The Heresy of Belief
“Which is it?” asks Neitzsche. “Is man God’s mistake or God man’s mistake?” I am going to argue that, even proceeding on the second assumption, it is possible to reason one’s way to the paradoxical conclusion that belief in God is itself a heresy.
Consider, first, the following sketch of an atheist’s explanation for the origin of religion. At some point in prehistory, one theory goes, a clan of grunting protomen learned to create tools. The practical implications of this discovery are vast and obvious. Less obvious are the spiritual implications: Without knowing it, they had prepared the way for belief in God. The explanation is as reasonable as the conclusion is incredible: Seeking to understand how the world came into being, man developed an anthropogenic theory of his origins from his own acts of creation ("This totem came into existence through the creative agency of man; man must have come into existence through the creative agency of something like himself") that has, over millennia, evolved into the panoply of modern religions. In this light the compulsion to worship the postulated Artificer of man is easy to understand, since the differential of design complexity between the tool and its creator and the tool-creator and his Creator demands a sacralization of ordinary respect and esteem. Of course other secular explanations for religion exist. One conjectures that belief in God, through a sort of psychological neoteny, results from a retention into adulthood of the childhood tendency to have imaginary friends. Another, put forward by Julian Jaynes, that human beings prior to 1000 BC and the “breakdown of the bicameral mind” mistook their own interior monologues for the voices of an autonomous and external consciousness and therefore imputed them to supernatural agency. But it is the one I have just outlined with which I am concerned. Because what if it turns out that belief in God was necessary in order for humankind to “feel its way” towards modern science and that modern science, in turn, contains the germ of a future worldview that is both scientific and spiritual? It is logical: Creationism was the first "ontological hypothesis" and perfectly tenable in its time. But it may be that today we face a scientific and spiritual obligation to reject our primitive belief in God as a necessary step in the progress towards a spiritual science, or scientific spirituality, more subtle, more intelligent, more benevolent that any known religion or science... Richard Dawkins quips that surely God, whose existence he denies, respects the courage of atheists more than the bet-hedging of agnostics and the blind faith of true believers. Perhaps Richard Dawkins is right, though in a way that he does not suspect. Perhaps God exists but He does not want us to believe in Him. |