How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  In analyzing the data, we lumped these questions into two groupings: (1) rational influences on belief (the apparent intelligent design of the world; without God there is no basis for morality; the existence of evil, pain, and suffering; and scientific explanations of the world); and (2) emotional influences on belief (emotional comfort, faith, and desire for meaning and purpose in life). The single strongest correlation we found was for gender: Men tended to justify their belief with rational reasons, while women tended to justify their belief with emotional reasons. This finding dovetails well with the other significant relationships we found, such as a positive correlation between education and rational arguments for God’s existence, and a negative correlation between education and emotional arguments for God’s existence (as education decreased, preferences for emotional arguments increased). There was also a significant relationship between openness and a tendency to prefer rational reasons for belief over emotional reasons. This was confirmed in the finding of a significant negative correlation between openness and a preference for emotional reasons for belief—low openness is associated with a higher preference for emotional reasons.

  In other words, educated, open people, and men feel the need to justify their faith with rational arguments, whereas less-educated people, especially women, are comfortable with their faith being based on emotional reasons. One explanation for this outcome is that, in general, education causes a decrease in faith, so for those who are educated and still believe, there is a need to justify belief with rational arguments. Since most people come to their faith by being raised religiously or through personal experiences, rational arguments are not typically a part of this process. We should not be surprised, then, that there were significant negative correlations between rational arguments and being raised religiously as well as parents’ religiosity. That is, if your faith is a deep one, going back to childhood, there is less need to justify it with rational arguments. But these correlations, while significant, were weaker than for most we found in this study, indicating that education’s even stronger role can override early-life experiences.

  To give people an opportunity to say in their own words why they believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, we asked them exactly that. The graph above presents the most common reasons why people believe in God, and why they think other people believe in God.

  INTELLECTUAL AND EMOTIONAL REASONS TO BELIEVE

  One of the most interesting results to come out of this study was that the intellectually based reasons for belief of “good design” and “experience of God,” which were in first and second place in the first question of Why do you believe in God?, dropped to sixth and third place for the second question of Why do you think other people believe in God? Taking their place as the two most common reasons other people believe in God were the emotionally based categories of “comforting” and “raised to believe.”

  Why? One possible answer to this question is what psychologists call “biases in attributions.” As pattern-seeking animals, we seek causes to which we can attribute our actions and the actions of others. According to attribution theory, we attribute the causes of our own and others’ behaviors to either a situation or a disposition. When we make a situational attribution, we identify the cause in the environment (“my depression is caused by a death in the family”); when we make a dispositional attribution, we identify the cause in the person as an enduring trait (“her depression is caused by a melancholy personality”). Problems in attribution may arise in our haste to accept the first cause that comes to mind. But I suspect this is only part of the explanation. Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade explain that there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for people “to take credit for their good actions (a dispositional attribution) and let the situation account for their bad ones.” In dealing with others, for example, we might attribute our own good fortune to hard work and intelligence, whereas the other person’s good fortune is attributed to luck and circumstance.

  I would argue that there is an intellectual attribution bias, where we consider our own actions as being rationally motivated, whereas we see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice (“I’m against gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership increases”); whereas the other person’s is attributed to need and emotion (“he’s for gun control because he’s a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to identify with the victim”). This intellectual attribution bias applies to religion as a belief system and to God as the subject of belief. As pattern-seeking animals, the matter of the apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in the day-to-day contingencies of our lives, is a powerful one as an intellectual justification for belief. But we attribute other people’s religious beliefs to their emotional needs. Here are just a few examples from the written portion of the surveys:

  • A thirty-year-old male Jewish teacher with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9), says he believes in God “because I believe in the Big Bang; and when you believe in the B.B., you have to ask yourself—‘what came before that?’ A creation implies a creator.” (Aquinas’s prime mover argument; see Chapter 5.) Yet, he goes on to explain: “I think that most people believe out of an emotional need, although there is a significant minority of rational (even skeptical!) believers such as myself.”

  • A fifty-one-year-old male with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) but no formal religious membership writes that he believes in God based on his “personal experiences,” but for others “belief in God provides emotional support and a belief structure that provides meaning, purpose, and rules of conduct for them. Many feel lost without believing something /someone more important than them runs their life rather than believing that they can and do create their reality and the universe.”

  • A sixty-five-year-old male Catholic with moderately strong religious convictions (7 on a scale of 1 to 9) gives the standard watchmaker argument: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.” Nevertheless, other people believe in God because of a “sense of security” and “blind faith.”

  • A thirty-seven-year-old female Catholic with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9) says she believes in God because “how else could you explain our origins? Only God could create a world and universe out of nothing. There are miracles every day that science cannot explain.” Others believe, she says, because it “gives hope.”

  • A forty-one-year-old male Baptist with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) explains that he believes in God “due to the evidence of his magnificent creation and the extraordinary order of the universe,” whereas other people believe because “without God there is no purpose for their lives or the universe.”

  There are many, many more examples. Morever, these data support Gallup polls taken in 1982 and 1991, where 46 percent of the public believe that “man was created pretty much in his current form at one time within the past 10,000 years,” 40 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life, but God guided the process, including the creation of man,” but only 9 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life. God had no part in the process.” The Gallup polls did not ask why, but it seems obvious from our results that the answer is that people see God in the universe, in the world, and in their lives. Hardly anyone has heard of theologian William Paley and his eighteenth-century watchmaker argument for God, but they know this argument intuitively from their experiences. They also read about it from science popularizers like cornet hunter David Levy, who told millions of readers of Parade Magazine that the “miracle of life” was due to the fact that the universe was “designed” for
us, and that this is proved by such scientific facts as: (1) ice floats; (2) the night sky is dark; (3) protons and electrons have absolutely identical charges; (4) we have the right kind of Sun. There are perfectly rational, scientific explanations for these facts that have nothing whatsoever to do with life being “designed” or a “miracle” in any supernatural sense. But these counterarguments are also counterintuitive. The “feeling” one gets in studying the world and life is that it seems designed. And this is what people report about their perceptions and experiences.

  Interestingly, the primary reasons people gave for not believing in God were also the intellectually based categories of “there is no proof for God’s existence,” followed by “God is a product of the mind and culture,” “the problem of evil,” and “science provides all the answers we need.” For example, an eighteen-year-old Jewish male who considers himself an atheist, writes: “I don’t believe in God because it is impossible for a being to be what God must be in order to be a god without being obvious and undeniable. In short, God is philosophically impossible and scientifically and cosmologically unnecessary.” By contrast, and following the tendency to attribute to others emotional reasons for belief, he says other people believe in God because: “It’s comforting. Additionally, some people find it easier to deal with problems if they believe it is ‘God’s will.’”

  ALL’S RIGHT WITH GOD IN HIS HEAVEN

  In his 1781 classic work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon concluded his discussion of religion with this observation: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” As we have seen, belief in God in the modern world is a function of a complex array of reasons that, while true for some people and false for others, certainly are equally useful. Consistently we find a fascinating distinction in belief attribution between why people think they believe in God and why they think other people believe in God.

  This distinction was not lost on the psalmists of the Old Testament. To the choirmaster of Psalm 19:1, the author proclaims: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” Yet in the psalm for the sons of Korah, Psalm 46:13, it is declared: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.”

  Are these not, in a way, two sides of the same coin? For believers, the heavens declare God’s glory; for other believers He provides strength in their time of need. Or, as Robert Browning wrote in Pippa Passes: “God’s in His Heaven—All’s right with the world.”

  Chapter 5

  O YE OF LITTLE FAITH

  Proofs of God and What They Tell Us about Faith

  Faith has to do with things that are not seen, and hope with things that are not in hand.

  —Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, LVII, c. 1265

  On Sunday, November 15, 1998, I debated God at the Church of the Rocky Peak, in Chatsworth, California, in the northwestern end of the San Fernando Valley. More precisely, I debated Dr. Doug Geivett, a professor of philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology and the author of such books as Evil and the Evidence for God and In Defense of Miracles, on the subject of “Does God Exist? Where Does the Evidence Point?” As a testimony to the interest in this subject, more than 1,500 seats were filled in this giant, modern church, with droves of students sitting on the floor in front of the dais, and standing room only at the back. The minister of the church, Dr. David Miller, was extremely accommodating to me, given that I was likely to be outnumbered in this venue. Was I ever. Miller asked for a show of hands of those who came specifically to support me. About fifty arms went up.

  Dr. Geivett went first, presenting the standard arguments for God’s existence, including: Big Bang cosmology is described by Genesis 1; the anthropic cosmological principle and the fine-tuned nature of the universe implies a creator; life has all the appearances of design; humans are moral and morality could only come from God, because if it did not, then no one would be moral; and the historical evidence supports the resurrection of Jesus. Geivett concluded his initial presentation by explaining that we are confronted here with an either-or choice: Either God exists or He does not; either the universe was created or it was not; either life was designed or it was not; either morality is natural or it is not; either Jesus was resurrected or he was not.

  I opened my rebuttal by explaining that there are only two types of theories: those that divide the world into two type of theories, and those that do not. I explained that God’s existence is an insoluble question, and then spent the majority of my time presenting evidence (as I do in Part II of this book) that belief in God and its expression through religion has all the earmarks of being a human creation and a social construction. In other words, I argued that humans made God, and not vice versa. In no way do I intend this belief to belittle religion or people’s belief in any way. It is a testable hypothesis that I find reasonable and supported by the evidence from comparative mythology and world religions, evolutionary biology and psychology, and the anthropology, sociology, and psychology of religion. That man made God is every bit as fascinating as the reverse; and the evidence is even better.

  I expected my debate opponent (and most of the audience), of course, to disagree, but I did not expect them to give me such a hard time about not addressing Dr. Geivett’s “proofs” point by point. I touched on them briefly, but since I have always understood religious belief to be based on faith, the notion of “proving” one’s faith seems oxymoronic. Nevertheless, in each of the three rebuttal segments, and in the question-and-answer period, my opponent reviewed the “proofs” over and over, demanding (along with the audience afterward) that I either refute them or accept God.

  In Christian theology these arguments for God’s existence are called apologetics, from the Latin apologeticus—“to speak in defense.” I am quite familiar with them and began my study in the 1970s with the bestseller in the popular end of this genre, Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, with its oft-quoted argument that Jesus was a liar, lunatic, or Lord. (Since Jesus could not be either of the first two, it is argued, he was, de facto, God incarnate.) And for the past quarter century I have maintained an interest in apologetics because it is here where religion most closely intersects with science. Because we are rational, thinking beings, faith never seems to be enough for most of us. We want to know we are right, and in the Western world to know something is true is to prove it through reason or science, logic, and empiricism. Thus, arguments in favor of God’s existence and the divine origin and authority of the Judaeo-Christian religion are couched in the language of science and reason, and there have been literally tens of thousands of books written along this vein.

  But the question at hand is this: do any of these proofs actually prove God’s existence? No. In fact, most of them are not so much proofs and arguments in favor of God’s existence as they are “reasons to believe” (as one organization of modern Christian apologists is called) for those who already believe. The “God Question” remains as insoluble today as it ever was.

  PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS FOR GOD

  As we saw in the previous chapter, the most common reason people give for believing in God is that there are arguments and evidence that lead them to that conclusion. Here are ten of the most commonly used philosophical arguments for God, and the problems with each. Since all of them are covered elsewhere in much greater depth (indeed, entire volumes are dedicated to each), I shall allocate more space to the scientific arguments that follow, which are, I think, more effective from the believer’s perspective and thus require a more thoughtful response.

  1.

  Prime Mover Argument. This is the great Catholic theologian and philosopher St. Thomas
Aquinas’s first way to prove the existence of God as outlined in his great work, Summa Theologica. Everything in the universe is in motion. Nothing can be in motion unless it is moved by another. That something else must also be moved by yet another, and so on. But this cannot regress into infinity, “therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”

  Counterargument. The universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be. Thus, God must be within the universe or is the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be moved, and thus the regress to a prime mover just begs the question of what moved God. If God does not need to be moved, then clearly not everything in the universe needs to be moved. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own prime mover.