The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

by Michael Shermer

First of all, why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God care whether I believed in him? Shouldn’t he know this ahead of time in any case? Even assuming that he has granted me free will, since God is said to be omniscient and outside of time and space, shouldn’t he know everything that happens? In either case, why would “belief” matter at all, unless God were more like the Greek and Roman gods who competed with one another for human affections and worship and were filled with such human emotions as jealousy. The Old Testament God Yahweh certainly sounds like this type of deity in the first three of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17, King James Version): “I am the LORD thy God.… Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Yikes! The sins of the fathers are to be borne by their children’s children’s children? What sort of justice is that? What kind of God is this? This just sounds so … well … ungodly to my ears. Most people have learned to get over jealousy, and I’ve even managed to keep it in check much of the time myself, and I’m no god, that’s for sure.15 Wouldn’t an omniscient,...