Some may argue that God is a human invention to satisfy the gap that exists in human understanding of reality and man’s lack of understanding of himself. In other words, God is a stop-gap measure until we can come up with something real.
That’s not a bad nutshell version of much secular thinking about religion.
But there is a problem with this thinking. The millions of men and women around the globe who aspire for something transcendent is not mere biological coincidence, says Karl Rahner. It is a human fact, a part of man’s desire, a part of human nature. Man’s desire for the transcendent cannot be easily dismissed or ignored without grave consequences, Rahner said. It would be the same as ignoring man’s innate desire to procreate as a means to remain present even after he has gone, said Eric Erikson.
I don’t see why that’s a problem at all. If there’s a problem in thinking here, it’s ceding to Karl Rahner (or Piaget for that matter, below) any kind of authority in this matter at all. As a theologian, Rahner’s testimony is worth what? He might as well be an astrologist, explaining how we are born with an innate idea that our destiny is wrapped up in the location of the stars.
It’s this kind of casual, undisciplined thinking about the questions that produces the layers of superstition that get piled up here, one upon another, creating the edifice of religion. It’s precisely argumentation like this that I would point to as the “stop gap” people rely on in lieu of real world analysis and knowledge.
Piaget once said that man is the only creature who can biologically assimilate and accommodate to life, All other animals adapt, but retain their natural instincts, whereas man’s instincts seem to evolve into reason and deliberate operant behavior. There is no biological explanation for this other than to put it as the great Jewish psychiatrist wrote, “man’s search for meaning.” Victor Frankl once said that if man loses his search for mening he is subject to his inner passions, which do not liberate him, but only frustrate him, because without a transcendent reality they can never be fulfilled. Therefore, as William James said in his writings, the proof of man’s need for the transcendent lies in man’s very nature, not in his imagination.
There is a very simple and straightforward explanation for this. Man (so far as we know) is the only animal with a brain that has developed to the point where it is capable of arbitrary levels of abstraction, including levels of self-contemplation. That’s a neat feature of evolution, and humans are the only ones that have emerged with that faculty. That economically explains why we think in terms of
transcendence – because we can. A brain that is equipped to think in abstract terms is a formidable asset for survival (which helps explain why we are here discussing this), but it is also capable of contemplating all sorts of other conceptual abstractions. With a brain so equipped, its an inevitability that we should get to musing about questions like “why are we here?”, and “what is the nature of reality?”, etc.
There isn’t any need to appeal to the supernatural to explain this.
Given that man is built with a desire to find the transcendent, it is impossible to build a civilized society in which there is no room for God. To do so would be to do as Pope John Paul II pointed out in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, to build a nihilistic society that has no end in sight and no purpose for a common good. When there is no reason for a common good, the only result is chaos and moral decomposition, as has been proven by the Communist experiment of Karl Marx.
I think you are quite correct that it is impossible to build a society without room for God, or the the idea of God, anyway. As Voltaire observed, if God never existed, we’d have to invent him. And so we have, many times over, in all sorts of permutations… God fashioned in man’s image by men (and women) of all sorts.
So there’s no getting away from the idea. It’s a fiction we are inclined to create because it’s useful, anodyne, something we desire to be true (many of us), even if it’s not. Another aspect of our evolutionary heritage is what is called our “intentionality”, our obsession with the intentions of the humans and other actors around us. Our keen fascination with intentionality – being able to detect a hint of deceit or betrayal in a fellow tribesman planning to overthrow you, or the tensing of a muscle in the prey you are stalking indicating it is about to take flight – produces an overactive imagination in areas where there are no discernible actors.
We think in terms of telos, strategy, plan, design. When you are a hammer, everything’s a nail. When you are a “design-obsessed-human”, everything looks designed. So we look around at the wonders of the starts and the beauty of nature, the delicate workings of the human hand, and think “This must be designed”.
In this psychological climate, preventing God as a conspiracy theory about the word is a futile idea. It’s an unstoppable idea, even and espectially if there’s no God. That doesn’t mean that idea has to hold sway, but you won’t ever extinguish it. It’s an artifact of human psychology.
Therefore, if man is to exist with meaning and society is to venture forth into the future as a cooperative body, it must have a common source of values and a common goal that transcends human weaknesses and failings. The only explanation is found in man’s inner interest and desire to find God, even in the most primitive expressions of faith.
Br. JR, OSF
I think that is gradually, and strongly being discredited as an idea, and “faith” is coming to be sign – rightly I think – as a major source of problems and divisions that work against the interests of man on the whole. This is easy to see just by apprehending the purely subjective nature of religion – and Catholicism is a good example of the type. As a subjective matter, it defies unification, utter thwarts universalization. Many honest, intelligent people, for example, are mystified that there are people who seriously believe there’s a God or gods at all. That’s a major defeater for the idea that somehow religion as an expression of subjective, mystical beliefs is even a
plausible hope for a “common source of values”.
A practical solution is not easy, or straightforward, but grounding in objective experience is a crucial superiority over religion. Objectivity is amenable to commonality and universality where subjectivity is not. Christianity, like so many other religions, is fundamentally incompatible with objective testing and validation, and like so many other religions, can’t hope to be any kind of unifier, save for what can be “unified” at the point of sword and the end of a whip.
-Touchstone
