefulness of human existence. When a person says he can explain how we are able to transcend ourselves and bases this in matter, he or she blunders into a false metaphysic. Modern, empiriological science is not competent to make judgments about Being qua Being. When scientists do so, they are no longer being scientists, but philosophers.
Excellent observations Berny.
Amazing discussions. I will be sure to follow this as I am a 16 year old male, who was just sitting around thinking deeply, and asked the question 'is god a figment of our imagination', typed that in google and got this link.
JaGWiRe,
Thank you for your input. I was very encouraged by your comment. It has been one of the goals of this blog to discuss real questions that real people have about God, Jesus, and Christianity, without beating around the bush or shoving the Bible down people's throat, but in a way that is honest and intelligent without pretending that we have all of the answers.
You are always welcome to comment on this blog. If you ever have any questions or comments that you would like to discuss feel free to post them, and we'll put them up for discussion.
A lot of us that read or write on this blog have asked a lot of hard questions about God and Christianity. We come from different backgrounds. Some of us were atheists. Some of us are Catholic. Some of us are new Christians, and some of us have been Christian for what seems like all of our lives. But what matters is that most of us have found a meaningful, real (unimaginary) relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and that has made all of the difference in our lives. I encourage you with all of my heart to continue to pursue that intelligently and honestly.
I found this article on the "News to Note" section of the Answers in Genesis website. It seems appropriate for this discussion:
Religion? It’s all in your head: New Scientist takes an unmitigated swipe at theism.
Based on a report that attendance in “strict” churches rose during the Great Depression, New Scientist writer Michael Brooks has leapt to a conclusion: that all of religion is imaginary, and that tough times spur our belief in the imaginary. He writes:
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.
Of course, the evidence is that Brooks presupposes that religion is imaginary and, within that deconstructive framework, elicits an explanation for the origin of religion that suits his presuppositions. He practically admits as much, since the two ideas he provides for the “origin of religious belief” are both evolutionary. (I.e., he presumably long ago rejected the possibility that there is a supernatural.)
Brooks spoke with a number of researchers (who all presumably have the same bias as he does) about the idea that thinking imaginary things is “hardwired” into the brain. “People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters, and fantasy partners,” Brooks writes.
If a person already believes religion is purely fantasy, it’s easy to buy into this sort of logic. Children spontaneously invent imaginary playmates, so “God” must just be a sort of sophisticated imaginary character for adults.
There’s a very straightforward problem with this logic, however, as Brooks acknowledges: “All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods.” Yet he apparently remains confident that “religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work.”
The entire article is a lesson in how worldviews shape our understanding. Evolutionists almost thoughtlessly attribute religious belief to evolutionary forces, whereas creationists likewise see religion as man’s attempts (right and wrong) to engage with the supernatural. Brooks even describes a hypothetical experiment in which children would be raised in isolation: would they spontaneously develop religious beliefs? Our guess is that whatever the outcome, both evolutionists and creationists (or atheists and theists) would easily arrive at explanations consistent with their own worldview.
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