How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [4]
The intellectual and spiritual quest to understand the universe and our place in it is the foundation of the God Question, the various answers to which are explored in the first chapter of this book, including theist, agnostic, nontheist, and atheist, along with the differences these positions make in our thinking about the question. At the beginning of the twentieth century social scientists predicted that belief in God would decrease by the end of the century because of the secularization of society. In fact, as the second chapter shows, the opposite has occurred. Never in history have so many, and such a high percentage of the population, believed in God. Not only is God not dead, as Nietzsche proclaimed, but he has never been more alive. To find out why, the “Belief Engine” is considered in the third chapter as the mechanism by which any of us come to believe in anything, including and especially the magical thinking that leads millions of people to believe in psychics and mediums who claim that they can talk to the dead in heaven. To get at the core of the God Question and why people believe, the fourth chapter presents the results of an empirical study that asked a random sampling of the population that very question. The results were most enlightening, not only in the reasons people give for belief in God (made especially poignant when contrasted with why we think other people believe in God) but also in the quality and depth of the answers given (often in multipage, single-spaced typed letters), showing that the God Question is one of the most compelling any of us can ask ourselves.
It turns out that the number-one reason people give for why they believe in God is a variation on the classic cosmological or design argument: The good design, natural beauty, perfection, and complexity of the world or universe compels us to think that it could not have come about without an intelligent designer. In other words, people say they believe in God because the evidence of their senses tells them so. Thus, contrary to what most religions preach about the need and importance of faith, most people believe because of reason. So the fifth chapter reviews the various proofs of God, from those presented by medieval philosophers to those proffered by modern creationists, and considers what these arguments, and their employment in the service of religious belief, tell us about faith.
This relationship between science and religion, reason and faith, the subject of the sixth chapter, has once again emerged to the forefront of cultural importance due to a conjuncture of events, including the millennium that beckons us to reconsider the meaning of the past and future and the relative roles of science and religion in history; the discovery by physicists that the universe is more finely tuned and delicately balanced than we ever realized; the magnificent photographs of the universe made by the Hubble Space Telescope revealing an almost spiritual beauty of the cosmos as never seen before; and the issuance by the Pope of two statements, one acknowledging the validity of the theory of evolution and the other endorsing the successful marriage of fides et ratio, faith and reason.
Because humans are storytelling animals, a deeper aspect of the God Question involves the origins and purposes of myth and religion in human history and culture, the subject of the seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters. Why is there an eternal return of certain mythic themes in religion, such as messiah myths, flood myths, creation myths, destruction myths, redemption myths, and end of the world myths? What do these recurring themes tell us about the workings of the human mind and culture? What can we learn from these myths beyond the moral homilies offered in their narratives? What can we glean about ourselves as we gaze into these