What Most People Get Wrong

Truth, Falsity, and Spirituality without Religion

Through the years, I’ve taught philosophy courses for hundreds, maybe thousands, of students at nine different colleges or universities. Many of those have been introductory courses that include a couple of weeks on religious questions. Pretty much every time I’ve raised those questions, I’ve introduced them to my students via some version of the following prompt:

Whether you yourself believe in God, disbelieve in God, or have no opinion about the existence of God, what might be some reasons in favor of belief? What might be some reasons in favor of disbelief?

In more recent years, prior to soliciting students’ answers, I have pointed out to them that there are at least three kinds of “reasons” one might have for believing or disbelieving in God. Some reasons can be described as biographical: if a person believes in God merely because he was raised in a religious home, that would be a biographical reason for his belief. Other reasons can be described as pragmatic: imagine a person who finds belief in God to be a source of comfort and strength, so she professes some kind of religious faith as a strategy for dealing with the challenges of life. For her, belief in God is a useful thing to possess. These are not unimportant concerns, but in my role as a philosophy professor, I am not terribly interested in these kinds of reasons. What I’m looking for when I ask my Philosophy 101 students for “reasons to believe in God” are justifying reasons: I want to hear about the kinds of considerations that purport to make theistic belief reasonable. I want my students to offer reasons for supposing that the statement God exists is more likely to be true than false.

Now, it has always seemed to me fairly obvious that a philosophy professor would be asking for justifying reasons rather than biographical or pragmatic reasons when he or she raises the question “why would someone believe in God?” But it turns out that what seems obvious to me is not always obvious to my students. I need to take the time to explain these different kinds of reasons because if I don’t, the overwhelming majority of students will focus exclusively on the kinds of reasons I’m not interested in. “A lot of people believe in God because that’s how they were raised.” “Someone might believe in God because they are afraid to die.” And so on.

The downside to explaining these different kinds of reasons and then declaring to the class, “Okay, so, what I’m looking for are justifying reasons for belief in God,” is that people just stare at me blankly. The idea that someone might have that kind of reason for their religious beliefs is often brand-new to them.

Why is that?

I have a theory about this, and I’m pretty sure it’s correct:

One of the dominant ideas in western culture is that religious statements are not the kinds of things that can be true or false.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that this idea is universally held in our culture. There are plenty of religious people—I’m one of them—and plenty of irreligious people who are quite confident that religious claims can be true or false and who even spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to figure out which ones are which. But hey: every culture has its weirdos. Every culture has people who don’t quite go along with the flow. And it’s crucial to understand this idea of a cultural “flow” in order to understand the claim I’m making here.

I’m not going to attempt, in this particular Substack post, to argue that theism actually is true. I’m interested in the statement that belief in God is the kind of thing that could be true, in the same way it’s true that the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day or that gravity is proportional to mass. Like, you know, actually true.

Now, I suspect that most people who are inclined to read the stuff I write are already pretty firmly on board with this idea, and to those folks it may feel like I am belaboring a point that doesn’t really need to be made in the first place. But for anyone who is not already comfortable with this way of thinking, or for those who are comfortable with it but are interested in better understanding the culture in which we live, let me say a bit more.

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how easily we get sucked into a particular way of conceiving the world. Given the realities of human nature, this is probably inevitable. We are born at particular times and places, to particular people inhabiting particular cultures. We are influenced from our very first moments of consciousness—maybe even earlier—by the ideas, attitudes, and assumptions that prevail among those peoples and cultures. And while it is possible for a cognitively normal human being to call those ideas, attitudes, and assumptions into question, we have to notice them first. That’s not nearly as easy to do as you might think.

Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate. Here’s the first. Years ago, when she was an undergraduate and an evangelical Christian, my wife went on a mission trip to Albania. One of the experiences from that trip that has stayed with her ever since was one of the first conversations she had with the family with whom she was staying, a family that was enjoying a comfortable lifestyle by then-contemporary Albanian standards but would have been considered poor by nearly all Americans. In telling them about her own life and circumstances, Jen mentioned, as one would, that her parents divorced when she was young. Upon hearing this, the father of the family’s eyes welled up with tears, and it became clear to Jen that the whole family was heartbroken for her about something that most Americans, frankly, would hardly bat an eye over.

A second illustration involves an anecdote about a young woman I know. As the story was related to me, this woman, a recent college graduate who was raised in a nominally Catholic home but does not now seem to be practicing any form of religious faith, was asked by her father about the place of Catholicism in her life. She quickly made it clear that it had little or no place, and by way of defending her position—as, again, it was told to me—she rolled her eyes and said, “The Church doesn’t believe in contraception, Dad.”

Just as I’m not going to argue for theism in this essay, I’m also not going to say anything substantive about divorce or contraception. I simply want to call our shared attention to the broader cultural contexts that make these reactions—that of the Albanian father to divorce and that of the young woman to Catholicism, I mean—coherent and explicable. I know next to nothing about the Albanian man’s education and intellectual or religious formation. I’d be incredibly surprised, however, to learn that he had any sophisticated training in any relevant academic discipline. I suspect that he had simply absorbed and deeply internalized a whole host of attitudes and assumptions about the nature and value of marriage, family life, and human flourishing more broadly that led him to weep for sorrow at the idea of a child experiencing her parents’ divorce. Similarly, I know enough about the young woman mentioned above that I would be utterly astonished to learn that she had wrestled in any meaningful way with the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. It would be astounding to discover that she is well-versed in Pope Saint John Paul II’s theology of the body or the natural law tradition in moral philosophy, and has carefully worked out her own understanding of sexual ethics in a sophisticated way. Is it impossible? No. But it seems far more likely that she has simply grown up in a culture where the freedom to pursue sexual fulfillment independently of any deep commitments or responsibilities—i.e., independently of marriage or childbearing—is taken to be an obvious and basic human good, an ineliminable component of a well-lived life, and therefore the entire Catholic religion can safely and concisely be dismissed via the observation, “They don’t believe in contraception, Dad.”

Whether right or wrong, reasonable or unreasonable, the Albanian man and the young American woman have done what I suspect all humans do, or are prone to do: embrace a vision of what is good and how to live on the basis of the culture around them. It’s not just morality, of course. Our ideas about the nature of knowledge and fundamental reality itself are influenced in similar ways. Happily, let me point out, influenced is not the same thing as determined. One could say that the whole reason the discipline of philosophy exists—indeed, the reason for the liberal arts tradition as a whole—is that we humans are able, to some degree, to step outside our own assumptions and ask questions about them. The problem is that we have to notice them first.

There’s a great line in C. S. Lewis’s book Surprised by Joy where he describes a key step in his own intellectual journey. He came to understand, he writes,

that our own age is also ‘a period’ [in history], and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

That’s really the key idea: there are assumptions and attitudes so deep within us “that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

Some years ago, a sociologist of religion named Christian Smith conducted influential research suggesting that the standard contemporary American attitude toward religion could be described as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” That phrase is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s not a terribly complicated idea. Smith was simply saying that the average American believes in a deity who doesn’t really get involved in human affairs, and that the function of religion is to offer some kind of moral guidance and to help us feel better about our lives.

Returning to the point I was making at the start of this essay, I think that the explanation for why so many students have stared blankly at me when I have asked them to suggest “justifying reasons” for belief or disbelief in God is that moralistic therapeutic deism is one of the “widespread assumptions” so deeply “ingrained in [our] age that no one…feels it necessary to defend” it. Many students—many people, that is—are convinced in their bones that the central purpose of religion is to make us feel better about our lives. But if that’s the point, why in the world would you be worried about whether it’s true or not?

I bring all of this up because today is the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the readings for Mass include a statement from St. Paul the Apostle that makes absolutely no sense if you’re a moralistic therapeutic deist. In the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, he writes:

if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain;
you are still in your sins.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.

Those are bold words! St. Paul is saying that if the Christian message isn’t actually true—if Jesus did not really rise from the dead, if he did not literally die and was not buried in a tomb and did not return to life several days later—then Christianity is simply a waste of time. The whole thing is bogus; our “faith is vain.” Those of us who have devoted our lives to Christianity “are the most pitiable people of all.”

I might dare to be equally bold and suggest that the inverse is true as well. If Christ has been raised, if our faith is not in vain, then it’s the most extraordinary and important thing there is. It’s the pearl of great price, worthy of absolutely everything we can give, worthy of our very lives. The person who is satisfied with moralistic therapeutic deism, who is content to dabble in religion when it is convenient or when it offers warm and pleasant feelings, who is, I daresay, “spiritual but not religious” is utterly and profoundly missing the point.

Christianity makes claims that are either true or false. Nay, as St. Paul makes clear, it rests on claims that are either true or false. God exists. Sin separates us from God. God became incarnate in the man Jesus Christ. Jesus died and rose again, making it possible for us to be forgiven of our sins and healed from their effects, for us to live eternally in a redeemed and renewed creation, in the glory of God, forever and ever, amen. If these statements are false, Christianity is at its core a big waste of time. If they are true, the Christian gospel is the centerpiece of all human history and of each human story.

If, dear reader, you are among those who have taken it for granted that religion is essentially and fundamentally about people’s feelings, if you have assumed that it’s just a private matter to be dabbled in (or not) as one happens to be inclined, if you are “spiritual but not religious,” if you have all this time been a moralistic therapeutic deist and not realized it… well, please consider this an invitation to step outside those “widespread assumptions no one feels it necessary to defend.” Consider the possibility that the Christian story is actually true, in the fullest, richest sense of that word. And if it is true, well...

What then?