Why Belief Isn't That Different for Atheists or Religious People

By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet. Posted January 6, 2009.

       -- Richard Petraitis, "Bullets Into Water: The Sorcerers of Africa," REALL Newsletter v.6 

Belief in magic is a human universal. Fortunetellers, entrails readers and omen consultants have been advisers to generals and kings.

At other times they have been condemned. The Code of Ur-Nammu (ca. 2100 B.C.) is the oldest set of laws that we actually have a copy of. One of them is: If a man is accused of sorcery, he must undergo ordeal by water; if he is proved innocent, his accuser must pay 3 shekels. In 1401, a British Act of Parliament made the penalty for witchcraft and divination to be burned at the stake.

With the advent of science, supernatural claims were put to the test. It became obvious fairly quickly that nobody was able to demonstrate an act of actual magic, psychic ability (without "natural" information or fraud), or to forecast the future (better than at random or through natural reason). In 1735, the British passed a new witchcraft law. This time it treated the people who claimed to have such powers as con artists and reduced the penalty accordingly.

People still read their horoscopes, go to psychics and consult palmists. Many believe quite fervently. Nonetheless, if someone gets money out of someone else based on a promise of psychic or magic abilities, it is treated in law as fraud.  

Belief, in and of itself, is a normal and necessary mental function. It’s utilitarian, functional and usually quite mundane. 

False beliefs are frequent, common and widespread. Often, they’re even universal. 

Belief in God 

Belief in God -- working with the hypothesis that it’s a false belief -- seems significantly different from the examples above.          

Religious beliefs are sometimes described as magical thinking.

But magic is case specific. A magic action has -- one thinks or expects or hopes -- one magic effect, which can be countered, by countermagic. It can also, as in the case of the Xhosa, be shown to not work. Belief in prayer, or in a specific prayer, can be considered magical thinking, but not religious faith itself.

God is all there, all the time. He working everything, whether he’s invoked or not. He cannot be countered, and he cannot fail.

Belief in God is a vastly more important belief. It affects a wider and deeper range of choices and of behavior.

It goes to identity. Whereas magic operates outside of and against identity -- it goes to a person’s worldview. Magic is an aberration, a violation, that breaks with the rest of the natural world. 

Many people think that belief in God is based on evidence. They’ve seen and heard him. Or felt his presence. If not personally, then they know of many others who have had such experiences.

There’s far better and far more frequent "evidence" that the sun is traveling around us. We see it happen daily.

Yet almost everyone in the world is willing to accept that what we see is based on an illusion. Even that the illusion is caused by something that we cannot perceive. That the earth, which feels so solid and still beneath our feet -- another illusion, is actually spinning around. 

More often, the case for God is based on inference.

"Oh look, what an amazing, wonderful world. And see how it all fits together, more intricately than a Swiss watch, but a million, million times more complicated, it must have taken one heck of a Great Watchmaker! There’s no other way to account for it!"

This is, in fact, a very normal thing to do.

We have lots and lots of theories that involve things we can’t "see," that create a whole story to explain the effects that we do see. Evolution is one.

We have theories that claim the existence of things we don’t understand.

From Newton, right up to the present, nobody knows what gravity actually is.

There are theories about things that are a lot stranger than God, who is, after all, a lot like a human -- with the same sort of values, standards, practices, consciousness -- just bigger and better.

People commonly say that God moves in mysterious ways, but not nearly as mysteriously as things move according to quantum theory. 

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it possibly be like that?" Because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

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Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. His latest book is Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

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