Sunday Sermonette: Because It Feels Good
Nobody believes in God for only one reason, no matter what they may say. In faith as in physics, you need at least three points in order to have a stable platform. Think of faith as a three-legged stool.
The first leg was learned at our mother’s knee. Most people are brought up to believe and practice the tenets of a particular religion, and seldom wander far from that early indoctrination. They may not believe it anymore, but it is one of the customs of our tribe. If the poll-taker asks, they’ll say they’re members of that religion, though if you ask as their house of worship, you’ll find they haven’t been seen in a pew since the last High Holy Day.
The second is the power of apologetic argument to give at least superficial reassurance to a believer’s doubts. We can’t explain how we came to be, therefore God. Our tribe has a moral sense, a righteous Lawgiver must be at the heart of it. And so on. Apologetics seldom persuade non-believers.
The third leg of faith is just this: Because it feels good.
If you had asked me twenty years ago about my faith I would have told you all about the opportunities to encounter God within the rich historical and liturgical traditions of the Episcopal Church. Any flash of insight I might have had while studying the Scriptures or praying were inspired by God. The thrill of the bass ascending from the depths in a hymn was God. The awe I shared with the Psalmist, “When I considered your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,” that was God. The safe feeling that, even though I might be worried or afraid, God would make everything work out for the best - that was God, too. I’d been sober since 1983, surely that was evidence of God. I was employed and in good health and happily married: must be God. Inexplicable coincidences worked out in my favor. When I was in a hurry, a parking space appeared. The car skidded and yet I didn’t hit anything. I prayed for the health of someone and they got better. And when I told these stories to my fellow believers, they nodded in recognition and said, “Thank God!”
How can anyone say there is no God?
When I was an infant, my mother rocked me to sleep until I learned to rock myself. When I cried, she comforted me. Soon I learned to comfort myself. When I was a child and full of wonder, adults told me stories about magical places where wishes came true, where evil was punished and virtue always prevailed. Soon I learned to tell them to myself.
This worked fine for me until the cognitive dissonance became unbearable. No gods have been found on mountaintops, so the domain of God is now somewhere beyond space and time. Yet somehow in the midst of spinning the billions of wheeling galaxies, an almighty deity has a spare second to find me a parking space or tickle the pleasure center of my brain when I hear lovely music or have an a-ha! moment. Why does the God who I believed answered my prayer for the healing of one person fail so spectacularly to respond to another? Why does he never cure things that don’t get better by themselves? Where are the prosthetic limbs at Lourdes? Why is it a miracle that one person survived a terrible accident that killed a hundred others? If God’s eye is on the sparrow, why does the sparrow still fall?
In the end, the final reason for faith is simply this: Credo Consolans. We believe because it comforts us. We know about wishful thinking. We know about how confirmation bias makes us remember the hits and forget the misses. But the world is scary and the random chaos of life is scary and the certainty of death is scary. Believing in an invisible, immaterial, transcendent God who loves us is comforting. Having someone to thank for the lovely and the numinous and the fortuitous is comforting. The simple, unchallenging hymnody and sonorous prayers and pompous circumstances of liturgy is comforting.
I have many friends, neighbors, and relatives who believe, and that’s fine by me. We can be friends no matter what you believe. I’m not the Atheist Evangelist.
Unless you decide that it is your duty to enforce your religious doctrines on me or my friends and family. Then we have a problem.