What We Need

We used to think that the earth was the center of the universe. The planets and even the sun were thought to orbit the earth. Contrary to popular belief, this idea did not come from the Bible but from ancient Greek philosophers like Ptolemy and Aristotle. Things didn't change until 1543 when Copernicus, a Catholic priest, proposed a heliocentric or sun-centered arrangement of our solar system. And Galileo confirmed it by telescope in 1610. So we are no longer at the center of the universe in science's consideration. Or are we?

In 1973, at a symposium commemorating the 500^th birthday of Copernicus, theoretical physicist Brandon Carter coined the term “anthropic principle” to refer to the fact that many of the features of our universe, such as its age, the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, and others, are precisely those needed to allow life to develop. If their values were greater or less than they are, life could not exist anywhere. And this fact makes some scientists, especially atheistic ones, uncomfortable because it looks as if our universe is, if not designed, then at least fine-tuned to promote the development of life. To avoid that, they have proposed that there are multiple universes with different conditions in them and this just happens to be the one which permits life to exist. Other scientists point out that there is no evidence of these alternate universes (Sorry, MCU) and that this is just an excuse not to contemplate the implications of a universe that is apparently built around life.

Our sermon suggestion question is “Did we create God just to make ourselves feel better and explain away the mysteries?” In other words, is God, as an acquaintance of mine puts it, just an imaginary friend for adults?

It's an appealing way to explain away a God you don't wish to exist. Desiring that there is a God doesn't make it true, anymore than desiring ice cream means that when you open your freezer, you'll find it packed with Ben and Jerry's. But as the anthropic principle shows, that while it may not grant our desires, reality does conform to our needs. C.S. Lewis pointed out that, for instance, our appetite for food is strong evidence that food does exist, if not in your fridge then somewhere in the world. Your body really does need it.

And not all of our needs are physical. Love and affection are real needs for human beings. You may have heard of the horrific findings of a study of Romanian orphanages. Even when all of their physical needs were taken care of, children who did not receive love and attention from the overworked staff often died. Those who survived were mentally damaged. The question is not, then, do we desire God but do we need God?

How do we define needs? One element is that a need is natural whereas a desire can be created. We need food to live but we only desire Doritos or Dr. Pepper or blooming onions because media, marketing, and even our peers brainwash us into thinking we must have them. So is there any evidence that belief in God comes from within people or is it urged upon us from without?

As it turns out, a study by Oxford researchers shows that children naturally believe that there is a God who designed the world. This is true even in cultures, such as the Japanese, in which kids are not indoctrinated with religious beliefs. The evidence is so overwhelming that the senior researcher, anthropologist Dr. Justin Barrett, said of children, “If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves, I think they would believe in God.” This is not proof that God exists but certainly it is evidence that God is not an unnatural concept inflicted on us by others for either well-intentioned or nefarious reasons. In fact, comedian Julia Sweeney, an atheist, was dismayed to find that her daughter believed in God, though not raised to do so. Studies show it is hard to convince kids otherwise, at least until they get to be 12.

And every day the evidence mounts that our brains, if not hardwired for belief in God, are at least God-friendly in the same sense that the universe is life-friendly. While there has been a lot of attention to the growing group of “nones,” people who do not have a religious affiliation, the vast majority are neither atheists or agnostics. 70% of people who say they don't have a religion believe in God. This should not surprise anyone. If you are a believer, then you would expect belief in God to be a sort of default setting. If you are a non-believer, then everything must be explained without resorting to the supernatural and that means the widespread belief in God has to arise naturally.

Still like the anthropic principle, the implications of the naturalness of belief in God discomforts atheists. They would much prefer that the explanation for belief in God be that it is an aberration or a socially transmitted delusion. Because, according to them, the effects of religious belief are overwhelmingly negative. But is that true?

A study by the Paris School of Economics and the European Center for Social Welfare Policy and Research shows that religious people are more content and cope better with life's shocks, such as the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. After more than a decade of studying the relationship between religious belief and health, University of Miami researcher Michael McCullough says that, by a wide margin, religious people do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages, and are generally happier than nonbelievers. They have better self-control and are less likely to break the law, have sex outside marriage, do drugs or abuse alcohol. Obviously there are exceptions but these positive effects are true of the majority of people who believe in God.

Ok, so believing in God can make your life better, but is that the same as a need? Remember the unloved Romanian orphans? Not all died, but those who lived had serious psychological impairments. So one could argue that God is a need in the same sense that love is, or that certain vitamins are. You won't necessarily die if you don't get enough Vitamin D but your life will be less healthy and probably not as long. Certainly a lot of the behaviors that religious people tend to avoid, like drinking or breaking the law, will, if indulged in, lead to a less healthy and probably shortened life.

But we are talking about social behaviors here. Does belief in God have actual physical benefits? McCollough has found a positive correlation between church attendance (the only objective way for scientists to measure religiosity) and lower incidence of blood pressure and of heart disease, the number one cause of death in this country. A study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior shows religious people have a lower mortality rate from digestive and respiratory cancer. Believers spend less time in hospitals and recover faster. Levels of interleukin-6, which indicate immune response, are elevated in conditions such as AIDS, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and other diseases. A 6-year study of more than 1700 older adults found that those who regularly attend religious services tend to have lower interleukin-6 levels, which might explain the overall better health and better recovery rates of believers.

Can not believing kill you? It can make you more likely to kill yourself. Suicide rates are much lower among actively religious people, a fact attributed to stronger moral objections to suicide and lower levels of aggression. Believers also have significantly lower degrees of hopelessness, which is described in a 1998 study as “the most critical psychological variable predictive of suicidal ideation and behavior.” In fact, according to the World Health Organization, “Of the top ten nations with the highest male suicide rates, all but one (Sri Lanka) are strongly irreligious nations with high levels of atheism...of the bottom ten nations with the lowest male suicide rates, all are highly religious nations with statistically insignificant levels of organic atheism.” (In the US the suicide rate among males is 4 times higher than among females. It is the second most common cause of death for men under the age of 45.) Of course, many irreligious nations have legalized suicide and assisted suicide. It is also interesting to note that Sri Lanka, the one religious country among the top ten countries with a high male suicide rate, was also the site of a recently resolved but decades-long civil war, in which the Tamal Tigers, atheistic Marxists, pioneered the technique of suicide bombing! That may have influenced that country's data on male suicides.

So there are personal benefits to believing in God. But does that personal belief translate into social good? Again Michael McCollough, by having folks remember past wrongs while monitoring their anger and stress through their heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration, found that religious people are less vengeful and more forgiving. And throughout the history of the world, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and charities have been primarily founded by religious organizations. This creates a culture in which these things come to be considered so important that eventually they are adopted and supported by governments and social entities. In fact, historian Tom Holland has shown that the values we take for granted—compassion for the unfortunate, helping the disadvantaged, caring for the sick, rooting for the underdog—are all due to the influence of Christianity upon our culture. They were not the norm before the spread of belief in Jesus, the God who is love. Studies have shown that religion is the key factor in building civilizations, because it binds large numbers of strangers with beliefs, behaviors and a sense of belonging that otherwise would not exist outside of a family or tribe.

Sociologist Rodney Stark argued that science arose in the Christian West due to a belief in a single rational God who created human beings in his image. This meant humans could understand the mind of God through exploring his creation. Other great civilizations like China, though they had a head start on the West in the sciences, did not continue to build on them because they believed in multiple gods who often warred with one another or who had control of only certain aspects of creation.

So is God a need? Belief in God is natural; it spontaneously arises in children; it is present in virtually every culture; and it is in complete harmony with the way our brains are set up. Belief in God is good for both the physical and mental health of the individual and it is beneficial to society at large. But what about the idea that religion mostly causes negative effects on society, like wars? Researcher Michael White, who catalogued the 100 biggest atrocities in history, has found that only 10% of wars were caused by religion. 90% of wars had nonreligious causes. And let us not forget that the officially atheistic nations of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China killed 100 times more people in just one century than did so-called “Christians” in 20 centuries. Because the greater violence we see in atheistic societies might be due to the fact that when you remove God as the supreme authority, you create a power vacuum. In steps the next highest authority, the State. And no State ever said, “love your enemies.”

It certainly looks like God is a need for healthy individuals and healthy societies. But does that mean God exists? I mean, maybe we created God to fill that need. If so, this would make it the only need ever to arise without a reality to fill it. It would be like having a stomach in a world without food. If it's a need, going without a way to fill that need is harmful. The answer to a need needs to exist. You need shelter; shelter exists. You need sleep; sleep exists. You need love; love exists. You need God but God doesn't? How could that possibly be?

It's even nonsense from an evolutionary point of view. According to Darwin, things change in order to better adapt to an environment. This means that an animal that lives in a tree evolves feet or paws or claws that conform better to the reality of tree trunks and branches. To create a sense of a God who isn't there means to evolve in response to an unreality. It would be like an animal that lives in the desert evolving fins or gills.

Ah, but could God be a mistaken answer to a need for something else? But what would that be? What else encompasses all the needs that God fills? God gives us meaning. God gives us a moral code. God forgives our sins, God gives us love. God gives us someone to pray to. God gives us someone to emulate. God gives us lots to think about. God gives us much to sing about. God gives us a promise of justice. God gives us a reason to hope. God pushes us to expand our ideas of what we can do, of who is a member of our family, of how we are to respond to injustice and to the needs of others. There is no one thing that does all that. People have tried to substitute other things for God—the state, the family, other groups, friendship, romance, art, entertainment, sports, celebrity worship, other cultural phenomena—but none is adequate. Trying to use them in place of God is like pica—the compulsion to eat dirt or other inedible substances, displayed by some pregnant women, in response to a lack of certain necessary minerals in their diet. Nobody prefers dirt to a good diet, the thing you really need.

There is no substitute for God and no getting around the fact that we need him. This is not to say that people don't try to recreate God in an image more to their liking. People try to eliminate his more fearsome aspects to make him more cuddly, thereby declawing his moral force. Others try to eliminate his unconditional love for all his creatures in order to make him more partisan. Some elevate a charismatic human leader, like Hitler or a cult leader, to godlike status, only to see him fall when his hubris makes him go too far. Some reduce God to an abstract concept that underlies the universe but which will not interfere with how we choose to live our lives. Some reduce him to a hanging judge and others to an abusive father and still others to an ineffectual but well-meaning grandfather. But the real God defies being pigeonholed.

When Moses asked his name, God replied, “I am who I am.” Which doesn't tell us a lot. It's almost as if God were saying, “I exist and that's all you need to know for now.” In Jesus Christ, we get a clearer picture of the God who made us and loves us and redeemed us. But we still don't know everything about him. We never will. A God who is totally comprehensible to the human mind is not the God who made everything. And that speaks to other needs he fills—the needs for wonder and for curiosity and to ponder and to explore. We need them as we need God. And we need to remember how much more there is to life, the universe and everything than simply what we see.

First preached on July 5, 2009. It has been updated.