You could describe me as deeply religious: I believe ethical decisions have enduring consequences, I view life as an unbelievably rare gift, I feel a sense of community around people of similar worldviews and I even mark important events in my life with rituals. Of course there is one detail I’m leaving out: I don’t actually belong to any religion or faith tradition. My experiences have led me to believe that deep down inside we are all religious, and the real differences only arise in how we as individuals express this impulse.
To give you some context around my religious background, let me just state that several years of Catholic school will turn almost anybody into a skeptic.
While I entered as a faith-guided pubescent, I left a borderline atheist with an irrational resentment for the Catholicism. But in my defense, it was hard not to end up this way. For one, I didn’t buy that an all-encompassing being would have human qualities, especially to the extent that its predominant role in our existence is that of both a caring source of love, and a dispenser of moral judgment.
Additionally, much of the bible’s original ethical codes can only be justified within the cultural context that they were created. Just as our perceptions of right and wrong constantly shift today, it makes more sense that biblical text was the product of human thought, limited by its context at the time. In other words, humans superimposed their own thinking onto God, and by no coincidence God’s sentiments were surprisingly human.
But there was something missing from my angsty rejection of Christianity: religion has done the world a lot of good.
A faith tradition can provide individuals with a sense of belonging and community, a source of external meaning within a lonely and vast universe, and a system of causality that encourages ethical behavior, among other things. In fact, there has been a growing consensus within some academic circles that we have evolved into the religion seeking beings that we are today.
A three-year study conducted at Oxford University is one of several research efforts that have supported this claim. Known as the Cognition, Religion and Theology project, researchers have incorporated over 40 different studies across the world with the hope of better understanding religious thought and its origins. The study found that belief in an afterlife, the tendency to assume that phenomena happen for a purpose, and other supernatural inclinations are widespread, unrestricted by faith or geography. Many of these inclinations could have been valuable assets for intelligent, certainty-loving beings living in an uncertain world, such as early humans.
With this comes perhaps the only conclusion that scientists and creationists can shake hands on: Religion can be a very good thing. And people like me, who do not necessarily believe in an afterlife or external agency, have other ways of keeping the faith.
The Universe likely began in an instantaneous expansion of energy nearly fourteen billion years ago. And just under ten billion years after that, the only planet that is known to support life took shape. Without rehashing the rest of this narrative, the fact that such harsh physical processes have produced elegant, self-replicating, and intelligent life fills me with awe. And along with all of this randomness, we have been given the gift of consciousness to appreciate it all. God or no God, there is something sacred about all of that.
