If God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him

The back of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album reads as follows.

In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created him. And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord of all the earth when it was suited to Man. And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on his God and saw that it was good. And Man formed Aqualung of the dust of the ground, and a host of others likened unto his kind. And these lesser men were cast into the void; And some were burned, and some were put apart from their kind. And Man became the God that he had created and with his miracles did rule over all the earth. But as all these things came to pass, the Spirit that did cause man to create his God lived on within all men: even within Aqualung. And man saw it not. But for Christ’s sake he’d better start looking.

At different times in my life I’ve had different attitudes towards this bit of Andersonian mockery, but (reading it a certain way) it says there’s a reason why man needs God, and that lightly tossing that aside is not a good idea.

This is where the so-called New Atheists fail. They haven’t taken the time to understand why man is a religious animal. They review “the arguments,” in the limited way they perceive them, pronounce them invalid, then toss the millennia-old enterprise into the dumpster. It’s a twisted, impaired, autistic, short-sighted view of the issue.

Today is one of those days where I’m not being as productive as I know I ought to be. I can make excuses. I can blame myself. I can get into a funk and be useless. But inevitably, on days like this, Matthew Ward’s song will come into my head: Gotta do better than this.

Belief in God provides both of the poles around which a man’s life ought to be regulated: (1) a moral standard that exists outside himself, which sets a goal that is unattainable and is constantly judging him, and (2) forgiveness, compassion, and not only a chance, but the incentive to get up and try again.

Among the things that destroy a man are too much law and too much grace. They have to be kept in balance. But neither of these concepts — law or grace — make much sense from an atheist perspective. Law is merely human will. Grace is … what? Weakness? Acceptance of the frailty and fallibility of life?

Religion is a constant in human life (in part) because it meets man where he is. But let’s be honest. The modern world makes it very hard to accept traditional concepts of God and religion. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a breakthrough that reconciles these tensions. In this episode — Jordan Peterson as Martin Luther version 2 — Pigweed and I discuss the possibility that somebody like Jordan Peterson is going to forge that synthesis.

Peterson might or might not be the man to do it. Probably not. But the reconciliation between man’s religious need and modernity has to be settled, or we’re going to fall (temporarily?) into some ugly form of fundamentalism, either religious or secular.