Do You Need A Belief In God?

Can you get through life on your own terms? When something terrible happens, can you make sense of it? And at the end, can you look back and feel that your life added up to something complete, all of that without leaning on a belief in God. Maybe science covers it. Maybe philosophy fills in the rest. The harder question comes when death arrives: are you able to face what looks like total oblivion with no promise of anything after it? Can you be satisfied with what this one life hands you and not ache for a second one waiting down the road?

Some people would say that anyone who reaches for religion is just too fragile to stand in reality without a cushion under them. Believe that a man came back from the dead, or that miracles happen, and you get labeled a wishful thinker, someone playing make-believe. Under that view, this is all there is, and the faithful are the ones refusing to admit it. So take what you can grab, live one day at a time, enjoy the thing in front of you instead of pinning your hopes on some heaven that may never come.

There is another angle worth sitting with. Science might actually confirm parts of what religion has claimed all along, things like prayer, the idea of Heaven, even the devil. That work is underway. A book called Measuring the Immeasurable gathers studies built to test exactly these questions, whether such things do anything or nothing at all. It came out in 2008 from Sounds True.

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