Why I Believe in God
Organized religion is facing a difficult time. For the Catholic Church, the worst of it is the series of child sex abuse scandals that surfaced in the 1990s and seems to continue without end. As a Catholic, I find the Church’s behavior indefensible. The conduct of the priests involved was bad enough, but the impulse of the Church hierarchy to cover it up is worse. Many have cited this scandal as a reason to leave Catholicism in particular and religion in general, arguing that if the religious life does not possess enough moral content to inspire basic human decency, it is hardly of value as a path for living, let alone a path to God. If there is a God.
Although the sex scandals are the specific reason many ex-believers cite for their exit from religion, they are really only a single (though significant) milestone in a long drift away from God. In modern times, there has been a gradual rejection of religious ideas, an erosion of theology under the rising tide of science and technology. People today, comfortable with the internet and international flights, automobiles and air conditioning — all products of science — feel they can navigate life without reference to God or spiritualism of any kind.
But the modern age has brought fears as well as comforts, and these fears may keep God relevant yet. We have improved in many ways, but in many others we have only exchanged one set of griefs for another. We have replaced slavery and the oppression of women with nuclear weapons, terrorism, and mass school shootings. The power to live in comfort has shifted the threat of death away from cholera and appendicitis to world war and genocide. Instead of Black Death we get climate change. Instead of dental abscesses we get the moral emptiness of hourly wages in the gig economy. The paradox of powerful technology is that, while it can bring great good, it also brings the potential for great evil.
So I would argue that there is a place for religion in modern life. If I were to debate an anti-religious atheist, one question I would have is this: If one could raise a magic wand and eradicate a single evil from humanity, which one would it be? The atheist might fall into my trap and say religion. And I would choose greed. Or anger. Or selfishness. Really, any of the seven deadly sins religion has taught us about will do. The point is that it is not religion that makes people terrible to one another, it is basic human weaknesses. People who find profound evil in religion are not looking deeply enough. When religion harms, as it sometimes does, it does so because people use religion as a tool for their own selfish purposes. Calling religion evil is mistaking the instrument for the evildoer, the knife for the murderer.
Even the most beautiful things in life can be subverted. Beauty itself can be an inspiration or a temptation. Justice can be a way to raise human consciousness or an excuse to treat people badly. Religious faith, at its best, allows us to see this. It teaches us that humans are fallen, and that the way to manage our fallen nature is not to ignore sin but to face it and seek healing and deliverance from its grasp. Deliverance does not come from within, for we all have too much propensity for evil in us. It must come from without. This is what Christians mean when they talk about grace.
Having laid out this groundwork, we can now approach the problem of God. In developing this argument I am indebted to C.S. Lewis, especially Mere Christianity, although I have adapted and incorporated other concepts to fashion my own point of view.
Ethics and God
For the most part, my faith in God rests on ethical foundations. There are other ways to get at the question, including metaphysical and epistemological arguments, but the ethical approach to God fits my thinking the best.
The crux of the issue is, why be concerned with God in the first place? It doesn’t really matter to me if the Great Wall of China exists, or Mount Everest, or the Golden Gate Bridge. They are all nice to look at, but if any of them didn’t exist, nothing would change for me. I would still go to work tomorrow, pay my bills, and drop my kids off at school.
The same argument is often made by atheists — what does it even matter if God exists? Life still sucks and you die, right? How does arguing about the existence of God help if it changes nothing I will do?
I would say that I have a crying need to live with a purpose. For me, meaning in life is everything. Nor am I alone: Some of the best selling spiritual books of all time are titles like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. God gives meaning and direction in life by determining what is good and what is evil. This sense of good and evil informs every decision I make, and gives my life its meaning. Since ethics provides us with a sense of purpose, it seems like a good starting point for considering the existence of God.
God and Good
There are three ways to approach the idea of good. The first way we (and C.S. Lewis) will call naturalism. This approach says that we are all atoms and chemical reactions. There is no meaning to it all. Humans don’t exist because God wanted to create something good. We exist because we evolved through a series of random events.
Here I want to pause and point out that a lot of theists like to criticize naturalism by saying that the idea that humans evolved by a random process is absurd. You cannot, they say, shake a bag full of metal parts and expect them to assemble into a watch. Divine guidance is required for evolution to proceed. You will not hear that argument from me. The principles of evolution and the randomness of quantum mechanics do not strike me as absurd. They are scientifically sound and should not be dismissed.
Instead, I merely observe that if we are all just matter and there is nothing beyond the material world, there cannot be a such thing as absolute good and evil. Atoms are not good or bad. And it follows that if this is so, no arrangement of them comes to goodness. One arrangement of atoms produces a flower, and another arrangement produces a rotting corpse. Since both are composed of exactly the same building blocks, where do we get the idea that one is good and one is not? Not from the objects themselves. Thus naturalism limits our thinking about life in a very significant way — it jettisons all possibility of goodness. As we will see later, some naturalist try to get this idea back by appealing to something we can call human nature, or by a pleasure principle, but this assertion always breaks down. If you think we are nothing but atoms, you can’t have goodness back without cheating.
The second approach humans have used to explain good and evil is to assert that good and evil are opposing forces that are endlessly battling it out for world domination. This method of thinking, often called Dualism, implies that the moral life is a competition between equal and opposite forces. The evil that we see in the world is simply the half of creation that is under the sway of the devil.
At first, Dualism seems strange and absurd, but it is not. The Chinese Yin and Yang represent dualism. The ancient Middle Eastern religion Zoroasterism is a dualist faith, and its influence can be seen in some aspects of Islam (although it is not fair to call Islam a dualistic religion). And some people who call themselves Christians are also Dualists. They believe Satan and God are in competition for the world, and while they think God will ultimately win, they see good and evil as opposing forces. The classic cartoon of the person with an angel on one side and a devil on the other is a representation of Dualism. If you like space movies, the Force in the Star Wars series with its Dark Side and Jedi side is another example of dualism.
The third approach, which is the true Christian approach, is that the world was created by God as ideal, but has fallen into corruption. The clearest example is the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, which starts out as a perfect world for Adam and Eve, but, because of their betrayal of God, becomes corrupted.
The third option is the way I see the world. I think it is the way most people see the world, even if they have not clearly recognized that they do. The world is beautiful, rich, complex, marvelous — and not quite what it ought to be. It isn’t a place where good and evil occupy equal and opposite positions. Nor is it a place that is a bunch of atoms, some of which happen to be you and some of which happen to be me, all a product of a random, meaningless process. It is a place where goodness predominates. Corruption lies underneath, feeding on goodness like a leech.
Proof of this, as writers like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have argued, is that evil is not a thing in itself, but an absence of good. No one is attracted to evil for its own sake the way he or she is attracted to good. The temptation to do evil derives from two motivations: either the use of evil to achieve a good thing, or the desire to pervert a good thing to make it bad, usually because the person doing the perverting cannot live up to the standards of goodness.
The first is easy enough to see. People steal to acquire something they consider good — money, for example. They kill out of a desire for justice, or commit adultery for the pleasure of sex or for romantic acceptance.
Other evil things are perverted good — good things corrupted. Hate is not a thing itself, but the complete absence of love. Hate occurs, for instance, when a person who, jealous of what another person has, rejects all good feeling towards that person. What is left is a residue of anger and jealousy. Hate requires the conscious rejection of concern for another, the draining away of all love. Because the hater finds the standard of loving his enemy too high, the hater rejects love and embraces the absence of love.
While hate is the absence of a good thing, we do not think of its opposite, love, as an absence. Love is definitely a thing, not the negation of a thing. This is true of all moral goods. Attraction and admiration are not corrupted jealousy. It is jealousy that is a corruption of attraction. Pedophilia, another evil, is a perversion of natural sexual love. Anger is a thirst for fairness and the instinct to act in self-defense that has been drained of concern for the well-being of the other. Anger is justice and self-love perverted. Perversion may not at first seem to be a synonym for absence, but reflection reveals that it is: to pervert something is to take the original and make it into something else without adding to it. To do this you must take something away, dilute it, distort it. Something has to be taken away; there has to be an absence of something in the original.
Did you ever notice that it is impossible to be angry and feel concern for another at the same time? Anger blots out other feelings. An angry person will do destructive things he or she would never do in any other context. This is the reason people like to be angry — because anger erases fear, or anything approaching concern for others. Angry people are free of the constraints of ethics. This is a very convenient thing to feel.
The fact that anger blots out love is evidence that it is a perversion of the good. When a person feels love, it is possible to feel many other things — fear, concern, happiness, assertiveness, sexual desire. Love permits other feelings. Evil impulses like hate, jealousy, and anger do not permit love or other positive feelings to co-exist with them. You can love a person and be moderately angry with them, but you cannot be truly furious at someone and feel love for them at the same time. Since anger and hate are perversions of love, these emotions do not permit love to co-exist with them.
This, by the way, is why Christianity teaches that tolerance of anger and hate is sinful. Since they are the opposites of love — love corrupted — they cannot co-exist with love without corrupting love.
Since evil is not a thing itself but a corruption of good, this explains why evil is really only understood in contrast to good. If someone dies, we mourn the death because there was once life, a good; we never mourn people who never existed. If evil were a thing itself, independent of love, it could exist on its own without any relation to any good, just as an orange can be in a bag of apples without either the orange or the apple affecting one another. But since evil is corrupted good, it makes sense that it seems to spread, feeding on the good it cannot exist without, infecting good things and ruining them.
This also provides us a clear path to fighting evil. Nurture the good. Feed love, irrigate justice, shelter the growth of kindness. Our human instinct to fight evil by choosing to be good is exactly right. What is corrupt cannot be readily uncorrupted; it must be rejected and allowed to wither away. Corruption is defeated when it is crowded out by health and beauty.
How Good Leads to God
If we accept that the world is good but corrupt, this leads to a deeper question. Where does goodness come from? Goodness, as we have discussed earlier, is not a property of matter. There is nothing about an atom or a subatomic particle, about gravity or the photon, that is necessarily good. If all we are is matter, it is hard to see where goodness comes from. Put simply, if all electrons, protons, and neutrons are good, then all matter is good. There would be no evil at all. There is nothing about a subatomic particle that makes it morally different from any other. So if some things are good and others are evil, and if evil is goodness corrupted, good must come from somewhere other than mere matter.
Goodness seems to be a transcendental property of nature; that is, it is a quality that cannot be seen but is somehow added on to the physical. Something that nature does not have in and of itself. One could argue that goodness need not come from a sentient being, such as God, and in a way I have no quarrel with that. God is not a thinking being in the way we understand thought; God is not a person the way we think of people. People exist in time. Our thoughts change from moment to moment — one moment we are thinking about the weather outside, the next about what’s for dinner. God is being itself. God doesn’t think different things at different times. When God says something is good, it is always good as long as it lasts and whenever it recurs.
But we may have leapt too far, too quickly. So let’s go back and see what we mean here. God is an uncreated creature that brings order and purpose to the universe, that makes some things more vital and beautiful than others and some things more crucial to joy than others. The way God “thinks” about something in the world gives that thing its goodness, determines when it will come into being and when it will cease to exist, and places it in a natural hierarchy. God can be thought of as that transcendental force that gives everything a meaning and a place in the cosmos. Put another way, God is what we see when we say something is good.
In this way of thinking, it makes sense that some things are better than others, that some things point more clearly to greater things. Why do we, for example, find a rose more attractive than a slug on the ground? There is no logical reason for it, and no biological one either. But a rose points towards symmetry and color, it appeals to our sense of emotion in a way that a slug does not. It suggests that some things are more pleasing than others. This does not necessarily prove that God exists, but it shows that even in our casual thoughts we see that things that ought to be materially equal in fact have places in an aesthetic hierarchy. This suggests the possibility of a higher, spiritual hierarchy.
Naturalism and Moral Relativism
Naturalist philosophers, by and large, hold that there is no intrinsic good in nature. Goodness, these naturalists say, is a figment of our imagination. We see a rose as more beautiful than a slug, but that is just our mind’s reaction to a state of affairs that has nothing to do with reality. A horse finds grass more delicious than spaghetti; for a human it is the other way around. Therefore, good is in the mind of the beholder, and not a property of nature. Goodness, rather than being a real thing, is relative, and depends on who is doing the thinking.
This is an alluring argument. It skips over the thorny problems of ethics entirely and replaces it with the simple matter of what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. But the problem is that when you press the naturalist on the concept of goodness, he has great trouble wiggling out of the idea that good is an objective thing and not a matter of personal taste.
For instance, one could argue that enjoying a cup of coffee with breakfast and the act of murder are just a matter of taste. Someone could take a liking to either. The naturalist will come back with the argument that we humans share an ethic that says we should not hurt others, and this should be our common goal. It is a goal that people agree on, and therefore one we should follow and label as good. We label it good because we, as a society, have agreed on this.
In the end, the rock the naturalist crashes on is the concept of truth. When your only sense of good and evil comes from social consensus, you find that your very basis of good and evil slips out from underneath. Follow their argument: Naturalists argue that the we should follow rules that all humans agree upon. Why? Because all people will be happier that way. So what? We want all people to be happy. Again, why? Because our goal is to achieve the greatest amount of happiness. Again, why? Because that is a practical way of living. If you make me happy, I will make you happy in return. Again, why? I can just make myself happy, and to hell with you.
Do you see why this is a slippery argument? We should agree on a good because it will make us happy, and happiness is good. But why is happiness good? Because we agreed on it! This is like saying I will take this poker chip and say it is worth a million dollars and you will take another poker chip and say it is worth a million dollars. Then we will trade poker chips and make each other rich! But that’s not how anyone thinks of happiness. We think of happiness as a good, in and of itself. It’s not something we agreed to. It is something that is good, in a real sense. Do you seek happiness because you were told to, or because you see value in it yourself, value that you will not allow someone else to talk you out of?
The argument that good is not objective and instead comes from social agreement gets worse. If it makes the majority happy to own slaves, by this argument we can perfectly well agree to own slaves. Male chauvinists in years gone by argued that women should stay in the home because they will be happier there. So if most women agree with that, does that still make it all right? Naturalism would suggest that might be the case.
In the end, believing that goodness is just what we agree on, that it is all in our heads, creates a huge problem. There can be no truth regarding human behavior. Slavery and writing operas are the same if both are all right with the majority.
This is a hard position to defend, so at some point the naturalist resorts to the idea that there is a such thing as human nature, that things like slavery are incompatible with human nature, and so shouldn’t be allowed. Or that oppressing women is counter to human nature, and shouldn’t be allowed. Just as grass agrees with the nature of the horse and spaghetti agrees with the nature of the human, there are some things that simply fit in with what humans do, and so ought to be done.
Naturalists can get very sophisticated about this. They attribute patterns of human thinking to DNA and genetic evolution. We have, for instance, an instinct to eat spaghetti and not grass because our DNA has evolved to make us desire things that provide good nutrition for us. Then they apply the same thinking to human ethics. Evolution, they say, selects for humans who function as part of a greater society, and things like religion and ethics are fictions that work as emotional glue to create these societies. Although morality seems real, it is only an emotional pattern wired into the minds for the human species for survival, much as a leopard’s spots are programmed into the leopard for its survival.
This may seem like a new idea, using science to construct the concept of human nature, but it is not. Still we are stuck with the naturalist’s old argument, that morality is an illusion. Good isn’t good, and bad isn’t bad. Humans just think murder is bad because our DNA tells us so, and our DNA tells us so because it is an adaptation for the survival of our species. Again we are left asking the same questions: If cannibalism helps the survival of our species, does that make it good? Domestic abuse? White supremacy? After all, in human history racism keeps turning up, and so a definite argument could be made that it is programmed into us, and thus, important for our species’s survival. For, you see, if we are going to rest good and bad on the backs of our DNA, then whatever evolution says is right, no matter how revolting we may find it, must be perfectly all right.
I am not entirely in disagreement with the concept of human nature. Except that I maintain that “human nature” is that part of us that is like God — that is, the soul. Human nature for me, for a theist, is transcendental, a part of us that is added on, not purely dependent on atoms and molecules. A naturalist who argues that we can base goodness on human nature or DNA throws every sense of good and evil into meaninglessness. Naturalists can never fully escape the trap of meaninglessness. As I pointed out earlier, you can’t derive goodness from atoms. It isn’t there.
The Three Approaches to Good, and Why Two Fail
Thus far we have observed that goodness is a transcendental property of nature. Any other definition of goodness has implications that are not coherent. We have also considered that evil, while it appears to be the opposite of goodness, is not really a thing, but instead the absence or corruption of goodness.
The concept of good is the basis of ethics, because morality is mainly concerned with making choices that bring about good results. Few people argue that we live in a world without any role for ethics. Naturalists tend to argue that what we call morality is a human imposition on the world, an imaginary human nature, but for the most part, they don’t argue that we should dispense with morality entirely.
Our first option for looking at the meaning of good, that we are just material and there is nothing else to be said about it, breaks down because it leaves us adrift with no sound principles to steer us. War and peace; love and hate; justice and racism — these are all rearrangements of atoms with no application to the real world. Illusions. This is not a world I consent to live in.
The second choice, dualism, argues that good and evil are competing forces. At first this seems useful because it provides a ready explanation for the presence of evil in the world. Evil is present because it is on equal footing with goodness, and goodness has no dominion over it. But on careful analysis it also breaks down. If good and evil are just opposites, why choose one over another? Hate and love are opposites. Why not choose hate to live by? The answer is because we feel that hate corrupts, while love nourishes. This moves us towards the idea that evil is not the opposite of good, but instead a corruption of good. Dualism does not do a very good job of explaining why we should choose good over the evil. The dualist may argue that we choose good because good is better than evil. This is a poor answer. It puts good above evil in creation, giving goodness a kind of dominion over evil and slides us over into the view that good is preferable to evil. If we accept this point we are no longer pure dualists, but moving into the domain of our third and most reasonable option.
What we want out of our ethical system is a set of values that tell us what direction to take. Dualism ultimately fails at this purpose, and in fact can badly confuse things. If I were a dualist I might not be motivated to do the right thing, but instead would pick the side most beneficial in that particular instance. Since good and evil are slugging it out in an eternal, unwinnable battle, the role of humans isn’t to pick a side, but to take advantage of the conflict however they can. Selling your soul to the Devil isn’t a bad decision, it’s simply profiting from the business market.
The third choice, that evil is corruption of good, not only seems more likely than the others, but it also happens to be the viewpoint of a major world religion: Christianity. Christianity, and to a large extent Judaism as well, paints the picture of the world as fallen, as a world that was originally good but has fallen into corruption. Christianity says that the world was created pure and good and in the image of God, but that mankind, through an act of egotism and rebellion (seizing the knowledge of good and evil) has alienated itself from God. Humanity has become corrupt. Jesus — or in Judaism, the Messianic belief — is the instrument through which God rescues humanity from corruption.
This is the way I see the world. I see it as a beautiful place, but a place that has been corrupted. It is a place made in the image of God, but because goodness is not everywhere, it is apart from God. Because this observation of the nature of good and evil fits well within the story Christianity tells, this suggests that God is real, and that Christian philosophy is true.
The Final Steps to God
Some people, absorbing all this, will protest that while the argument that good exists and evil is a corruption of it sounds reasonable, this does not prove God. Haven’t I made a sudden, implausible jump?
It is true that moving from goodness as a real thing to the existence of God is something of a leap. But let’s acknowledge how far this thinking has gotten us. We have argued that good is a property of nature, but not a physical part of nature. It therefore is transcendental, an added-on property. It may be that it isn’t God that adds this property, but since right and wrong are not things that can be found in nature, they must come from somewhere. Since the things we see as the greatest goods — love, trust, honesty, justice — are all properties that seem to spring from reason, it is logical that the source of ethical goodness is also a being of reason.
Let’s put it another way. If we find something in nature that only makes sense to a rational being, it logically follows that this thing was created by a rational being. If we are walking in the jungle and find a pyramid built of stone bricks, we would assume a civilized culture built it. It would be silly to think that a pyramid in the jungle was generated by random changes in unthinking natural forces, or by a band of gorillas who have the physical skill but no knowledge of geometry or engineering. Since the add-on properties of beauty, justice, love, and truth are intelligent and good, it is reasonable to think that the being who added them would be good and intelligent as well. And here we arrive at a reasonable explanation for God.
A final objection would be that moral properties could have evolved without God. We don’t think of Newton’s Law of Gravity as proof of God, but it is rational. So, if scientific law does not prove God, moral law may not, either. Just because morality is rational doesn’t mean it took a God to make it come about.
And yet, there is a difference between the two. The laws of gravity are only descriptions of the behavior of physical things. A ball in motion doesn’t choose to follow the law of gravity. The law of gravity only describes the motion of the ball. Physical laws are observational. They describe and predict behavior, but they make no rational comments about nature. Moral laws, on the other hand, do comment on behavior and can only be understood through intellect. Although a cat obeys the law of gravity when it pounces on a bird, the cat has no sense of whether killing the bird is right or wrong. Morality requires intelligence to exist. And if it is true that humans don’t determine what is good and what is not, some other intellect must be doing so. Thus, God.
And this is why I believe in God. This discussion is not intended as a definitive proof of the existence of God. I do not believe an airtight argument exists. Why God would choose not to reveal himself incontrovertibly is a hard question, but the fact that God is invisible in no way proves he doesn’t exist. We believe in many things we cannot see. Furthermore, almost all of the things we believe in we accept not with absolute proof, but only with strong signposts. This is normal and does not stop us from doing things like seeking jobs without proof that working is good for us, marrying without proof that love exists, paying taxes without proof that civil rights are a real thing, or consenting to be paid in money without proof that paper money is worth what it says it is. Nor does it stop us from insisting on being told the truth, or seeking to love and be loved by others. Some of the most gratifying things we do in life we choose without airtight proof. This is something our lives demand of us. It is reasonable to accept that religious faith should not be any different.
