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July 10 - July 31, 2019
Soulation (www.soulation.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping others be appropriately human. Their most recent book is Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk.
Is God Just a Human Invention?
Our intention in this chapter is to walk through some of the most common reasons skeptics think God is a human invention
both “God does not exist” and “God exists” are claims to knowledge that are either true or false. Both viewpoints require justification or evidence.
If there is a default position, then it is “I don’t know if there is a God” (agnosticism),
Agnosticism can be a virtue for a season of exploration, because we definitely want to avoid being gullible. But as Yann Martel wrote in Life of Pi, “Doubt is useful for a while…. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
First, it begs the question against God.
Second, another assumption made by those who employ Freud’s projection theory is that having beliefs that bring us comfort means that those beliefs are false.
Third, part of the rhetorical force of Freud’s projection theory cited by Hitchens is the perceived connection between God being an illusion and Freud’s rigorous psychoanalysis.
Emeritus professor of psychology at New York University and former atheist Paul Vitz writes, “Nowhere did Freud publish a psychoanalysis of the belief in God based on clinical evidence provided by a believing patient,”
In other words, there is no psychological basis for his conclusions because he never performed psychoanalysis on people who actually believed in God.
C. Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism
indefatigable
Fourth, the projection theory cuts both ways. If it can be argued that humans created God out of a need for security or a father figure, then it can just as easily be argued that atheism is a response to the human desire for the freedom to do whatever one wants without moral constraints or obligations.
Perhaps atheists don’t want a God to exist because they would then be morally accountable to a deity. Or maybe atheists had particularly tragic relationships with their own fathers growing up, projected that on God, and then spent most of their adult lives trying to kill a “Divine Father Figure.”
Finally, perhaps the idea that humans invented God to meet their desires is precisely backward.
Perhaps the reason humans have a desire for the divine is because something or someone exists that will satisfy them. C. S. Lewis powerfully articulates this point: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire, which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Probably earthly
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The specific gene in question, that everyone has some version of, is VMAT2. Hamer claims that this gene accounts for the spirituality that emerges in some people but not others. To be fair, Hamer admitted his title was overstated in a later interview and that there “probably is no single gene.”9 But if he knew this going in, then why not change the title of the book?
None of Hamer’s work was subjected to peer review by other geneticists or published in any scientific journals. And the study, upon which the book was based, was never repeated.
The Human Genome Project director, Francis Collins, states plainly, “There is no gene for spirituality.”
The mind or soul is clearly correlated with certain brain states or chemistry, but the mind or soul is not identical or reducible to them.
Dawkins candidly admits, “To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both.”
the idea has been subject to severe criticism and is by no means a mainstream view among his peers.
How does one decide what is a dangerous idea and what is a beneficial idea?
why are the ideas that Dawkins dislikes (e.g., religion or God) viruses of the mind, but others like Darwinian evolution are pure, safe, and beneficial?
Both ideas are equally unsubstantiated and meaningless.”
Perhaps humans were hardwired to believe in God by the process of natural selection?24 Maybe this belief was useful for human survival?
If we discover through cognitive psychology that it seems certain moral behaviors are hardwired into properly functioning human beings, then this would fit nicely as well with the biblical notion of God’s laws being written on the human heart (see Rom. 2:14–15).
Barrett, one of the pioneers of this field, concludes that “belief in gods generally and God particularly arises through the natural, ordinary operation of human minds in natural ordinary environments…. The design of our minds leads us to believe.”
If belief in God is indeed an issue of hardwiring, then two possible explanations exist for the design we observe. Either a blind process of natural selection produces religious belief over time as a by-product with some selective advantage, or an Intelligent Mind designed humanity to naturally believe God exists.
“Belief in God: A Trick of Our Brain?” in Contending with Christianity’s Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors,
Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
Warranted Christian Belief
Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult.
For as important as science is, it is only one source of human knowledge.
In response to Harris’s book The End of Faith, Ravi Zacharias asks, “Has it occurred to Sam Harris that his book might sow the seeds for the slaughter of Christians? Has he paused to think of what motivates him to write these things against a group of people? What would he say if two hundred years from now someone says that genocide against Christians can be traced back to the anti-Christian writings of Sam Harris?”
Vigorous discussion and thoughtful interaction are needed in the public square, and then we let the best ideas win.
From the Christian perspective, the goal isn’t a sacred public square where only the ideas rooted in Christianity are preferred (or any single religion for that matter). Nor is the goal a naked public square where no ideas from various religious traditions are even entertained. The goal, as Os Guinness describes it, is a civil public square:
We must learn to debate the ideas and the implications of those ideas without affirming that everyone’s view is equally valid on the one hand or demonizing those with whom we disagree on the other—this is what is truly dangerous for society.
Persuasion rather than coercion is the only reasonable way forward.
Ravi K. Zacharias, The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists
CHRISTIANITY, TRUTH, AND DANGER
A philosophy professor assigned some readings by Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian philosopher. After having dismissed Kierkegaard in a paper, I decided to actually read the primary text, The Sickness unto Death. I found a profound assessment of the human condition before God. Much to my surprise and dismay, the book began exposing both my rebellion against God and God’s offer of grace through Christ.
discovered the works of Francis Schaeffer, James Sire, C. S. Lewis, Os Guinness, St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and many more high-caliber thinkers, who demonstrated that the Christian worldview has nothing to fear in the world of ideas.
We are not alone in this assessment. Secular critic and agnostic Terry Eagleton observes, That is why it is so important to develop a thoroughly Christian understanding of human dignity and the issue of slavery.
Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
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For centuries slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics.”
we must understand a critical principle of interpretation: Israel as described in the Old Testament is not God’s ideal society.* To use an analogy from the computer industry, they were God’s people 1.0 because they were a work in progress (just like you and I are).
perpetually plagued by war and poverty. It was within the volatile world of the ancient Near East that God began the process of restoration and redemption through the people of Israel
The fact that it was regulated at all is striking given the moral poverty of surrounding nations.
