• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 536 0

identify with the victim”). This intellectual attribution bias applies to religion as a belief system and to God as the subject of belief. As pattern-seeking animals, the matter of the apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in the day-to-day contingencies of our lives, is a powerful one as an intellectual justification for belief. But we attribute other people’s religious beliefs to their emotional needs. Here are just a few examples from the written portion of the surveys:

• A thirty-year-old male Jewish teacher with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9), says he believes in God “because I believe in the Big Bang; and when you believe in the B.B., you have to ask yourself—‘what came before that?’ A creation implies a creator.” (Aquinas’s prime mover argument; see Chapter 5.) Yet, he goes on to explain: “I think that most people believe out of an emotional need, although there is a significant minority of rational (even skeptical!) believers such as myself.”

• A fifty-one-year-old male with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) but no formal religious membership writes that he believes in God based on his “personal experiences,” but for others “belief in God provides emotional support and a belief structure that provides meaning, purpose, and rules of conduct for them. Many feel lost without believing something /someone more important than them runs their life rather than believing that they can and do create their reality and the universe.”

• A sixty-five-year-old male Catholic with moderately strong religious convictions (7 on a scale of 1 to 9) gives the standard watchmaker argument: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.” Nevertheless, other people believe in God because of a “sense of security” and “blind faith.”

• A thirty-seven-year-old female Catholic with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9) says she believes in God because “how else could you explain our origins? Only God could create a world and universe out of nothing. There are miracles every day that science cannot explain.” Others believe, she says, because it “gives hope.”

• A forty-one-year-old male Baptist with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) explains that he believes in God “due to the evidence of his magnificent creation and the extraordinary order of the universe,” whereas other people believe because “without God there is no purpose for their lives or the universe.”

There are many, many more examples. Morever, these data support Gallup polls taken in 1982 and 1991, where 46 percent of the public believe that “man was created pretty much in his current form at one time within the past 10,000 years,” 40 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life, but God guided the process, including the creation of man,” but only 9 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life. God had no part in the process.” The Gallup polls did not ask why, but it seems obvious from our results that the answer is that people see God in the universe, in the world, and in their lives. Hardly anyone has heard of theologian William Paley and his eighteenth-century watchmaker argument for God, but they know this argument intuitively from their experiences. They also read about it from science popularizers like cornet hunter David Levy, who told millions of readers of Parade Magazine that the “miracle of life” was due to the fact that the universe was “designed” for us, and that this is proved by such scientific facts as: (1) ice floats; (2) the night sky is dark; (3) protons and electrons have absolutely identical charges; (4) we have the right kind of Sun. There are perfectly rational, scientific explanations for these facts that have nothing whatsoever to do with life being “designed