1 Everything is religion

Does God exist?

Many people regard this question as almost ludicrously simple, and thus also as provocative and confrontational. But the problem is that major and polarising discord remains concerning the answer. Some say that the answer to this simple question obviously is a resounding no: Of course there is no God! All talk of a God is an expression of a tenaciously persistent superstition that has stuck with humanity throughout all of known history, ever since the rain dances of the first shamans. A superstition that in all likelihood will wither away and die as our knowledge of the nature of physics at the macro and micro levels grows sufficiently to be able to refute the many foolish notions of religion and document how these are tied to various sociocultural conditions.

But as we know, some others are as unshakeably convinced that God not only exists with the greatest certainty, but also that this God painstakingly keeps track of all of our sins as well as our good deeds. And as if that were not enough, this same God created our planet and all its innumerable life forms at the dawn of Time. This God, who thus exists, permeates every aspect of our existence, and not believing in Him and admitting this is something that sooner or later will incur punishment. Possibly for all eternity. But the matter is complicated further by the lack of agreement among these many people who are convinced of His existence as to exactly which god really does exist, and throughout history this has given rise to innumerable conflicts – battles and wars that have claimed countless human lives in the name of God. So how could God not exist?

So in fact, this seemingly simple question must be nuanced and made more specific, at least somewhat, in order for us to be able to discuss it in a meaningful way. What the answer will be – and what the question actually means – depends, of course, partly on what we mean by “God”, and partly on what we mean by “exist”. Let us start with the latter, which might perhaps be the most convenient place to start. A beautiful poem, untitled, one of the very last authored by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – the manuscript is dated as November 19, 1935 – reads as follows:

There are sicknesses worse than any sickness;
There are pains that don’t ache, not even in the soul,
And yet they’re more painful than those that do.
There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us...
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls...
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.
Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
(Translation: Richard Zenith. From Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Books 2006.)

In the poem several assertions are made; assertions about the texture of existence. The poem states that things are this way and that way. There are sicknesses that are worse than any sickness and therefore are also something other than sickness (although they are, nonetheless, sicknesses), and the anxieties from dreams are more real than those that afflict us in what we call life or reality (which means that the concepts “dream” and “reality” must be challenged), and so on. Sicknesses, anxieties, a hint of elusive hopes and a significant measure of resignation. If we were to attempt to identify some sort of all-encompassing feature of Pessoa’s poem, we might perhaps agree that it encapsulates a frame of mind, even an acquired outlook on life. And that this frame of mind and this outlook are coloured by an increasingly lucid sadness.

But exactly where does this sadness exist? Well, not on the piece of paper or on the screen where the poem is available to us. For there, if we are going to be picky, only a set of abstract, graphic symbols in various combinations exists. That these combinations of something that we call letters come together to produce something we call words, and that moreover these “words” mean something and have a context-specific value, depends entirely on a social contract that most of us subscribe to through learning, because it is comforting and in many respects also enriching. We look at the symbols and conjure up various perceptions. Which means that the question of where this sadness actually exists, to the extent that it actually does exist, remains unanswered, unless it exists on the piece of paper or on the screen.

And we may take this one step further: Does art exist? Most people do not question that a whole host of physically tangible objects that purport to be art actually exist, although there are many who would energetically deny the unique experience of art that others testify to more or less loquaciously and eloquently. This concept of art actually being an organised hoax, orchestrated for the purpose of enriching all those who participate in this racket while making them appear to be extremely high-minded, is a philistine concept, deeply rooted and difficult to address. Where people do not participate in the social contract they do not quite understand what it is all about, and consequently assume that it must be some sort of fraud. Someone is fooling you and all the others are either pretending that everything is as it should be, or are allowing themselves to be convinced without being able to see through the hoax. This applies, by the way, to a large degree also to philosophy which, outside certain protected reserves, is considered a rather dubious activity. Maybe it does not exist either.

But returning to Pessoa’s sadness – where does it exist? For we maintain that it does. And the answer closest at hand is surely that it is we as readers who create it. With the ardent support of the author himself of course. He and we create it together with the aid of that set of social contracts that is literature and poetry, in exactly the same way that we create a multitude of other things that exist in and through language with the aid of various other social contracts: nations, ideologies, communities of various kinds. This in turn means that most of us who are either reading or writing this book, and who now and then reflect on existential and ontological problems, are carrying around a relatively flexible definition of what it actually means that something “exists”. There is a lot that does not exist, but that actually does exist – in language. The sadness of Pessoa, or rather the sadness of the poem, does not exist in the same sense that the saucepan that is standing over there on the kitchen stove exists, which we can touch and measure and weigh and photograph, and whose existence is irrefutable since the meat stew inside it would certainly spill onto the stove if the saucepan did not actually exist. But we know nevertheless with great certainty that the sadness of the poem actually does exist and that we ourselves are particularly well equipped to vouch for this very fact, since we have participated in creating it. Thus we also know that there exists, just as Pessoa writes, so much that does not exist, but that does exist – in fact, that lingers there.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger constructs existentialism on this basic distinction. He categorises the saucepan on the stove and all other indisputably physically existing phenomena within the idea of the ontic. But what else “exists” in a broader sense, outside and beyond the ontic – such as the sadness we read into Fernando Pessoa’s late poem – Heidegger sums up in the idea of the ontological. Heidegger’s point is that the existential human being does not simply live within a Sein (being) in the ontic world, but belongs just as much in the ontological world, in a Dasein (being there or existence as it is generally translated in English). Being there and experiencing Dasein is, according to Heidegger, about being fully human. Thus, the human being is much more than merely a physical being. The world is more than just saucepans. Heidegger’s existentialist idea of Dasein is a metaphysical state.

Naturally, at least in theory, you could choose to stand outside all linguistic contracts that you do not understand. You could simply not participate, and you could, as Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty once did, in a contemptuous tone of voice maintain that when one uses a word, it means exactly what one chooses it to mean – neither more nor less. And with the word “exists” you therefore merely mean that something that actually does exist must exist in the same ontic and apparently indisputable way that the saucepan exists on the stove in the kitchen, and that if it does not exist in this way, it does not exist at all. However, one should also bear in mind that Humpty Dumpty fails to communicate anything of interest at all in his conversation with an increasingly frustrated Alice.

The problem with this kind of language philosophy desperado is namely that your existence becomes rather boring and lonely amid the saucepans. At the same time one should stress in this context that this “being” definitely does not constitute a guarantee of quality, and that the cosmic vacuum we call “nothing” in everyday parlance has proven to be anything but empty in the classical sense. It is in fact out of this apparent “nothing” that the Universe has been created, which the cosmologist and physicist Lawrence Krauss argues convincingly for in his book entitled just that: A Universe from Nothing. That something exists in an ontic sense is, in other words, not very remarkable. So do E. coli bacteria, and in large numbers, too. While being the only thing that assuredly does not exist, “nothing” is something that even physics barely wants to acknowledge nowadays.

With this flexible understanding of the various nuances of the concept of “being”, and with Pessoa’s and Heidegger’s insights that there exists so much which does not exist in the ontic sense, but which nonetheless does exist, we are cautiously approaching the concept of “God” and posing questions such as how we should understand this concept fairly correctly – or at least in a way that is reasonable – and whether what is accommodated within the definition we finally settle on actually does exist in an ontic or an ontological sense. Or are we merely talking about hot air here? The handling of the issue becomes somewhat easier however when it dawns on us that the ontological question in all likelihood answers itself, since God – whatever this turns out to be – is something we humans have created ourselves. Throughout history, there has never existed a human society where religion was not exercised in some form. At any rate, there have been no research findings of any kind anywhere indicating the tiniest trace of the presence of human collectives of any significance that did not have a religious community. This is indisputable. Even our dead cousins the Neanderthals buried their near and dear ones under ritual forms that indicate the presence of some kind of religion. From this, one may then draw a number of different conclusions.

One of the conclusions that was particularly frequently and eloquently proposed around the millennium shift was that God – and here we are speaking mainly about the Christian God and his Almighty colleagues within Judaism and Islam – is pure delusion. This is in fact the title of the central work of the radical atheist genre, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, a celebrated evolutionary biologist and pugnacious atheist. Many other titles by others who share Dawkins’ views develop fairly similar arguments. The common and recurring idea is one that describes how, roughly up until now, human beings have been so ignorant and superstitious that it became necessary to invent sundry varieties of religion in order to extract various useful things such as solace, community morals, and something that might resemble a pattern in, and a meaning for, a gloomy existence filled with privation and suffering.

In connection with this, one might argue – and indeed not without reason –that with the passing of time, religion turns into the story that those in power tell to the people in order to legitimise the prevailing order and thereby also, conveniently enough, their own privileges. Those in power promise abundant rewards in the afterlife to obedient subjects who pay taxes and without complaint accept their subservient places in this life on this Earth. In this way, the emperor gets his way without fuss and in practice at really no cost at all. In this way, religion becomes both the opiate that keeps the people asleep and the pretext with which one commandeers people into war whenever it benefits the interests of those in power. Whoever succeeds in usurping the office of God’s spokesperson here on Earth need not risk being contradicted to any greater extent, at least not within his or her own faith community. And what the others – the infidels – have to say by definition is of little or no value at all. For it is with them that one makes war, it is them one hounds from places that one considers sacred, it is them one plunders and torments the life out of with God’s clear blessing. That the infidels believe in the wrong god conveniently enough makes it possible to strip them of all humanity.

Hardly anyone would deny that hideous atrocities and cruelties have been committed in the name of this or that god throughout history: the examples are innumerable and a complete catalogue of all the crimes carried out under a religious banner would require a book of its own. Nor is this in any way a unique speciality of the Abrahamic religions. In Polynesia, prisoners of war and heretics were sacrificed to the gods. The Aztecs refined human sacrifice to an activity that was carried out on a near-industrial scale, administered by the state and clergy in an effective symbiosis. Dispatched soldiers carried out raids on the neighbouring peoples in order to bring home prisoners in great quantities, after which these prisoners, courtesy of the clergy, were sacrificed to the great god Huitzilopochtli by cutting the hearts out of their living bodies, which subsequently, not quite as alive, were rolled down the steps leading up to the altar.

But when it comes to the extent of these types of crimes, most particularly in the present era, although there are Hindus making war on Muslims with great energy in India for example, the Abrahamites occupy an unchallenged position of prominence. Militant Islamists terrorise other Muslims along with the rest of us with an intensity that affects all of our lives and communities: how we travel and move across national boundaries, whom we choose to trust and interact with, what we dare to write and publish, and what we allow ourselves to say in public. A significant measure of self-censorship is exercised in both Islamic countries and in the West because of an unbridled fear of the physical attacks of religious fundamentalists. What one can and must ask oneself in this context is, however, what the causative links actually are, and to what extent these religions as such are culpable in the exercise of violence and the atrocities that are carried out in the name of various gods.

It is of course possible to find calls for cruelty towards the impure of faith in both the Bible and the Quran, as well as in other religious scriptures, but it is also possible to find calls for loving kindness. The programmatic inconsistencies in religious scriptures is part and parcel of their nature, since they are a collage produced from a multitude of various texts, written by various people on various occasions and under various conditions for completely separate purposes, which means that one may find support for almost any position by quoting various Bible verses and Qur’anic suras. And it is with this painstakingly selective citing of scripture – or alternatively without any support whatsoever in any significant source at all – that various groups invoke God’s blessing for their acts of violence directed at dissidents. Which ought to invite a certain caution when pointing the finger at this or that religion as responsible for this or that act of violence.

While it is certainly true, to take a much talked about example, that the triggering factor when it came to the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh was a film, Submission, which critically discusses the oppression of women that is religiously tinged; and while it is true that the murderer himself confirmed the connection between the deed and his own fanatical interest in protecting the true faith, it is also true that this kind of aggressive and confrontational practice of religion is rejected by many, if not most, Muslims. Thus one might imagine that religion has been made to serve, and throughout history continuously has served, as a fancy excuse for dogmatic fanatics and the unscrupulously powerful who, for various strategic reasons, or because the violence quite simply was addictively intoxicating, chose to terrorise real and imagined enemies. As an example, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the Middle East is political and social rather than religious in any real sense, in spite of them choosing to fight about so-called holy places – strictly symbolic assets – from time to time when it is expedient for turning up the rhetorical heat. The same applies to the civil war in Northern Ireland, where the designations “Catholics” and “Protestants” fail to tell us anything relevant whatsoever about wherein the historical and multidimensional conflicts really have lain, and to a certain extent still lie.

In addition, one might ask oneself whether it really is sport that should be held accountable when organised groups of football hooligans clash, or if it isn’t more a question of people who simply want to engage in collective violence subject to certain rituals, and that this function that has been imposed on football in this context should be regarded as purely symbolic. For the various teams that are pitted against one another on the field encapsulate, formalise and discipline this aggression within very strict limits. After the game, opponents offer each other a friendly handshake and exchange shirts with each other. Sport in itself brings people together, at least in terms of its practitioners. That the hooligans actually want nothing more than to fight before, during and after the game – and that people actually enjoy both engaging in collective violence and the freedom from responsibility and the intoxication that comes with surrendering to the collective will that places itself above all of society’s formal laws and regulations, irrespective of what cause or group identity one claims to be fighting for – has an extremely negligible connection to the practice of sport per se.

In large part, this reasoning may be transferred to the question of the excesses and crimes carried out in the name of God. God is innocent, to the extent he actually exists: it is we humans who are guilty. Thus, we cannot blame religion with any degree of preserved credibility, and maintain that it was religion that forced us to act brutally towards our neighbour, when the truth is that – countless times throughout the course of history and under every possible pretext – we have tortured and massacred people who in some sense have belonged to a group other than ourselves, quite voluntarily and with great enthusiasm. We just don’t like strangers or what is different: this is deeply rooted in us. The cure is civilisation, but it is far from all-embracing and probably never will be. Nevertheless, all of these ecclesiastical sins and crimes are one of articulated atheism’s two principal arguments against religion as it has been manifested thus far.

The other argument – which we regard as considerably stronger – is traditional religion’s demands for special treatment in the form of a completely unique reverence and respect vis-à-vis other ideological systems. Thus, not infrequently religion regards itself per definition as above every kind of questioning. Aside from the more or less opaque declarations concerning its existence that traditional religion itself chooses to make, it should be under no obligation to explain itself. Criticising religion, or just studying it like any kind of natural and social phenomenon, amounts to desecrating the holy doctrine and offending an entire world of believers. On this theme, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett has written an astute atheist manifesto, Breaking the Spell, where he observes that the Enlightenment is buried and forgotten and that the gradual secularisation of modern society – which could long be observed and which it was thought would soon be complete – is now crumbling away before our very eyes. Religion is more important than ever. But religion evades serious study, Dennett complains: it only allows itself to be enticed into something that has the semblance of a dialogue on its home turf, surrounded by smoke and mirrors, where it uses suggestion to produce murky connections between faith in, for example, the sacred soul’s immortality on the one hand, and on the other hand the believer’s moral refinement. But it never clarifies what these connections actually consist of.

In so far as this sort of nonsensical reasoning is gaining ground, there is of course good reason to criticise religion. Anything of this kind sooner or later inevitably leads to a more or less brutal oppression of dissenting opinion, which in turn leads to a wholesale destruction of knowledge in the name of God. Which of course unarguably implies that ignorance in important areas is a necessary prerequisite for at least some types of religion. When, for example, Christian fundamentalists try to launch creationism under the ridiculous label of intelligent design as an alternative on an equal footing with Darwin’s theory of evolution – that is, as a sufficiently respectable alternative in order for it to be part of the curriculum in American schools – this is in fact a case of intellectual sabotage of the worst kind. Genuine knowledge is pitted here against bizarre nonsense. Anyone who seriously claims that “intelligent design” is an adequate “theory”, deserving of being discussed in the same halls of learning in which the evolutionary process through natural (and sexual) selection is studied – which according to this reasoning also is just a “theory” – does not know what actually constitutes a theory, and refuses to understand what the theory of evolution actually says and explains.

A religion that, in a similar way to Abrahamic monotheism’s many variants, largely rests on contrafactual fairy tale material may choose to either water itself down to the point of self-annihilation and proclaim that all the old dogmas and convictions that are in conflict with accepted knowledge should be seen as historically conditioned parables that are meant to be interpreted allegorically and not literally; or else walk down the path of complete denial and fight real knowledge by any means at its disposal in order to safeguard its own survival. The latter alternative becomes considerably easier to carry out if the individual not only wields religious but also political power, which of course is the case in many countries rule by Islam where religion and law go hand in hand. But even in the democratic USA, where freedom of speech is protected under the Constitution, many Christian communities successfully choose the path of denial and the destruction of knowledge, which probably, and paradoxically, is something that is being facilitated by the network dynamics that have developed on the Internet.

Whereas previously one could be in at least reasonable agreement concerning certain basic facts and then argue about how to interpret these, nowadays it is quite possible for various groups to maintain exclusive sets of facts that are determined by, and tally well with, their own fixed faith. The reason is that most people, if it were up to them, would prefer to be embraced by, and to associate in confidence with, the people they agree with rather than to be contradicted and questioned. And this they may well do. What enables this development towards an escalating social polarisation, both politically and in terms of outlook on life, is that on the Internet one tends to choose the sources of information that say exactly what one wants to hear and which confirm one’s own world view. And this occurs while one effectively isolates oneself from those with divergent opinions, with whom one quite simply refrains from engaging in debate, and with whom a meaningful conversation in principle is always impossible, since one does not even agree on the basics and game rules. Thus, the Internet has not developed into one big global village where everyone communicates with everyone else in a way that reflects mutual understanding and trust – which many digital pioneers naively had hoped it would. Instead, the landscape that emerges on the Web is an all too vast archipelago of closed communities without fixed connections between them.

Capitalism’s fixation with exploitation is therefore being followed by informationalism’s obsession with its counterpart, imploitation, that is, a maximisation of the value of information by means of the community’s deliberate delimitation, rather than a naive openness towards the outside world (see The Netocrats). Within such a closed collective, one might claim unchallenged that “intelligent design” is a “theory” that is broadly superior to the theory of evolution, or anything at all as long as it wins the approval of the collective’s intersubjective liking. To the extent that the protests and indignation of the outside world seep through these walls, they rather tend to strengthen the sense of community, since this concern from the outside easily can be dismissed as propaganda from the enemy. And the more bizarre the ideas proclaimed by a religious community or a sect, the more robust the resistance they trigger in the hostile outside world, and the more they strengthen the sense of internal community and the production of social identity.

But let us now return to our initial question: does God exist? We are talking here about the God of Christianity that Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced dead as early as the 19^th century. The atheist Dennett answers both yes and no to this question. What does not exist is the supernatural, omniscient and all-seeing God of which the Bible speaks, the God that created our world and everything else, and who sent his only son to our Earth for him to die a sacrificial death on the cross and thereby, in a transaction which in many ways is utterly unclear, purchase our liberation from our dreadful sins (that God himself thus takes no responsibility for despite the fact that he apparently created us as the wretched sinners that we are). At least this is what Dennett says, with reference to, among other things, the worthlessness of the “evidence” for God. Take for example Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument, according to which God quite simply has to exist by logical necessity since God by definition is above all else, which means that God cannot lack existence, since this unthinkable scenario would make God incomplete and in at least one important respect inferior to all that indisputably does own existence, such as that saucepan on the stove containing the stew. And according to our accepted idea of God, God must then be above all else, in particular saucepans.

This argument runs, as can be seen, in a tight little circle, and Dennett is not impressed. According to the same logic, everything that is said to be perfect and complete also must exist, and this is of course not something we can accept. And if this applies only to God, it is hardly the kind of logic to write home about. Nor does the cosmological argument – according to which everything must have a cause and everything that is created must have a creator, and that this creator is what we call God – appear particularly convincing on closer inspection. The idea here is that the causative link cannot stretch back in all eternity: this appears unreasonable. But if God in some way has created himself out of nothing and has no underlying cause, what is actually stopping the Universe itself from having created itself out of nothing? As we know nowadays, there is absolutely nothing to preclude this. What we know about the Universe actually indicates precisely that it did create itself out of what through ignorance we used to think of as nothing, but which instead turns out to be very much something.

There are, according to Dennett, no good reasons to believe that this God exists, and there are an almost infinite number of good reasons to believe that he does not exist. This prompts Dennett to view himself as an atheist. But he also claims, with an argument borrowed from Dawkins, that all of us, even the most devout and literal believers among theists in our cultural sphere, are in fact radical atheists when it comes to all those other gods that the rest of humanity believe in or have believed in once upon a time: Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Amun-Ra, and so on. Theists around the world thus don’t just believe in one god or the other, but also in their fantastic luck that the god they believe in within their particular congregation, and that they have been raised to believe in – as long as they do not happen to be converts – just happens to be the only god that actually exists, as opposed to all the other false gods, who thus do not exist.

However, what really exists without a doubt, according to Dennett, is the idea of God. What could be more obvious? One can believe in that idea and fill it with any number of different values without actually believing that only the Christian God (or Baal or the Gold Calf) actually exists. Dennett calls this belief in belief. You can believe that a religious faith supplies various commodities, and thus you can, which many do, believe in this faith without thereby necessarily believing in what the faith community for this religion believes in. You can also observe how the content of the idea of God has gradually changed almost beyond recognition from the old days of the folk religions up until the present day. This was brought to light as early as towards the end the 18^th century by David Hume in The Natural History of Religion, where he calls the polytheists “superstitious atheists”, since they do not recognise any phenomenon that is in accordance with “our idea of a deity”.

Dennett argues that no idea has ever undergone such a dramatic transformation act as that of “God”. On the one hand, this naturally creates a large measure of uncertainty. Many protest a faith in one and the same idea, but in actual fact they believe in completely different things, and if one expands the definition of God to comprise whatever it was that created life on Earth, it might turn out that God is, or at least could be, Darwin’s natural selection, in which case all atheists are in principle ardent believers in God. But that the idea of God has kept its name through all these shifts in meaning – from human-like jealous monsters and autocratic avengers to a diffuse kind of higher being with fuzzy boundaries – does mean, on the other hand, that religion and the religious attitude have co-opted large parts of, if not all of, existence; and that the God brand has retained a strong and extremely valuable loyalty, courtesy of its long history.

Consequently, we have every reason to expect that the idea of God will undergo additional transformation acts, because social structures continue to change, and because consequently believers will continue to demand more useful things from God. It is precisely these that are the foundations of this book. Voltaire writes that “If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him” (“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer”). And that is exactly what we humans invariably do: invent God anew, filling this flexible and robust idea with ever-new dreams and desires. Syntheism is quite simply the name of the next revolutionary phase in this development without end.

Sigmund Freud, the great father of psychoanalysis, regarded religion as an “illusion”, a thought that he developed in the book An Illusion and Its Future from 1927. His ambition was to let psychoanalysis offer its contribution to the understanding of religion, which is part of the culture whose main task it is, through various instructions and coercive measures, to defend humans against frightening, and in many ways cruel and dangerous, Nature. These instructions are held aloft, above criticism and questioning, by dint of their being accorded a divine origin. “In this way”, writes Freud, “a treasure trove of concepts born of the need to make human helplessness bearable is gathered, based on a fabric of memories of childhood helplessness, one’s own helplessness and that of the human race.” Thus religion is born: an increasingly systematic wishful thinking about superior and threatening forces that are endowed with the features of the father figure precisely because of the experienced helplessness that is associated with the solitary child’s vulnerability. That this illusory construction then grows to be so strong is related to the strength of this wishful thinking. The relief that it offers is as substantial as it is welcome: the difficult questions about the genesis of the world and the soul’s relationship to the body are conveniently answered and the fear of many of life’s dangers is allayed through divine providence. The acute terror which is caused by helplessness is eased through a carefully crafted illusion that responds to our collective and personal yearning for the father.

Freud is careful to stress that illusion does not need to be the same as delusion. Fallacies and delusions always contradict the truth, which is not necessarily the case with an illusion. What is characteristic of an illusion is the dominant element of wish fulfilment. We yearn for a father figure and find him up there in Heaven. A typical illusion, infused with wishful thinking, is also that the child is a pure and innocent creature without sexuality, according to Freud. Without taking a pronounced stand on the truth value of religion – for the designation ‘illusion’ is primarily linked to psychological mechanisms – Freud argues that religion corresponds to the neurotic phase that the human child must undergo in its development towards a cultural being with a fully developed superego. The human race itself also ought to be able to undergo this development and leave the childhood neurosis of religion behind – this is what Freud hopes – since science is continually advancing and displacing ignorance. There is no reason for us modern human beings to take over the faith of previous generations without reservation: we know better than to believe in what they believed in. From this arch-atheist perspective, the human race ought to be on the road to maturity and thereby becoming capable of basing its thoughts and actions on rational considerations. The question is whether more naive and illusory wishful thinking than this has ever existed.

The French historian François Furet chooses the same designation as Freud – illusion – when he studies and passes judgement on Communism in his book The Passing of an Illusion from 1995. This book primarily discusses the Russian Revolution with its aftermath and consequences, and Furet speaks throughout about this artfully orchestrated political illusion in religious terms. To all intents and purposes Bolshevism is a religious sect: it reflects and very consciously shrouds itself in a mythical inheritance from the French Revolution. It celebrates the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety from 1793 to 1794, and it legitimises its own power-consolidating terror with the same kind of sweeping reference to the threat from the counter-revolution as the Jacobites did in their rule of terror. Lenin is naturally depicted as a latter-day Robespierre, and just as incorruptible. Through this reflection and identification, the myth of the Russian Revolution grew ever stronger. And it is in this way that it becomes possible to combine the advantages of the shockingly new with the seductiveness of a glorious past. In a ravaged and war-weary Europe, the October Revolution willingly and with remarkable success took on as its own the well-established utopia of the arrival of the new human being.

“What happens in Russia in 1917 and the following years when the people of Europe make their way home from the war are only outwardly Russian events,” writes Furet. “What counts is that the Bolsheviks proclaim the universal revolution. Out of a successful coup in Europe’s most backward country carried out by a Communist sect headed by an audacious leader, the political situation creates an exemplary event that will steer the course of history in the same way as France of 1789 did in its time. As a consequence of the general war-weariness and rage of the vanquished people, the illusion that Lenin created out of his own theses and actions came to be shared by millions of people.” The revolution constitutes a promise of a future kingdom of good fortune for the new human being. Inconvenient facts melt away in the brutal heat generated by the radical rhetoric. This incompletely secularised salvation doctrine means that politics takes over religion’s claim to totality. “Revolutionary fervour wants everything to be politics,” writes Furet. Politics produces its own clergy as well as its heretics, and it thereby becomes impossible to separate it from religion, in terms of both expression and content. It is not enough that religion cunningly takes on another guise and meaning when necessary; it can also change name and label itself something completely different. Not infrequently politics, for example. Or just anything.

“War is merely a continuation of politics by other means,” writes the German General Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War from 1832. This is his answer to the question: What is war? Similarly, if we ask ourselves what politics really is, the answer is that politics is merely a continuation of religion by other means. And it definitely not only applies to Bolshevism or to other more or less doctrinal and airy-fairy movements with distinct features of sectarianism. Activities in the modern capitals of Western democracies do not constitute exceptions to this rule, whatever many secularised men and women in government and opposition would like to believe.

An interesting example that sheds light on this is the bitter resistance that was mobilised against President Barack Obama’s health care reform – the Affordable Care Act – during his second term in office. It was a resistance that finally led to a ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court which, by a margin of a single vote, established that the law in question does not violate the Constitution and consequently cannot be repealed. What is interesting is the following: what the Republican resistance focused on, what they claimed with great energy was incompatible with the Constitution, was the principle of an individual mandate, that is, that the responsibility for insurance rests in the end on the individual citizen, instead of, for example, on the employer. What is particularly curious and odd in this matter is then that the idea of an individual mandate – a requirement that people protect themselves through insurance, rather like the way in which by law they must protect themselves with a safety belt when they are travelling by car – as the foundation for a health care bill was initially proposed by the Republicans themselves after having been originally launched by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation in 1989.

Consequently, the individual mandate was the basis of the system that Obama’s rival Mitt Romney implemented as Governor of Massachusetts, and also of the Republican alternative to the bill that Bill Clinton once failed to steer through Congress, and which was built on the principle of employer responsibility (which Clinton in hindsight regards as a decisive mistake). All the chopping and changing in the Republican establishment’s dramatic turnaround from love to hate in terms of an individual mandate are depicted in an extremely illuminating essay by the journalist and blogger Ezra Klein in The New Yorker magazine (June 25, 2012). Barack Obama had no intention of repeating Bill Clinton’s mistake by proposing a law that his political opponents detested on the grounds of principle. Therefore, he based his health care act on an idea that the Republicans themselves had introduced once upon a time and had repeatedly expressed their support for: the individual mandate. Obama himself was one of the last Democrats to concur with this Republican idea. So what happens? Lo and behold, in a vote in December 2009 all Republican senators voted against the law and in favour of declaring it unconstitutional precisely because of the construct based on an individual mandate that they themselves had championed for 20 years.

Thus the parties had exchanged positions with each other and were struggling hard not to give the game away. What until recently was considered exemplary and heartily embraced by the Republicans is suddenly not only rash and reprehensible in general, but also something that in addition actually defaces the holy vision of the special case of America that the Founding Fathers had formulated once and for all time – a turnaround fully comparable to Josef Stalin’s embracing of the concept of socialism in one country instead of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s ambitions to export the Bolshevik revolution across all of the industrialised world. But where Stalin, to make absolutely certain, uses purges, intrigues and liquidations to maintain party discipline, it is sufficient for the members of the Republican resistance to rely on psychological turncoat mechanisms and loyalty to the collective with which one identifies – and which guarantees one’s status and support. Soon enough the unthinkable – that Obamacare might be the subject of a Supreme Court ruling because of the principle of the individual mandate – is not only thinkable, but a reality. It is sufficient that a few key people in the legislative body change their opinions for the entire flock to trot obediently along behind them, eagerly cheered on by their supporters in the media. And suddenly the Republicans are also enthusiastic advocates for an activist Supreme Court, on which all their hopes of victory are now pinned, which is also an entirely new, and almost revolutionary experience for the party.

But how is this possible? Even if we choose to disregard the fact that politics often thinks of itself as dealing with rational deliberations on thoroughly analysed matters of fact – while it actually primarily revolves around primitive antagonisms, loyalty to one’s own group and resolute non-questioning in order to preserve the religious community – there is of course generally a price to be paid for this sort of turnaround, that is, unless one has a police force of one’s own with which one can terrorise all one’s critics into silence. In this particular case with Obamacare, the price was that the Republicans were forced to present themselves as a party that, for two decades, had advocated measures that violated the Constitution. But this pain was considerably relieved by highly developed denial and repression mechanisms. Our actions and thinking in critical situations – and as a matter of fact in all possible situations – is actually not governed by conscious reasoning or rational deliberations. Instead, we react immediately and instinctively, only to subsequently delegate to our consciousness the task of legitimising the decision we have already made and producing at least a passably coherent explanation for our actions. Consciousness may also be likened to the officious press secretary of our emotional and instinctual life: assuredly eloquent and astute in every way, but lacking all real influence over the policy decisions that we continuously make emotionally and instinctively.

This means that we are still not measuring up to Sigmund Freud’s lofty expectations. And there is precisely nothing to indicate that we will ever do so. At a basic level, we feel and act religiously, not least those of us who incessantly allow ourselves to be convinced by our own officious little press secretary. We tie ourselves knots in order to motivate the most absurd positions and actions with common sense. And the overall pattern of all these hastily improvised decisions that require more or less laboured defences is solicitude for the group and its cohesion, as well as one’s own position within the group, or in other words, exactly what religion basically is all about and is concerned with. It is, as psychology professor Jonathan Haidt maintains in his book The Righteous Mind, impossible to understand the human being – as well as politics and religion – if we do not realise and bear in mind that our ancestors could not have survived and procreated with any success unless they had been extremely adept at belonging to groups. This is what people do and devote their lives to. We are, as Haidt writes, no saints, but sometimes we are really good team players. “Religion is loyalty to the world”, as the forefather of syntheism Alfred North Whitehead puts it.

In order to function as good team players, we require a sound ability to assess what our own group believe in and, when the need arises, to defend this belief with convincing quibbling just like a clever little press secretary (and you always convince others far better if you are yourself convinced). To support this ability, we use something psychologists call motivated reasoning, which means that you first of all adapt all interpretations of incoming information to the perception you have of what will serve your own interests in general and the group’s interests in particular. These mechanisms have been documented in lots of clinical experiments. We relate to events and statements in accordance with what we experience to be the wishes of group leaders and authorities. As long as it is to the good, we deny facts that are easy to check, and accept evident fallacies without it chafing our intellect too much. We search high and low for reasons to believe in something that appears to confirm what we already believe that we know, and we easily find reasons to dismiss anything that challenges our beliefs.

We all constantly act like believers in our everyday lives. And how could we act otherwise? Even Daniel Dennett himself reasons thus. We are all laymen in all conceivable subject areas that lie outside our own professional fields. We have first-hand knowledge of extremely little of everything that lies at the core of our existence and our societies. Accordingly, we choose our authorities on more or less arbitrary grounds, and we then choose to believe in what they claim without being able to investigate the matter to any extent at all. Dennett uses the formula e=mc² as an example. Do we believe in it? Many of us have heard about it, and many believe they know it to be accepted by a number of experts within physics, which makes it appear truthful and plausible. But few of us can actually explain in any detail why, because few of us can be said to understand the formula in any reasonable sense of the word “understand”. So how can we believe in something we do not understand?

What we do, according to Dennett, is believe that anything asserted about the formula e=mc² is actually true. But in truth we do not know. And for this reason, it is impossible to attain anything even resembling consensus on, for example, the issue of the climate crisis. What opinion the layman has about it depends largely on what authorities he chooses to believe in, which in turn is governed by his political positions on issues that pertain to economic growth and government regulation, among other things. We believe in what agrees with what we already believe in. We are religious. For this reason, the tough atheists’ criticism of religion misses the mark completely, however brilliantly formulated it actually may be in lengthy paragraphs. The God one is kicking is already long dead, and to once more joke about the old proofs of God’s existence is entirely pointless.

The new, rational human being, freed from superstition and systematic self-delusion by the sciences that are making heroic progress, is a completely unrealistic utopia without any foundation in what research actually tells us about how people really function. We are religious, whether we understand it or not. We believe, and believe that we know much more than we actually do know. And actually it really does not matter at all what content is proclaimed from pulpits or in scripture. The person who enters into a discussion about the apparent self-contradictions or absurdities in a religious doctrine is barking up the wrong tree. Some believe in God X, endowed with certain attributes and preferences, while others believe in something else, which is either called God or something else. What is important and interesting is whether, and in that case how, religion actually works. Trying to understand religion’s tenacity and fervour by studying various ideas of God is, writes Jonathan Haidt, like trying to understand the attraction of football games to their audience by studying how the ball moves on the pitch.

Religion has developed through cultural evolution, just like all other social-collective phenomena. Today we can reject a number of features of the content of many religions – it would be strange if it were not so – but we can hardly deny that they have served certain purposes under certain historically determined sets of conditions; and nor can we reasonably deny that they have in fact served these purposes with considerable success; otherwise religions would have perished without leaving many traces. But they did not. Along with psychologists such as Haidt and anthropologists such as Scott Atran and Joe Henrich we argue that the main reason is that this cultural innovation increased the coherence within groups and made them cooperate better internally compared to other groups. This did not necessarily mean that the other groups were outcompeted, but rather that they allowed themselves to be absorbed by the more effective religions.

The crucial point of having a god is that the god is said to reward loyalty and cooperation, while punishing selfishness and mendacity. An all-seeing god is particularly effective in such a context, since people cheat less when they feel that they are being watched. Common sacrifices and collective rites increase coherence, which creates the trust within the group that enables intimate and trusting cooperation outside the circle of family members. According to Haidt with support from Charles Darwin and the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the main function of religion is that it produces groups whose coherence makes them function like organisms. The biologist David Sloan Wilson writes in his book Darwin’s Cathedral that religions primarily exist in order for it to be possible for people to accomplish together what they cannot accomplish on their own.

This productive coherence exercises a powerful allure for reasons that we need not address further. We humans are social creatures who experience well-being by doing things together with others, and its contrast – alienation and isolation – is not something on which one can build dynamic and prosperous societies. This in turn means, as Haidt points out, that in the sense of being modern people, enlightened and rational, we can choose to reject organised religion, but even if we do so, we cannot emancipate ourselves just like that from the basic religious psychology that we are concerned with here. However, we can, as stated, always manipulate the terminology and imagine that religion is something other than religion, because we have decided to call it something else, if this makes us feel modern and clear-thinking.

Thus we have actually answered our opening question. God does exist. At least and without a doubt in an ontological sense. We have ourselves created the idea, just as we have created the ideas of democracy and art and a host of others. Religion lives, even among those who believe they have left it. Everything is religion and everyone is a believer. Anyone claiming the opposite, is truly, literally speaking, blinded by their faith. The really interesting question which thereby opens up is what to do with God and religion in the Internet age, when all the basic assumptions of our lives and existence are changing. How can God and religion become relevant, credible and engaging concepts for us and for future generations? That is the question which Syntheism seeks to answer.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58