The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Prelude, Why Do People Believe in God?

Why do people believe in God?

It's a simple query but the advent of this question during the Enlightenment marks one of the most profound assaults upon religious belief and practice. Specifically, classic apologetics has tended to focus on a much older, epistemological question: What are your reasons for believing in God? This issue is one of evidence and justification. Are there good reasons, with supporting evidence, for believing the the stories of the Bible? The question was less "Why do people believe in God?' than "Do people have good reasons for believing in God?"

The classic questions of apologetics are still with us. People still attack religious belief on epistemological grounds, asking if the warrants of faith are justifiable on evidentiary grounds. The classic criterion of "justified true belief" is still applied to faith. The responses to these attacks are varied. Mainly they break into two types. The first kind of approach is to fight the battle on the issue of justifiability by citing archaeological and historical evidences to support the biblical account. Aids in this fight can be purchased at your local Christian bookstore. The other move is to eschew the whole debate as misguided. Faith isn't reducible to data. Thus, the inherently scientistic criterion of "justified true belief" isn't applicable to faith. It's an issue of apples and oranges. A recent example of this approach is Terry Eagleton's recent book about the misfires of the "New Atheists" (see Stanley Fish's review of Eagleton's book here). Regarding "justifying" faith on scientific grounds Eagleton writes: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” We can see the move at work here. Asking if faith is "true" is like asking if Hamlet or Mozart is true.

Each of these approaches has benefits and limitations. The evidence-based approach has the advantage of showing that the biblical stories (in the New Testament at least) were not mythological. Most people accept that Jesus was a historical figure and that the letters from Paul to the churches were real letters to real people. But at the end of the day the critical issues have little to do with the historical particulars. The critical issues have to do the metaphysical and supernatural claims. And those are not amenable to archaeological justification. Conversely, the "apples and oranges" approach rightly recognizes that faith is not a branch of science and doesn't have to justify its claims on scientific grounds. However, these approaches run the risk of reducing faith to a subject in the humanities. Faith is like poetry and art. Faith is a form of ethical and existential humanism.

Given the complementary advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches they are often deployed in a pincer movement. Evidence-based approaches help fend off the claim that Jesus was mere myth. The humanistic approach fends off science, noting that the truth of faith can't be tested in a laboratory. Deployed together, each at critical junctures in the debate, these two apologetic moves carve out a space of "reasonableness" for faith. They accomplish the task of showing that the religious believer isn't crazy. Of course, these arguments fail as proofs for faith's ultimate claims, but they are helpful in making religious believers intellectually respectable. Beyond that, the belief versus disbelief debate reaches an impasse with neither side able to land a knockout punch.

Into this epic conversation a new, subtle spin was introduced during the Enlightenment, a spin nicely captured by the question "Why do people believe in God?" This question frequently surfaces in the apologetics debates but its contours are less readily identifiable than the classic apologetic moves and countermoves noted above. One of the goals of these essays is to map the terrain of this question and ponder various responses to it. As we will see, this question is a great deal more destabilizing than those encountered in the classic apologetics debates. The reasons for this destabilization are twofold. First, as noted, we've only recently begun to take the full measure of this new assault upon religious faith. Although this critique of religion has been around since the Enlightenment (if not before) we have yet to treat this critique as a distinct type requiring distinctive responses. Further, even if we did note the distinctiveness of this new critique the way forward, by way of response or rebuttal, is by no means clear. The rules of this new debate are so strange and novel that no consensus has yet emerged about how the Christian intellectual community should respond. In short, these newer critiques of religion are powerful and cogent but remain largely unanswered. Largely because the "answers" require skills and data that most theologians, our leading edge in the apologetics debates, do not possess. The "answers", should they exist, require laboratory data. Only recently has some of this data been collected and published. And the shape of this data will have important implications for how faith responds to her intellectual critics.

Let me be more specific. What is the challenge posed by the question "Why do people believe in God?"? And what is so different about this question compared to the classic epistemological questions concerning the reasonableness of religious belief?

The destabilizing nature of the question comes from the fact that the query shifts the conversation from reasons to functions. In the classic apologetics debate the focus was on reasons, the warrants and epistemological justifications for belief. But during the Enlightenment a new critique emerged, a question that swept past reasons and asked about the social and psychological functions of belief. Might religion be doing some kind of useful social or psychological work for us? Perhaps religion was vital to keeping order or keeping the unwashed masses docile? Perhaps religion allowed us to be happier, more productive, hopeful and cooperative? Maybe, in short, religion had a function. A social and psychological reason for its existence and ubiquity. Religion isn't about metaphysics but about coping, socially and psychologically.

In the West these questions reached their full force in the works of Darwin, Marx and Freud. Specifically, the function of faith was approached cynically in the wake of these thinkers. The overt content of faith was pushed aside by the "hermeneutics of suspicion" to explore the subterranean and unconscious motivations behind faith. The motivations of faith rather than the content of faith became the object of investigation. The issue was no longer "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" but "Why would someone be attracted to the idea of life after death?" The "reasonable content" of faith becomes a non-issue. Importantly, the shift from content to motivation renders the answers to the question "Why do people believe in God?" more cryptic. The obvious, self-reported answers no longer suffice. Believers are only dimly aware of what motivates their faith, distally and proximally. Are believers able to tell if their faith is an evolutionary by-product or a means of social control or a mechanism to repress death anxiety? These appeals to the function of faith dramatically shift the ground of the debate.

To end this first essay, I'd like to make two observations about how the shift from debating reasons to functions has left the Christian community in a bind; why the work of Darwin, Marx and Freud is so destabilizing and so hard to counter.

First, the functional move is inherently reductionistic in a way the earlier debates were not. The older epistemological debates tended to take creedal assertions at face value. The focus of the debate centered upon marshaling evidence for or against those assertions (or arguing why certain arguments were or were not applicable). By contrast, the functional move abruptly moves past the content of faith to level questions about social and psychological mechanisms of faith. This appeal to "mechanism" threatens to "explain faith away."

Second, this move is destabilizing in that it is unclear how Christian intellectuals should respond. Theologians are trained to handle the content and warrants of faith. They are not, as a general rule, well versed in how religion might be implicated in social control or as a means to repress death anxiety. In short, the criticisms based upon Darwin, Marx and Freud have largely left the Christian intellectual community flatfooted and flummoxed. It is true that Christian thinkers have resisted the reduction of faith to biology, sociology or psychology but much of this resistance is mere hand-waving. The reason for this is that the tools of the new debate are not solely logical and philosophical. Many of the new tools are those of the social scientific laboratory.

Why do I say this? Because in an age shaped by the suspicions of Darwin, Marx and Freud one cannot simply walk up to a person on the street or to the academic theologian and ask "Why do you believe in God?" and expect an answer that moves the debate forward. Such an approach is too naive. If Freud claims that faith is the product of infantile neuroses the protestations of the faithful to the contrary will not be an adequate response. Simple introspection, even if erudite and sophisticated, isn't going to settle the matter. Nor will a theological or archaeological response. One is going to need to know a bit about how religious belief functions in the mind of believers if one would like to rebut Freud's claim. True, even if Freud were correct does that mean that God doesn't exist? Because psychology doesn't determine ontology. That is an important response if Freud were correct in his diagnosis. But I'd like to ask a more fundamental question: Why cede this ground to Freud in the first place?

The primary goal of these essays is to examine the debate concerning the function of belief at the level of the critique itself. That is, we won't cede the sociological or psychological territory by responding to the critiques with theology. At least not until the data is in. That is, we'd like to not cede the facts to Freud prematurely, resigning ourselves to theologically spinning inhospitable data if things in the laboratory don't come out the way we like them to. Such a move might be logically coherent but, via Occam's Razor, would appear rather defensive. Rather, we'll wade into the empirical waters and deal with the claims at their most basic level: The function of religious belief inside the minds of believers.