Or so one often hears. Clearly, there is an objection in this remark, some argument against belief in God, but how exactly is it meant to go? Perhaps the remark can be traced to Freud, who held that belief in God is mere "wish-fulfillment," or Marx, who said that religion is the opiate of the masses, something they turn to for solace in the midst of suffering. The objection seems to be that such solace is the only reason people have for believing in God.
Let’s try to reconstruct this reasoning more carefully.
***
The first premise is something like:
1. People believe in God only because it brings them comfort.
However, already we should ask: Why accept this premise? Is it known on the basis of a statistical survey? Is it the result some mysterious insight in the hearts of believers everywhere? Someone who raises this objection owes us a reason to believe premise 1, which is, after all, an empirical claim about the motives of actual people.
So, one point is that it is unclear what reasons there are to accept premise 1. A further point is that there are reasons to reject it. For, it suggests only a single motive for belief in God, while in fact humans often have many motives for things, and any two people may not have the same motives. Human beings and their human stories are more complicated than that, a thing skeptics are usually willing to admit (one can hear the skeptic, in the next breath, objecting that the church, with its black-and-white moral rules, oversimplifies life; or that the church is too reductive when it says that all humans are sinners; or...).
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Even if we were to grant premise 1, there is a further question as to what exactly is supposed to follow from it. If true, does premise 1 show, for instance, that God does not exist? That would suggest the following argument:
1. People believe in God only because it brings them comfort.
2. If people believe in God only because it brings them comfort, then God does not exist.
3. So, God does not exist.
But premise 2 is clearly false. The fact that people believe a thing for bad reasons does not show it to be untrue. If my psychic tells me that I will live to see another day, and I believe her out of groundless faith in the paranormal, that does not mean I will die this very night. My reasons for belief are one thing; the truth of the belief is quite another.
Consider an analogy with actions: it is one thing to do the right thing, and another to do it for the right reasons. The mere fact that people donate only for tax write-offs does not mean donating is a bad thing to do, just that people sometimes do the right thing for the wrong reason.
***
So, premise 2 is false, but one might suggest a modification:
2*. If people believe in God only because it brings them comfort, then the way they formed their belief in God is unreasonable.
And we would of course need to change the conclusion to fit:
3*. The way people form their belief in God is unreasonable.
However, this conclusion is not all that threatening. Suppose a teenager from an ultra-conservative Christian family believes in evolution just to spite her parents. She does not know the evidence, let’s say; filial spite is her only motive, and that means, of course, she has formed her belief unreasonably. But if there actually is evidence for evolution, then once she learns of this evidence, can't her belief be based thus, like a tree re-planted in richer soil? When it comes to belief in God, we should think exactly this. The question is not, “Do some people have bad reasons for believing in God?”; but, “Are there any good reasons for believing in God?” (I’m not answering that question here; I’m simply addressing an objection.) And if there are good reasons for believing in God—say, the fine-tuning argument—once people learn them, their belief can be based on these more respectable grounds.
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Yet a further problem is that premise 2* is question-begging: It assumes in advance, albeit tacitly, that Christianity is false. Here’s why.
If Christianity is true, then it is plausible that God designed humans to yearn for Him, and to believe in him partly on the basis of such yearning. “God has set eternity in the hearts of men,” writes Ecclesiastes. If that’s true, wouldn't it be odd to fault people for believing in God in just the way that He designed them to? The religion-is-a-crutch objection seems, therefore, to assume that God did not design us that way. But to assume this is just to assume that Christianity is false, since Christianity teaches God did design us that way. So, the objection takes for granted the very thing it aims to prove.
***
Deep down, the person who thinks religions is a crutch might be worried: Can I be a Christian and still be intellectually respectable? Would I have to hitch my wagon to a community whose standards are shoddy? Would I have to be the intellectual equivalent of a wimp?
This is a good worry to have in the sense that it expresses a good value system, one that I share: the life of the mind is important and worth cultivating; serious thinking is worth putting in the service of truth; we must face reality even when it is painful.
Fortunately, while there are pockets of Christians who might reject these values, historically, many Christians have embraced them. Indeed, some of the greatest thinkers have been Christians, or at least, believers in God.
In the Middle Ages, when the great writings of the West were preserved by those Christians who cherished them, there was Augustine, Boethius, John Scotus Erigiuna, Heloise, Peter Abelard, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Petrarch, Aquinas, and Christine de Pizan, just to name a few. In the Modern Era, there was Descartes, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Milton, Kant, and Samuel Johnson. More recently, there has been a renaissance in Christian philosophy, with people like Alvin Plantinga, Peter Van Inwagen, William Alston, and Richard Swinburne.
This list is very far from complete, but it gets the idea across. It is difficult to imagine this impressive group of thinkers as turning to faith simply because they cannot face the burdens of life.
And it is no accident that so many Christians devoted themselves to the life of the mind. The Bible encourages this in many places. Proverbs tells us that wisdom calls and we should listen; Ecclesiastes tells us that wisdom is better than foolishness; and St. Paul tells us to be prepared to give an account of our faith, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. More generally, Christianity sees us as image bearers, which means, partly, that like God we desire truth, and perhaps with Him as our crutch, we may discover it.
Further Reading
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