How should we understand what God is? Part 4

How should we understand what God is?

Part 4: Reasons why our belief in God developed: To help us explain things

Another key reason for belief in God to develop was as an explanatory mechanism. Early humans became aware that they lived within a system of creation governed by massive forces, compared to which our puny fragility made us excessively vulnerable, forces which we could not control and did not understand. Not unreasonably, we extrapolated from what we did know that there must be invisible powers at work to make the universe happen. Early people graphically experienced their relationship with these forces, to which they felt intimately connected, and which they regarded with reverence and awe. Today, we understand, well, nearly everything. Should we then just completely abandon this strand of support for belief in God? In many ways, it seems fair. We can understand why people did make this mistake, but accept it was a mistake and we should not be encumbered by it anymore.

The main objection to this is that loss of sense of deep connection to the elemental forces of the universe and our reverence for them. Modernity gives us such immense benefits in length and quality of life compared to “natural life”, say, roaming the open plains. Many also feel trapped in an artificial, superficial and in some strange way, unsatisfying world – though we are so busy working and enjoying ourselves within our human-made creation that we don’t have that much time to notice it. There are still some big philosophical problems to deal with, such as, “Why should there be something rather than nothing?” Many scientists feel confident that one day we will understand exactly how the universe came into being, and, when we do, it will have an entirely scientific explanation. There will be something about reality that means that, even before there was a universe, the forces that brought a universe into being had to exist.

This seems counter-intuitive: how can there be anything about reality before there was any reality? However, quite a lot of modern science is counter-intuitive, so it’s a possibility. Those who believe in God can still justifiably hold on to the view that God could be the reason as to why the forces that created the universe were possible, or that – if science alone can explain that – that God also exists alongside a universe that did not need him to exist. However, this seems an unnecessary conjecture to bring the existence of God into the equation if everything can be explained without him. There would still be the issue of the first reason to believe in God: the encounter with God we call religious experience. However, if this second point does become cut and dried, it may then be fairer to reassess the nature of religious experience. I will still argue that it is the most precious thing in existence, but the source and nature of it will have to be reinterpreted.