“With his keen eye for spotting insights in data, Wuthnow presents a wonderful study of the mental maps people use to be religious in the modern world. As usual, he has identified something that we all think about obliquely and tackled it head on. The God Problem is a huge achievement.”—John H. Evans, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

“In The God Problem, Wuthnow sheds new light on the American debate over religious belief versus non-belief. Wuthnow’s insight offers a nuanced portrayal of the religious situation in our time. This is a significant and insightful book.” —Wade Clark Roof, J.F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara

Robert Wuthnow is Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion. Among his books are After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s and Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches, both from UC Press.

The God Problem

Expressing Faith and Being Reasonable

By Robert Wuthnow

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27428-0

Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
1. Dangerous Dogma,
2. Talking to God,
3. Big Scary Catastrophes,
4. Heaven Is a Wonderful Place,
5. Jesus Sets You Free,
6. Billions of Galaxies,
7. Conclusion: Don't Be Spooky or Weird,
Appendix,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Dangerous Dogma

Before turning to a close investigation of the ways in which thoughtful people talk about their faith, we need to step back and consider why the God problem actually is a problem. Our contemporary culture sometimes gives us the false impression that believing in God is not problematic at all, especially because so many people do believe and apparently consider it reasonable to believe. For one thing, our culture is highly relativistic, and so it is not uncommon to hear about people who, for instance, are dedicated scientists and devout Christians, and to say to ourselves, "Well, that's their business." Instead of questioning how they can reconcile these beliefs, we just assume they must have their reasons. Similarly, we hear a politician or athlete say that she is asking God's blessing on America or that he is praying for victory, and we somehow determine that these are just figures of speech. Or we fall back on distinctions we have learned somewhere during our long years of schooling and tell ourselves that facts are different from values or that reason is different from faith. These are ways of talking—and will deserve our attention later on—but they do not satisfy the critics who take a skeptical view of religion. The critics have put forth some trenchant arguments about why it actually should be difficult for intelligent, well-educated people in the United States and elsewhere to believe in God.

Much of the recent concern about religion stems from the view that beliefs about God are irrational. The kind of rationality with which this criticism is concerned involves using appropriate means to accomplish one's ends. A rational approach to driving a nail involves using a hammer. A rational way of treating an illness is to call a doctor. Asking God to drive the nail or to treat the illness would be irrational because any normal, intelligent person knows there are more effective ways of proceeding. Prayers and other religious incantations do not get the job done, and to think they do is to engage in superstition. In the past, before the advent of scientific medicine, people who held superstitious beliefs could perhaps be excused for these false ways of thinking, critics argue. But in the contemporary world, being superstitious is a sign of stupidity. Thoughtful, educated people should know better. Indeed, the whole purpose of modern science and education has been to develop rational ways of pursuing our goals. If we want to increase the yield of our crops, we experiment with hybrid seed varieties, fertilizer, and irrigation; we do not pray, as people did centuries ago, in hopes that the gods will intervene. This is not to say that thoughtful Americans are always rational about everything they do. We nevertheless strive to find the most effective ways of getting what we want. A person who wants to do well on an exam knows that the rational course of action is to spend time studying. He or she may spend too much time partying, but that is a matter of poor planning and of deflecting one's energies from achieving one's goals. To be irrational would be to assume that partying itself is the correct way to earn good grades. Expecting God to reveal the answers for the exam is similarly irrational. And it strikes us as plain stupid if people think that hexes, magic, and other superstitious activities are going to work.

The criticism that much of what passes for devout faith is irrational has focused especially on prayer. An Internet video entitled "Proving That Prayer Is Superstition," which has purportedly reached a far larger audience than Dennett, Dawkins, and company, makes this criticism by pointedly likening prayer to asking a lucky horseshoe for favors. A lucky horseshoe has no effect on the outcome when rolling dice, the video explains. Praying would have no effect on the dice, either. "Belief in prayer is a superstition," the narrator observes, "just like the belief in lucky horseshoes." The video continues, arguing that praying for God to cure cancer is similarly superstitious. "Will God reach down and eliminate all the cancerous cells? If you are a normal, intelligent person, you know what will happen. Nothing. This prayer will have no effect whatsoever."

Just to be clear, this criticism taken by itself does not constitute an argument against believing in the existence of God. Even the most ardent critics would acknowledge that this is the case. It still might seem rational to believe that God or something God-like exists because there are unknown and perhaps unknowable aspects of the universe. Or it might seem reasonable to believe that God exists because this God offers a person everlasting life in heaven. But those kinds of beliefs have very little to do with the God problem I am describing. God is not a problem only as long as that God steers clear of any active involvement in the world as we know it. The God of an unknowable universe or of life in heaven is a God that can be believed in without imagining that this God intervenes in any way with daily life. This God need not perform miraculous cures, make rain, or assist in winning the lottery. As soon as this God starts messing with the natural order, the God problem comes into play. An educated person will have difficulty believing that God can cause the sun to stand still, virgins to give birth, rain to fall, and diseases to be cured.

A slight variant on the argument that believing in God is an irrational way of achieving one's goals is the idea that God or some other supernatural being is responsible for one's failures. The claim that "the devil made me do it" is one example. Suppose I steal a car, get caught, and at trial explain to the judge that I had been instructed by an evil spirit to commit this felony. The judge might not send me to prison but have me locked up in an insane asylum. At the very least, the court would consider my defense irrational. The same logic applies in less extreme cases. If I am a thoughtful, well-educated person and am having difficulties in my marriage, the rational thing to do is to talk to a friend or seek help from a trained therapist, marriage counselor, or psychiatrist—not to visit an exorcist. If my marriage founders, some part of me may decide that it was God's will, but I would have trouble with the thought that I could have prevented it if I had prayed harder or that God was punishing me for something I had done.

Recent critics of religion have gone a step further than earlier critics in demonstrating that belief in God is very likely to be irrational. The irrationality of believing in God, they argue, is not just a matter of bad logic. There are actually good reasons why a person might hold irrational beliefs about God. Many of these reasons have to do with human evolution. For example, something about the way the human brain has evolved disposes us to look for agents as the cause of things. A crop failure prompts us to ask, "Who caused it?" We are also especially inclined to remember stories about...