It occurs to me that before talking about whether there is a God, we should see what our biases are. I’ve put my cards on the table: I obviously want the evidence to support, or at least avoid conflicting with, the notion of an infinite God. On the other side of the fence, I’ve seen atheists who don’t merely believe that there is no God: they’d prefer it that way. Richard Dawkins is one of them. In The God Delusion, he argues that the notion of a creator is demeaning to human existence.
It goes without saying that biases on either side of the divide can threaten the quality of an investigation, so it’s useful to know what they are. But there’s another reason to look at our biases: they tell us a lot about how we conceive of God.
I once had a professor who, apropos of nothing, asked why religious people often feel compelled to spread their faith. He found it offensive, and his theory was that they do it to score points with God or out of some sense of superiority: our team’s winning! I was too timid to say anything at the time, but my response was this: if you found the cure for cancer, you’d be running through the streets telling people about it. (Well, at least you’d try to get it published in a medical journal.) People of faith believe they’ve got the cure for death. That’s something you don’t keep to yourself.
I’ve met some atheists who don’t believe in God because they’re not convinced—they don’t think the evidence is there, and they’re not going to accept faith blindly. Fair enough. But as I said earlier, I’ve met others who would actually rather that there be no God. Why? I think it comes down to what you think God is, and what you think the consequences of faith may be.
I think most confirmed atheists (and a good many theists, for that matter) see God as a judge with some kind of “sin abacus” and faith as a list of rules that we all routinely break. If that’s my reference point, and if I’ve got even a modicum of self-awareness about my failings as a human being, I am going to be deeply invested in the position that there is no God. I’ve felt that way myself. When that was how I conceived of God, there were times when I thought it would have been better if he didn’t exist. (For one thing, I would have had a lot more sex a lot sooner.)
But if God is not a frowning judge in the sky, things change. If, like the people in my cure-for-cancer analogy, we see faith and God not as a series of prohibitions but as quite literally the cure for death—how could that not be attractive? Who wouldn’t want that?
I am, of course, vastly oversimplifying God and faith by describing them as “the cure for death.” So let’s expand the proposition a bit. Christians believe that God is an all-powerful being whose chief characteristic is complete and perfect love, and who for reasons unknown has decided to focus a great deal of attention on sharing that love with us. As C.S. Lewis put it, this includes the offer to “make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine”.
This is the actual Christian view of God. Whether you believe in it is another story entirely, but if that’s the reference point, it becomes very strange and deeply irrational to prefer that it not be true.
