Faith is in trouble. For thousands of years religion has asked us to accept on faith a loving God who knows everything and possesses all power. As a result, history has walked a long and sometimes tumultuous road. There have been moments of great elation interspersed with unspeakable horrors in the name of religion. But today, in the West at least, the age of faith has drastically waned. For most people, religion is simply taken for granted. There is no living connection with God. Meanwhile, unbelief has been rising. How could it not?
Once you expose the unhealed rift between ourselves and God, a deep kind of disappointment rises to the surface. We’ve gone through too many catastrophes to trust in a benign, loving deity. Who can ponder the Holocaust or 9/11 and believe that God is love? Countless other heartbreaks come to mind. If you probe into what is really going on when people think about God, their comfort zone with religion shrinks. They harbor a nagging sense of doubt and insecurity.
For a long time, the burden of faith has rested on the imperfect believer. If God doesn’t intervene to relieve suffering or bestow peace, the fault must be in us. In this book I’ve reversed things, putting the burden back on God. It is time to ask some blunt questions.
What has God done for you lately?
In supporting yourself and your family, which is more effective, having faith or working hard?
Have you ever really surrendered and let God solve a really tough problem for you?
Why does God allow such suffering in the world? Is this all a game or an empty promise that a loving God exists?
These questions are so troublesome that we avoid asking them, and for millions of people, they aren’t even important anymore. The next technology that will improve our lives is always on the horizon. A God who matters in the twenty-first century is all but extinct.
As I see it, the real crisis in faith isn’t about declining church attendance, a trend that began in Western Europe and the United States during the 1950s and continues today. The real crisis is about finding a God who matters and can be trusted. Faith presents a fork in the road, and all of us have come to it. One fork leads to a reality upheld by a living God; the other leads to a reality where God is not just absent but a fiction. In the name of this fiction, human beings have fought and died, tortured infidels, mounted bloody crusades, and performed every imaginable horror.
There’s a heartrending show of cynicism in the New Testament when Jesus is on the cross—a slow and agonizing way to die—and the bystanders spit with mockery, including the chief priests of Jerusalem:
“He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusted God, so let God rescue him now if he wants him!” (Matthew 27:42–43)
The vitriol in those words hasn’t diminished over time, but there’s a more unsettling point. Jesus taught that people should trust in God completely, that faith can move mountains. He taught that no one should toil today or save up for tomorrow, because Providence will provide everything. Leaving aside the mystical meaning of the Crucifixion, should you and I have that kind of trust?
If people only knew it, they reach a fork in the road many times a day. I’m not writing from a Christian perspective—I practice no organized religion in my personal life—but Jesus didn’t mean that Providence will supply money, food, shelter, and many other blessings if only you wait long enough. He meant this morning’s food and tonight’s shelter. “Ask and you will receive; knock and the door will be opened” applies to choices we make in the present moment. And this greatly raises the stakes, because if God is disappointing for all the times he hasn’t come through for us, we are disappointing for all the times we have taken the road of unbelief—literally every hour of the day.
The seed of unbelief is in all of us. It offers plenty of reasons not to have faith. I hope as a compassionate human being I would have looked at the spectacle of a crucifixion and felt pity. But when it comes to my own life, I go to work, save for the future, and look over my shoulder at night on a dangerous street. I put more faith in myself than I do in an external God. I call this the zero point, the nadir of faith. At the zero point, God doesn’t really matter, not when it comes down to the tough business of living. Viewed from the zero point, God is either pointless or feeble. He may look down on our suffering and feel moved, or just as likely he may greet suffering with a shrug.
For God to have a future, we must escape the zero point and find a new way of living spiritually. We don’t need new religions, better scriptures, or more inspiring testimony to God’s greatness. The versions we already have are good enough (and bad enough). A God worthy of faith must actually matter, and I don’t see how he can until he starts to perform instead of disappoint.
Making such a radical change involves something equally radical: a total rethinking of reality. What people fail to realize is that when you challenge God, you challenge reality itself. If reality is only what appears on the surface, then there is nothing to have faith in. We can stay glued to the 24/7 news cycle and do our best to cope. Yet if reality is something that extends into higher dimensions, the story changes. You can’t rebuild a God who never existed, but you can repair a broken connection.
I decided to write a book about how to reconnect with God so that he becomes as real as a loaf of bread and as reliable as a sunrise—choose anything you trust in and know to be real. If such a God exists, there’s no longer a reason to be disappointed either in him or in ourselves. Nothing like a leap of faith is required. Yet something deeper must be done, a reconsideration of what is possible. This implies an inner transformation. If someone tells you “The kingdom of heaven is within,” you shouldn’t think, with a twinge of guilt, Not in me it isn’t. You should ask what it would take to make the statement true. The spiritual path begins with a curiosity that something as unbelievable as God might actually exist.
Millions of people have now heard about “the God delusion,” a slogan from a band of militant atheists who are avowed enemies of faith. This disturbing movement centered around Professor Richard Dawkins cloaks its vehement, often personal attacks in terms of science and reason. Even if people don’t apply the word atheist to themselves, many are still living as if God doesn’t matter, and this affects the choices they make in their daily lives. Unbelief has implicitly won where it counts.
Faith, if it is to survive, can only be restored through a deeper exploration of the mystery of existence.
I have no harsh things to say about atheism without the militancy. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature,” but he also helped found a society based on tolerance. Dawkins and company are proud to be intolerant. Atheism can be humorous about itself, as when George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.” Every strain of thought has its opposite, and when it comes to God, unbelief is the natural opposite of belief.
It’s not right, however, to suppose that atheism is always opposed to God. According to a paradoxical 2008 Pew Research survey, 21 percent of Americans who describe themselves as atheists believe in God or a universal spirit, 12 percent believe in heaven, and 10 percent pray at least once a week. Atheists have not entirely lost faith; there’s nothing in that to judge against. But Dawkins proffers spiritual nihilism with a smile and a tone of reassurance. I realized that I had to speak out against this, even though I feel no personal animus against him.
Faith must be saved for everyone’s sake. From faith springs a passion for the eternal, which is even stronger than love. Many of us have lost that passion or have never known it. As I argue for God, I wish that I could instill the urgency expressed in just a few lines from Mirabai, an Indian princess who became a great mystic poet:
The love that binds me to you, O Lord,
is unbreakable
Like a diamond that smashes the hammer
when it is struck.
Like the lotus rising from the water
my life rises from you,
Like the night bird gazing at the passing moon
I am lost dwelling on you.
O my beloved—come back!
In any age, faith is like this: a cry from the heart. If you are determined to believe that God doesn’t exist, there’s no chance that these pages will convince you that he does. The path is never closed, however. If faith can be saved, the result will be an increase in hope. By itself, faith can’t deliver God, but it does something more timely: It makes God possible.