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Is the belief in God a merely human wish, or a reflection of reality?
According to the conventional wisdom of the atheists and skeptics, human beings invented God because they long for an ultimate father figure who will protect and take care of them. Similarly, say the atheists, human beings invented the notion of eternal life in order to escape their natural fear of death. There is no question that such motives play a role in the religious beliefs of many people. However, when the atheists reduce religion to nothing but such motives, they are reasoning in a backward fashion. They assume that these deep intuitions and longings in man arise only from subjective human fears and needs and have no connection with objective reality. Yet the atheists do not apply such reductive reasoning across the board. Would they say that the human desire to find an intelligible structure in nature means that nature has no intelligible structure? Would they say that the expectation that things are intelligible is merely a subjective human need projected onto the world? Would they say that the human desire for truth means that truth is just a childish wish-fulfillment? On the contrary, as even old-fashioned materialistic atheists would acknowledge, at least in the case of science (I exclude modern philosophers of science, who defer the issue of the objectivity of truth), men’s subjectively experienced desire to find the true and intelligible structure of things corresponds with an objective world that has intelligible structure. In other words, the desire for meaning, experienced subjectively by men, draws them into fruitful relationship with an objective reality that has meaning. There is a “fit” between human consciousness and the external world, just as there is a fit between our sense organs and the external world.
But this fit between the experiencing human being and the objective world he experiences applies just as much to the world of spirit as to the world of nature. Thus our belief in the transcendent God, the creator of the universe, the savior of our souls, is not a mere projection of a childish human need for a loving and protective father figure, but something in us that corresponds to the true nature of reality, something—both our intuition and Biblical revelation tell us—that has been planted in us for the very purpose of bringing us into relationship with that reality. Similarly, the belief in the possibility of eternal life is not the expresssion of a mere wish of mortal humans to escape death; it is something planted in us by God, so that we will seek and come to know the true life that God wants us to live with him. Email entry |