Why do people believe in God?

It used to be the ultimate million-dollar question: why do people believe in God? But inflation has swollen the price to 1.9 million pounds. This is the sum being handed to Oxford University researchers to explore a topic that has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. The researchers will not be troubling themselves with the matter of whether or not God exists, merely whether belief in God maybe gave Man a Darwinian evolutionary advantage; or whether it is a result of Man’s sociable nature.

Lord knows, they won’t be the first to have tried. In The Descent of Man Darwin noted how “a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal”. That kind of phenomenon prompts evolutionary biologists to seek a genetic explanation, and to ask whether such a genetic change might have boosted Man’s chances of survival. Or maybe the architecture of the human brain evolved, making a belief in God a sort of neurological accident. But if so, who is to say that the only reason our brains evolved in a way to enable such a belief in God to be possible isn’t because God made them evolve that way?

It has become fashionable for science and religion to snarl at one another. They need not. Many scientists are religious. Universities sprouted in Europe to fertilise religious learning first planted in monasteries. Early scientists sought to explain God’s role in the Universe, not to deny it.

Will the researchers find that people believe in God because science cannot explain, say, Mozart or Matisse or Cole Porter? Or can it? Will they finally be able to solve Nietzsche’s riddle: “Is Man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of Man’s?”

From an editorial in ‘The Times’, London, February 19