Douthat puts it nicely in a post last week:
you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An
intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an
extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature;
this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount
of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with,
yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the
religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so
much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a
story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings
have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a
being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel
comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him
in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for
orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts. And without the persistence of
this perceived interaction (and beneath it, the intuitive belief in
some kind of God), it's difficult to imagine religious belief playing
anything like the role it does in human affairs, no matter how many
ancient scriptures there were propping the whole thing up.
This
is not to say that humanity's religious experiences and intuitions are
anything like a dispositive argument for the existence of God.
Certainly, there are all sorts of interesting efforts to explain them
without recourse to the hypothesis that they correspond to anything
real, and all kinds of reasons to choose atheism over faith. But it is
one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a
twinge of doubt about one's own disbelief. And just as the Christian
who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn't
thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the
Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous
hypotheses really needs to get out more often.
Belief is
rooted in a fundamental interpretation of one's experience. There is
no proving one's interpretation; there is only the attempt to express
it honestly and with as much verbal agility as one can muster to
represent the unrepresentable. We all of us live knowing that whatever
we believe true is a
provisional interpretation of our experience that is open to revision.
Doubt is an essential x-factor in the ongoing struggle to deepen what
we believe and is an essential challenge to our conscience to make this
representation in good faith.
But if anyone thinks that his rejection of the naive faith of his
childhood is the only necessary step, he is stuck at the beginning of a
journey thinking he has come to its end. Anyone who cannot admit of
doubt, whether he is in a believing or unbelieving phase of this
ongoing struggle, cannot be taken seriously. Such people are as
frightened of the basic open-endedness of this journey to the depths of
things as the fundamentalists and dogmatists are. The measure of a life lived in faith is not the degree of certainty professed, but the level of depth attained, and the attainment of any significant depth is an impossibility without doubt.
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