I believe in God because nothing else makes sense to me.
But my belief does hinge on some underlying ideas that some people may dismiss, so let’s start there. For one, I believe that we are more than meat. We are spiritual beings who inhabit bodies. Growing up, I went to a church that taught that we are spirits, we have souls, and we live in bodies: our spirit is the part of us that is made in the image of God. Our souls are our minds, wills, and emotions. I’m not sure how much this distinction between spirit and soul matters, and I would certainly never be dogmatic about it. But it’s a handy definition, so I’m going to roll with it (and it’s useful to explain the difference between people and animals. Animals have souls, but not spirits).
My belief that we are spiritual beings residing in bodies is intricately tied to my belief in free will. In fact, I believe the only way free will is possible is if we are more than just meat, capable of making decisions based on more than the neurons firing in our physical brains. Think of it this way: your dog makes decisions based on both nature and nurture—that is, doggy instinct and the way he has been trained (whether intentional or not. Sometimes dog owners inadvertently reward bad behavior, thereby reinforcing it). Your dog’s decisions, while they may look like free will, are not. That is, your dog is not free to act against nature or nurture. He will act according to the firing of neurons inside his physical doggy head. His neural pathways have been strengthened through reinforcement, made extinct through punishment, or pruned through disuse. (This doesn’t mean your dog is not the Goodest Boy. He definitely is—and if he isn’t, the fault lies not with him, but with nature and nurture).
If there is no free will, then the universe is a closed system: it is self-contained in that no outside influence (God) can act upon it. Everything that happens within that system is a result of nature or nurture, and the chain reaction of events was predetermined at the beginning, set in motion by the earliest ancestors’ genetics and the environment they created by acting according to their nature. Therefore, free will is an illusion. It’s all just biology running its course. The day you were born, your decisions were predestined by your own nature and the way your parents were going to raise you (which was also predetermined by their own genetics and environment). If you are only meat, you may think you have free will, but you do not.
However, we all act as if we have free will. In fact, even people who claim they don’t believe free will exists behave as if they do. They use words such as “should” in discussing the actions of others. They believe people should act a certain way, whether in big matters such as not murdering people or small matters such as returning their shopping carts. We all act as if people can choose to do these things, and we speak—and feel—accordingly. If no free will exists, then it is irrational to expect people to change just because we think they should. And it is irrational to be angry at others for acting in ways we think contrary to how they should behave. And if there is no free will, then arguing with strangers on the internet makes no sense. They cannot choose to do other than what they do. To change their behavior, we would need to use the principles of behaviorism: reinforce the behaviors we want to see repeated, punish the behaviors we would like to make extinct. If you’ve raised children, you know this is harder than it sounds. It is not something you can do to strangers on Facebook. Try it in a classroom of 30 teenagers and tell me you don’t see evidence of free will asserting itself against mere biology.
But maybe, you could argue, we act as if we have free will because we were conditioned to do so. Perhaps the illusion has been passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps it has been reinforced.
If it weren’t for our inborn sense of justice, I could see making a case against free will. When we hear about a terrible injustice, we get angry—and we want the perpetrator to be punished NOT because we are hoping to rehabilitate him. We want him punished as revenge. This only makes sense, of course, if the perpetrator could have acted differently. It only makes sense if he has free will. Punishment as Revenge is ingrained deeply within our collective unconscious.
Which leads me to the second underlying belief that holds my worldview together: only the truth can be lived out to its logical conclusion. Obviously, postmodernists will reject this idea out of hand: they don’t believe in objective truth. But think about it: if truth exists, then there actually are right answers. If life is a math problem, and you try to solve it using the wrong formula, you will get the wrong answer. If life is a machine, and you fail to operate it correctly, it will not perform as well as it should and may eventually break. If life is a labyrinth full of strange creatures, and you take wrong turns, you will eventually hit a wall.
But truth leads us through the labyrinth. It represents the openings. If your underlying assumptions are incorrect, eventually they lead to a blocked path, a trap door leading to an oubliette, or even the Bog of Eternal Stench.
It seems to me the logical conclusion is that we behave as if free will exists because it does. (And, by that same logic, every culture has believed in a Higher Power because He is real).
I believe free will points to the existence of God. Without Him, we would be sacks of meat living out our biologically-induced responses to external stimuli. But free will implies that we are more than our bodies—we have a spiritual dimension. And having a spiritual dimension opens up all kinds of possibilities, the existence of God being one of them.