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Innate ideas and the God shaped hole

By Peter Sellick - posted Thursday, 17 February 2011


This was an intolerable attitude for Christians because much of the history of Israel and the writings of the New Testament were given over not to the promotion of “religion” but its severe criticism.  The history of Israel is a history of the temptation of religion.  The crucifixion of Jesus is an indictment of corruption and self seeking political and religious structures.  If the resurrection of Christ is his vindication by God, then this event puts an end to religion. Or rather, that religion was radically criticised and transformed.

Certainly there is a tendency towards what may be called folk religion, that comforting concoction of nice sayings and fantastical visions that bears witness to no truth but the gullibility of human beings.  Certainly there is the use of religion by the state whereby it again turns into folk religion. All of these expressions fall under the axe of radical Christian belief.

By and large, commentary by social scientists on religion is wrought with problems mainly because they have not been trained as theologians.  They make the mistake of regarding all religion as being essentially the same and as being instrumental.  The giveaway is when they use the phrase “the great world religions” and when they understand religion as filling some need in the person.

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The elephant in the room is whether religious belief is true.  By this I do not mean true in the sense of scientific rationalism, although that cannot be ignored, I mean something like; does the belief or system of beliefs consist of a narrative that frees rather than binds the human spirit. My old teacher at this point would have commented that “religion” is derived from “religio” the Latin word for “bind.” 

Keeping in mind that “freedom” has been made to stand for a vacuum in recent years, freedom is a central preoccupation of Christian teaching.  It is not the aim of Christianity to make us more religious, but to set us free from the tyranny of belief that stales our lives.  I think that it is helpful to understand Christianity as a religious antidote to religion. By outward appearance it looks very much like a religion.  As they say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck!

The anthropologists and sociologists will point out many similarities with other religions.  But what is seen from the outside is not necessarily the truth from the inside. From the inside there is a radical critique of all instrumental understandings of belief.  There is, or should be, a dismissal of any idea that benefit comes first in our thinking of the faith. Going to church may make us feel good, but we do not go to church to feel good, we go to church to be confronted by the truth.  That can be a dangerous and disorienting experience that will call us to a greater thing than what we think are our spiritual needs, that may, in the end, be as shallow as a fantasy about personal happiness.

This leads us to return to the discussion of the innate.  Is there something in us that is receptive to religion, a god shaped hole? I would answer in the negative from an evolutionary perspective, but I would also say that there is an existential need to have some understanding of life greater than sex and death. Our mistake would be to use this as a justification of religious belief.  This is because such a justification would be self-serving and confirm us in all our personal fantasies, which is the primary critique of religion. There may be a need for belief but that need does not bring with it truthful content, rather, there is the danger that any content will do.

This leaves the question about how we are equipped for faith. The Christian view is that we are part of the good creation of God but have been alienated from Him. This is the theological content of the story of the Garden of Eden. Faith, then, promises a return to a previous standard of wholeness in which our alienation from God is overcome. This says something about our nature. It is not that we need to overcome our nature, as if that is corrupt, rather it means that we return to an original nature that has been created and seen to be good.

The gospel is and is not natural to us.  It is not natural to our alienation from God, our sinfulness. This it radically transforms.  But it is natural to our created humanity.  There is something in us that responds to the beauty of Jesus, something that Christian art through the ages has striven to express. Aristotle said that in order to conceive of something there must be a phantasm in us that is able to assimilate that which is received. There must be something in us that recognises Christ, something as yet uncorrupted.

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While there is not a "God shaped hole" similar to the language acquisition centre, there is a proclivity  to be attracted by the beauty of Christ and to find in him the fulfilment of all things, in other words, God. There is something in us that is attuned to the grain of the universe, so that new believers have the feeling that at last they have come home and have been restored to their true selves. 

It is therefore not the case, as Roses says in the African Queen; “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are here to overcome!”  If we take the creation narratives seriously,  we will know that our nature is made in the image of God, it is a reality wholly good. To think otherwise is to embark on a journey that will deny our most fundamental and unchangeable nature in asceticism and self-hatred.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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