Our background beliefs set up our conscious reasoning to fail to find sufficient evidence for God. So the young James Wood and Barbara Ehrenreich, brilliant young thinkers that they were, found the thesis of the “monotheistic God” wanting. But it wasn’t true that their reasoning had undermined their faith. Instead it was that a new kind of faith, one in the power of human reason and ability to comprehend the depths of things, had displaced an older, more self-effacing kind of faith.
