For the last two centuries or so, the intellectual elites have been predicting the triumph of secularization over belief in God. Thinkers ranging from Auguste Comte to Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx predicted that belief in God would evaporate as human beings gained control over the forces of nature – harnessing the power of steam in great engines, building dams across rivers to produce power, and gaining mastery over disease and physical impairments. Similarly, the prophets of the postmodern age have promised the demise of theism, arguing that belief in a personal and transcendent deity cannot survive the acids of contemporary conceptions of reality.
Strangely enough, those prophecies have not proved to be accurate. To the contrary, a belief in God still characterizes the vast majority of human beings who, as the prophet Isaiah understood, will invent a god of their own imagination even if they do not know the one true God. Paul Bloom understands this. A professor of psychology at Yale University and author of Descartes' Baby, Bloom argues that human beings are wired for a belief in God. Not that he believes in God himself, mind you. Bloom is a determined rationalist and self-declared atheist. Nevertheless, he finds the persistence of belief in God to be a conclusive proof for Darwin's theory of evolution. Bloom's argument is worth a closer look.
In "Is God an Accident?," an essay published in the December 2005 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, Bloom sets his case clearly. "The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief," he observes. "Just about everyone in this country – 96 percent in one poll – believes in God. Well over half of Americans believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe in an afterlife – and not just in the mushy sense that we will live on in the memories of other people, or in our good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say they believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet God. Woody Allen once said, 'I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.' Most Americans have precisely this expectation."
With that sentence, Bloom acknowledges what many others will not – that it is theism rather than atheism that is the normative belief of most Americans – and most others around the world, for that matter.
The prophets of secularization most often point to the advanced democracies of Western Europe, where very low rates of church participation and religious belief are often observed. Yet, Bloom is convinced that low church attendance does not mean that most of these persons have no belief in God whatsoever. Furthermore, he acknowledges that Western Europe is the anomaly, not the United States and the rest of the world. "After all, the rest of the world – Asia, Africa, the Middle East – is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists," he explains. "If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States."
Beyond this, Bloom effectively deflates the secularist assumptions of the political elites, pointing out that the vast majority of persons who voted for Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election identified themselves as "religious." This flies in the face of many in the academy who argue that belief in God, in any concrete and specific sense, is largely limited to the so-called red states and Christian conservatives. Even most scientists believe in God in one sense or another. Continue >>
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