How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Click here The negative correlation between preferring rational reasons for God’s existence and being raised religiously is r =–.10 (N = 2085, df = 9/2075, t =–3.30, p < .001).

  Click here The negative correlation between preferring rational reasons for God’s existence and parents’ religiosity is r =–.07 (N = 2085, t =–2.48, p < .01).

  Click here To the two questions (a) In your own words, why do you believe in God, or why don’t you believe in God? and (b) In your own words, why do you think most other people believe in God?, the reasons people say they believe in God, and why they think other people believe in God, in order of the number of responses given in the written portion of the survey, are presented here. To control for possible experimenter bias in placing subjectively written answers into discrete categories, I had a research assistant score the same answers and found an interrater agreement—that is, consistency between raters in scoring—above 90 percent, more than acceptable in social science research. For example, for the more-frequent answer for why people believe in God—“Good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe–—the interrater agreement was 91.4 percent; for the number-one answer for why other people believe in God—“It is comforting, relieving, consoling, gives meaning and purpose to life”—the interrater agreement was 98.4 percent.

  WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

  1. Good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe (28.6 percent).

  2. Experience of God in everyday life/God is in us (20.6 percent).

  3. It is comforting, relieving, consoling, gives meaning and purpose to life (10.3 percent).

  4. The Bible says so (9.8 percent).

  5. Just because/faith/need to believe in something (8.2 percent).

  6. Raised to believe in God (7.2 percent).

  7. God answers prayers (6.4 percent).

  8. Without God there would be no morality (4.0 percent).

  9. God has a plan for the world, history, destiny, and us (3.8 percent).

  10. To account for good and avenge evil in the world (1.0 percent).

  Cumulative total: 99.8 percent. Other answers that did not seem to fit into any category (and too few in number to justify a category of their own) included “because God is most powerful,” “because He loves us,” “the Jews survived,” “near-death experiences,” and “no other explanation.”

  WHY PEOPLE THINK OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

  1. It is comforting, relieving, consoling, gives meaning and purpose to life (26.3 percent).

  2. Raised to believe in God (22.4 percent).

  3. Experience of God in everyday life/God is in us (16.2 percent).

  4. Just because/faith/need to believe in something (13.0 percent).

  5. Fear of death/unknown (9.1 percent).

  6. Good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe (6.0 percent).

  7. The Bible says so (5.0 percent).

  8. Without God there would be no morality (3.5 percent).

  9. To account for good and avenge evil in the world (1.5 percent).

  10. God answers prayers (1.0 percent).

  Cumulative total: 94.0 percent. This question doubled the number of categories into which answers could reasonably be classified (compared to the first question), including (in order of quantity): “I don’t know,” “Jesus/God saved them,” “the culture is religious,” “fear of death,” “conversion experience,” “need to believe in an afterlife,” “need for community,” and a few unique answers including “stupidity,” “they are alive,” “because of the narcotic effect,” and “it is the right thing to do.”

  HOW WE BELIEVE AND DISBELIEVE

  THE VARIABLES THAT SHAPE OUR RELIGIOSITY AND BELIEF IN GOD

  These graphs present the most important variables that shape our religiosity and belief in God, including:

  1. Belief in God in relation to being raised religiously;

  2. Religiosity in relation to being raised religiously;

  3. Religiosity in relation to education;

  4. Belief in God in relation to age;

  5. Religiosity in relation to age;

  6. Belief in God in relation to parental conflict and being raised religiously or nonreligiously;

  7. Religiosity in relation to parental conflict;

  8. Being raised religious or nonreligiously.

  Scientists’ Belief in God and Immortality, 1916 vs. 1996

  Skeptics’ Belief in God

  General Belief in God

  Religious Upbringing and Belief in God

  Religious Upbringing and Religiosity

  Education and Religiosity

  Age and Belief in God

  Age and Religiosity

  Parental Conflict and Belief in God

  Parental Conflict and Religiosity

  A Bibliographic Essay on Theism, Atheism, and Why People Believe in God

  I have been careful to document all of my sources in the text. For further reading in this area, I recommend going to the original sources, which I list in the Notes that follow this short essay. Not included in my analysis, however, are additional books that the serious reader will want to read. This list is by no means complete, but with these books in hand, and with their bibliographies, you will have before you the grand scope of theological writing and religious studies.

  The philosopher George Smith’s book, Atheism, is widely read and highly touted among atheists. In it he claims that atheism is nothing more than “the absence of theistic belief,” yet he admits that “atheism is sometimes defined as ‘the belief that there is no God of any kind, or the claim that a god cannot exist’.” He goes on to explain that “an atheist is not primarily a person who believes that a god does not exist; rather, he does not believe in the existence of a god.” If theism is “belief-in-god,” says Smith, atheism is simply “no-belief-in-god.” Yet he admits that the word has more than one meaning, and the subtitle of his book would seem to gainsay this disclaimer: The Case Against God. Shouldn’t this read The Case Against Belief in God?

  Smith also confirms the pejorative use of the word: “Atheism is probably the least popular—and least understood—philosophical position in America today. It is often approached with fear and mistrust, as if one were about to investigate a doctrine that advocates a wide assortment of evils—from immortality, pessimism and communism to outright nihilism.” Smith cites the influential twentieth-century philosopher, A. E. Taylor, who, in his 1947 book, Does God Exist?, blames atheism for the two World Wars: “The world has directly to thank [atheism] for the worst evils of ‘modern war’.” With atheists never amounting to more than a couple of percentage points of any population, it is hard to imagine who had instigated and fought those wars. In my opinion Smith’s book on atheism is the best available, yet reading it only reinforced my conviction that the agnostic/nontheist position defended in Chapter 1 is the most reasonable one with our present understanding of the universe and our current social conditions.

  Michael Martin, who has probably thought and written about atheism as much as anyone in history, in his 1990 magnum opus, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, agrees with Smith that “atheists have been attacked for flaws in their moral character: it has often been alleged that they cannot be honest and truthful. For example, in 1724 Richard Bentley, an English Christian apologist, maintained that ‘no atheist as such can be a true friend, an affectionate relation, or a loyal subject’.” Martin also cites the Evidence Amendment Act of 1869, where “atheists in England were considered incompetent to give evidence in a court of law,” and a case in America in 1856 where “one Ira Aldrich was disqualified as a witness in an Illinois case after he testified that he did not believe in a God that ‘punishes people for perjury, either in this world or any other’.” Martin’s purpose is not to convert theists to atheists (at least not directly), but to “provide good reasons for being an atheist.” In doing so he distinguishes between several types of atheists,
including positive atheists who “disbelieve in god or gods” and negative atheists who “have no belief in a god or gods.” Martin further classifies negative atheists into “the broad sense of negative atheism,” where there is “an absence of belief in any god or gods,” and the “narrow sense of negative atheism, according to which an atheist is without a belief in a personal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely good and who created heaven and earth.” The reason for this latter classification is to distinguish between deists, pantheists, and polytheists who believe in an impersonal god or gods (small g) and theists who believe in a personal God who is all knowing, all powerful, all good, and created the universe. He does not stop there, further classifying positive atheists: “A positive atheist in the broad sense is a person who disbelieves that there is any god or gods and a positive atheist in the narrow sense is a person who disbelieves that there is a personal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and completely good and who created heaven and earth.”

  How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? It depends on how you define angel, define dance, and define the size of the head of the pin. All these distinctions are useful for medieval theologians and modern academic philosophers seeking semantic precision and clarification for the many nuances of human thought, but I still find my own distinction between atheism (there is no God) and nontheism (no belief in God) as statements about personal beliefs to be adequate. How many deists, pantheists, or polytheists do you know? None I would guess. For our purposes at the beginning of a new millennium in the Western world, it is safe to assume that when we are discussing “God” we all know what we mean by this term: an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good higher being who created the universe and us and grants ever-lasting life. If you believe this, you are a theist. If you do not believe this, you are a nontheist. If you believe God is unknowable through science or reason, you are an agnostic.

  So much of this book deals with the history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology of religion that the Notes itself is the place to turn. But I especially want to mention a number of influential texts in this field that attempt to get at the answer to the question of why people believe in God and need religion. These include first and foremost David Wulff’s Psychology of Religion and Ralph Hood, Bernard Spilka, Bruce Hunsberger, and Richard Gorsuch’s The Psychology of Religion. On the anthropology of religion see Daniel Pals’ Seven Theories of Religion, Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion, Arthur Lehmann and James Myers’s Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion, Gerald Larue’s Ancient Myth and Modern Man, Adolf Jensen’s Myrth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Theories of Primitive Religion, and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries . On the sociology of religion one must begin with the founder’s text, Max Weber’s The Sociology of Religion; and two excellent reviews of the philosophy of religion are Basil Mitchell’s The Philosophy of Religion and Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger’s Reason and Religious Relief.

  The body of literature associated with the God Question is Brobdingnagian. Visit any decent size library and look under God, theology, religion, philosophy, philosophy of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, morality, ethics, the Bible, biblical studies, biblical criticism, and other subjects and you will see what I mean. It is overwhelming. There are scholars who select one specialty and spend their entire careers in the narrow minutiae of that field. What I am aiming for here is clear communication about the God Question with virtually anyone interested in the subject, without sacrificing scholarly integrity.

  To that end I also recommend the following edited volumes of readings that will provide a wide range of perspectives on the God Question: John Hick’s The Existence of God: From Plato to A. J. Ayer on the Question “Does God Exist?” presents in depth all the major arguments for God’s existence as well as the critiques of these arguments in a very balanced treatment; Peter Angeles’s Critiques of God: A Major Statement of the Case Against Belief in God has an obvious skeptical slant but presents essays by major thinkers such as Bertrand Russell, Antony Flew, and Sidney Hook; and Gordon Stein’s An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism, which is exactly what it says it is. Peter Angeles’s The Problem of God provides an easy to read, succinct introduction to the debate, and Keith Parsons’s God and the Burden of Proof provides responses to Alvin Plantinga’s and Richard Swinburne’s analytic defense of theism. Many of C. S. Lewis’s books deal with these arguments from a Christian perspective, particularly Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. The most famous arguments for God’s existence were laid down by St. Anselm in his eleventh-century book, Proslogion, and by St. Thomas Aquinas in his thirteenth-century book, Summa Theologica, the arguments with which I deal in Chapter 5.

  Among modern authors I find Rabbi Harold Kushner’s books, particularly When Bad Things Happen to Good People and Who Needs God to be highly readable, reasonable, and respectful of the reader’s intelligence (although he is definitely a theist, most atheists and nontheists would find these works quite palatable). In the final chapter of Who Needs God, entitled “Why Is God So Hard to Find?,” Kushner answers the question by admitting the human nature of religion: “Religion is first and foremost the community through which you learn to understand the world and grow to be human.” If God is absent, it is “because we have stopped looking for Him.” The implication of both statements (to me anyway) is that God exists in our minds and religion is the product of human culture.

  In the arena of biblical studies, a subject not under my purview (with the exception of my analysis of the “Bible Code” in Chapter 5), the best place to begin is with the world-renowned biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? His book on The Disappearance of God is a fascinating read on the changing role of God from the early books of the Hebrew Bible to the later. Finally, his 1999 book, The Hidden Book in the Bible, puts forth a cutting-edge and potentially very controversial re-editing of the Old Testament in which Friedman pulls out of numerous books what he believes to be a continuous narrative, written by one author, that he calls the “first prose narrative.” Reactions from the biblical scholarship community remain to be seen. There are a number of other excellent authors in this field as well. Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel and especially his Who Wrote the New Testament? are particularly good; the latter is particularly strong in giving cultural context to the construction of the New Testament. Randel Helms’s Gospel Fictions and Who Wrote the Gospels? give a good perspective on these four books from a professor of literature who analyzes them as he would any important text in Western literature. Tim Callahan, the religion editor for Skeptic magazine, has written two splendid books that are at once comprehensive and well written: Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? and The Secret Origins of the Bible. Callahan is especially good about cutting to the chase of an argument and exposing both its strengths and weaknesses. I have learned a lot in reading these works, especially about the antecedents to the Bible, most of which are shrouded in mystery and almost never discussed.

  Finally, there is no excuse for not going to the primary source, and that is the Bible itself. To that end, my research has been greatly aided by several outstanding reference guides recognized by Bible scholars to be the very best places to begin a more thorough analysis of the good book (and available through any religious bookstore): The Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, The Literary Guide to the Bible, and The Jerome Biblical Commentary. For adding these to the Skeptics Society Research Library, and for keeping our analyses on religious and biblical matters on a professional level, I am grateful to Bruce Mazet.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

 
Click here For complete poll results see Skeptic, 8/1: 16.

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