Why God Won’t Die

Startling title, isn’t it?

Lately, I’ve been entertaining thoughts on Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead.”  You know, the Enlightenment Era idea that human beings have through the course of reason and rationality rid themselves of God and religion as a source of received wisdom.  It’s been long speculated that modernity and secularization went hand in hand.  As a society advanced into the modern age, God would be left to the epochs of superstition and fate.  In many ways, this prediction has become a reality.  Superstitions have been debunked by science and people tend to understands things through a casual, rational-thinking model compared to a speculative, metaphysical one.  Although I believe that the human race, for most part, has reached an intellectual level far superior to any other time in history, it seems that religion isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Despite the advances in science and the paradigm shift from irrational thinking to fact-based analysis, God is still very much alive and kicking.  In fact, God may be on the rebound from decades of relative decline.  The reason for this isn’t as irrational as one might think.  In fact, the reason for believing in something as irrational as religion is, in fact, a rational thing.  Human beings naturally seek order in their lives.  Religion gives people such order.  People naturally seek purpose, reason, justification and accountability; they seek out structure and order in a world that would otherwise appear disorderly.  The “God” or God-like person found in most living world religions gives people their sought after structure and order.  It also provides answers to life’s most daunting questions:  Why am I here? What do I do?  How do I do it? Where am I going?  Even if the answers provided can’t be proven by the instruments of science or reason of the mind, people will still turn to religion to find a response that satisfies their natural desire for structure and order.

Religions of all types share one major component:  they have some grand narrative that explains the origins of human beings, their general purpose on this planet, and prospects for a life after this one.  If put under any type of scientific or logical scrutiny, these grand narratives seem somewhat ridiculous.  What do you mean a man rose from the dead and ascended into the skies amidst the company of angels?  No way a man suddenly vanished of the face of the planet simply because he reached a state of total peace!  But to do this would miss the point.  Religions aren’t rational insofar as they can be scientifically proven or logically proven (Sorry Lee Strobel, but your “Cases” always seemed off the mark).  But they are perfectly rational when considered as a tool for the ordering of the mind and the universe. Without these grand, tell-all stories human beings would feel less secure about themselves and less certain about the order of things.  So, in a corky kind of way, it’s perfectly rational to be irrational.

Many philosophers have weighed in on this issues of religion in society.  Although the premises of their beliefs may differ, their general theories share the same basic thesis:  religion exists because people demand it to.

Adam Smith, himself a deist, inveighed on the value of religion in society in his book The Theory on Moral Sentiments.  Smith suggests that the human mind has a tendency to “extend and secure the perceived orderliness of the world by assuming that there is a supreme ordering agent with a purpose.”  Religion, including natural providence, is part of the explanatory web that the imagination creates to satisfy its desire for order in a world that would otherwise seem chaotic and haphazard.  Although the latter description of the world may be true, it’s perception that matters most here.

Religion, according to Smith, restrains humans from acting without propriety, restrains perfidious and violent acts, and subjects human beings to obedient, moral roles within society.  Acting contrary to the commands of the Supreme Being, who prescribed certain behaviors and proscribed others, turns religious disobedience into something seemingly unnatural.  God serves as the ultimate judge who curbs the most ardent of passions and keeps everyone accountable.

The very thought of disobedience appears to involve in it the most shocking impropriety. How vain, how absurd would it be for man, either to oppose or to neglect the commands that were laid upon him by Infinite Wisdom, and Infinite Power! How unnatural, how impiously ungrateful not to reverence the precepts that were prescribed to him by the infinite goodness of his Creator, even though no punishment was to follow their violation. The sense of propriety too is here well supported by the strongest motives of self-interest.

Alexis De Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America also points to religion as an ordering instrument.  Consider this quote about the nature of man:

Man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt of existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.  These different feelings incessantly urge his soul to the contemplation of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither.  Religion, then, is simply another form of hope, and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself.  Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature.  Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

Religion, to De Tocqueville, seems to resolve the friction between the contentedness and disaffection people feel about life – a sort of order out of internal disruption.  Also, the last statement seems to be a total reversal of Nietzsche’s claim; religion is the naturally state of the human mind, no dose of reason can naturally perturb this state.  Although I don’t buy De Tocqueville’s idea that unbelief is an accident and necessarily an aberration of intellect, I do think that a world without religion would be more disorderly and less morally constrained.

To seek purpose, despite being inherently unknowable, doesn’t make it a fruitless adventure.  Order serves as the cohesive glue that keeps the human mind in order and helps maintain a civil society.  Despite there being an axiomatic gap between the fundamental premises of religions like Christianity, people aren’t likely to disregard because of that. Even if religion is entirely built upon unknowable and probably false premises, people will continue to believe in them because without religion, people would feel disorderly and confused.  Life’s moral boundaries would seem blurred and an overarching purpose to life would perhaps be lost.