With 2006 underway we find many important issues in public policy being addressed from the perspective of God's supposed opinion on the issue. The role of God in public policy is no sophomoric foil, as the many deaths over the Moslem cartoons remind us. There are so many such issues in the U.S. that turn on competing interpretations of God's will that we can list them alphabetically: abortion, birth control, cloning, death and dying decisions, euthanasia, farming conditions of animals, Golan Heights, homosexual unions...
This is a very serious issue underlying many policies that directly affect freedom, constitutional rights, and the type of world our children will live in, so it cannot be waived away as irreconcilable. We must look at why people refer to the will of gods or God. One likely explanation is the God Reflex.
The God Reflex is humanity's tendency to attribute anything not understood to God or gods. It is another example of the errors that result from our reluctance to simply say, "I don't know." The things not understood may well be powerful (such as natural laws or germs), but they are not necessarily cognizant beings. The uncertainties may address daunting questions for which the answer is difficult (such as, "What is the ultimate origin of our moral code?", "Can we ever have justice for everyone?", or "What caused the big bang?"), so we may choose to fill in the gap with an omniscient being. Not only is there a human tendency to employ gods as placeholders where we have no other explanation, there is a human tendency to anthropomorphize those forces, to give them the shape of man. Since we tend to judge ourselves as the highest form of life, we can find no better model for the gods we invent. So, from natural, unconscious, physical laws, we create gods, and then we endow them with bodies and faces, and, more significantly, with consciousness and concerns similar to our own: people created God, and we created Him in our image.
To attempt to simply sweep away the question with the word "faith" will not suffice. People all over the world believe entirely contradictory things on "faith"; faith-based public policy has a history that is "mixed" at best; faith is a disastrous method for building bridges, doing surgery, and flying airplanes; it may be equally disastrous when deciding today's critical issues in policy. Faith may serve well in some areas, but in technical public policy for a democracy of many "faiths" we need to closely scrutinize the God Reflex.
There are many examples of the God Reflex. The ancient Greeks attributed any surprising or abnormal behaviors to the moria, or ate, which had been put into the person by a god to suddenly fill them with the courage, confusion, or passion to perform particular acts. These acts we now attribute to adrenaline, ethanol, or sexual hormones. The ancients knew nothing of these agents, but knew well their sensation and their effect, and so were left to answer that the immediate cause must have been "God." Some persons have more than nature and nurture in mind when they say a smart child is "gifted." This is the origin of our diagnoses of "stroke," "seizure," "attack," and "touched in the head." We still refer to alcoholic beverages as "spirits," and a person who behaves in an extreme fashion is considered to be "possessed."
Where did the first people come from? What is the origin of the Earth? -- or of our consciousness? The progress, however painfully slow, in answering the great question of science was possible only because some persons resisted the God Reflex and instead answered, "I don't know," and pursued a rational and natural explanation. To give up, simply draw in a man's face as the cause of the big bang, and declare the problem solved is anthropomorphization. Even if we did -- for the sake of discussion -- accept that answer, we would pursue it as we had every other answer -- we would have to ask "Where did God come from?" and the answer is typically something to the effect of "God just always was." Well, if it is logically acceptable to say, "God just always was," then it is fair and logical to say, for now, that until we have better data, perhaps "matter and energy just always were." The answer requires no violation of physical law, no creation of a new entity to jerry-rig the explanation (remember Occam's Razor?) -- it is the simpler answer that explains the observed phenomena and keeps us looking for a more specific explanation.
Many people standing on a mountaintop at sunset, or peering down at a newborn baby in their arms, will have a sensation of indescribable awe, gratitude, connection, humility, and inspiration. It is a real and valid sensation that may occur in many other profound circumstances as well. To ascribe it automatically to an omniscient being is anthropomorphization. It may well be beautiful, awesome, and mysterious, but that may well be because nature is very capable of beautiful, awesome, mysterious acts. You may be created by it and inseparably connected to it, but in more of an unintentional chemical way than in an intentional personal way. We have rational evidence for the mechanics of nature, but we have no rational evidence for putting a man's face or a woman's face on it and saying that it was done with conscious intent -- that is the God Reflex.
It takes nothing away from the spectacular and moving nature of these experiences that nature does this on its own; indeed, the realization of this often elevates a person's appreciation of the material universe. To be alive and to experience the stunning and exhilarating grandeur of existence in the cosmos is genuine; to anthropomorphize it is not.
Certainly, there is much about the universe and the human experience that cannot yet be fully explained -- many questions remain about the big bang, consciousness, and the future of our planet. There are "places" that our explorers have not yet gone: the limits of deep space, subatomic realms, and through time. Thus, even today, when scientific explanations are exhausted, the last questions are often still answered with "God." Nonetheless, if we wish to follow the truth wherever it may lead us, we must not give in to comforting and mystical answers; we must resist the God Reflex, admit that we do not know, learn from history, understand why it is in human nature that we create fictional answers, and, finally, set ourselves to learning the truth.
If we presume that most apparent irrationalities actually have their own underlying but perfectly sober reasons, then what are the reasons for the God Reflex? First, as discussed above, we dislike saying that we don't know. Many of us can't tolerate not having an answer, so, right or wrong, "God" serves as a temporary placeholder and gets us off the hook.
Second, our memory of our track record with this answer isn't very good -- we can still claim that the immediate cause of some things is God with a certainty undiminished by our long history of being wrong with that answer.
Third, we are genuinely fearful -- we sense that this pattern of factual discovery will, in fact, go on forever, and that as it does, the pattern of ever-increasing diversity, challenges, and incomprehensibility of the universe will also continue and the size of humanity (and certainly of self) in relation to it all will conversely and dishearteningly shrink. I'm not sure self-pity is a valid scientific argument.
Fourth, we confuse rejection of the God Reflex with rejection of critical issues that are genuine: the love or respect we have for people and institutions, we confuse the God Reflex with morality. People have a responsibility to the truth; they can retain the same affection for the people in their lives while choosing to disagree with them. It underestimates the relationship to assume it is contingent on comforting agreement. Morality can also be independent of religion and God; some would say that it is a moral issue to be honest with oneself and to follow the evidence rather than wishful and self-aggrandizing thinking.
Last, the God Reflex reinforces itself. Once having used "God" as our placeholder answer, we quickly forget that, in fact, we really don't know, and come to believe that "God" is actually the full and final answer. We have thereby inserted an answer that may be so intimidating or culturally revered that we and others will be very slow to investigate further.
That people would have a reflex that is not entirely healthy or that can lead us into trouble is not at all unusual. Anger, suspicion, and jealousy are just a few of the other natural human responses that serve us in some ways and yet can also be inappropriate and cause us a great deal of trouble. It is a matter of individual and social progress that each of us learns to control and manage those reflexes when they arise, expressing them when appropriate, and repressing them with more cerebral considerations when they are not.
The advance of reason and the human progress it brings depends, in part, on people acknowledging and managing the God Reflex. Why? Because public policy that works to advance society must accord with science and the discoveries of the modern world; we aim not just at answers, but at the correct answers, no matter how sensitive the questions or how cherished the preferred answer.