I’m always amazed that atheists, who advertise themselves as practitioners of reason, are always making arguments that don’t hold water. The thrust of their argument is that human beings exhibit many behaviors that fit nicely with a belief in God. Since a belief in God meets psychological and social needs, they argue, God can be explained simply as something invented to meet human needs. Therefore, God does not exist. Since God does not exist, they argue, John Lennon was right: “no heaven, no hell, and no religion too.” “Imagine that,” they chortle, picking up on the former Beatle’s iconic song. Specifically, they go to great lengths to point out human behaviors that we all observe, but then draw an arbitrary and unsupported conclusion from those commonly observed behaviors: that man invented God.
Wait a minute! How does that follow? Obviously, it does not. Just because I exhibit a psychological need that fits with God does not disprove God. The argument is like saying that because I exhibit a need that fits with Chicago (like wanting to watch a Cubs home game), the Windy City does not exist. Not surprisingly, they assert that the capacity for these behaviors has evolved. “Like our physiological DNA,” they assert, “the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural section.” Anything humans are, they are as a result of the Darwinian mechanism.
But again, not so fast. A theistic explanation of those human behaviors flips the equation. If God exists, it is equally plausible that God created human beings with those “God friendly” capacities the authors observe. So the atheistic conclusion, which they attribute to “reason,” is really an unreliable sleight of hand. Sometimes they speak of God as the Big Daddy in the Sky, a simplistic stick figure. That’s the God that atheists don’t believe in. Well, I don’t believe in that kind of God either. Nobody more theologically mature than a fourth-grader believes in that kind of God.
It is common for atheists elsewhere to conjure up other caricatures of God. For example, atheists demand that God always has to be “nice” to people – or else he’s not really God. Or, God has to “prove” he exists, in terms set by the atheist, or else God doesn’t exist. Arguing against a cartoon version of God, a “super-parent,” is an “easy out” for atheists. It lets them escape from the tough but real question – what to do with the claims of the biblical revelation of God.
If man truly invented God, he would not have come up with the idea of man’s inability to gain salvation through good deeds, or the idea of God’s son dying for hostile men to provide that salvation. Those ideas are counter-intuitive to how man thinks. So, in a sense, the atheists are correct in their assessment about the various gods that man has made up. The only problem is that there truly is a real God who doesn’t operate according to man’s wisdom. He’s not bound by our puny concepts that we ascribe to deity. As we’ve seen, we can’t conclude that human needs are “the real roots of religious belief,” nor are they evidence against God. So it does not make rational sense to decide against God based on observations of human psychology.