Belief in God is a Fallacy Created by Your Inner Self (Response)

I’ve been reading a book: Homo-Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. It has been a grand source of food for thought and so here is one of the prompted thoughts. 

I’ll give you what Harari said first. 

“If I believe in God at all, it is my choice to believe. If my inner self tells me to believe in God — then I believe. I believe because I feel God’s presence, and my heart tells me He is there. But if I no longer feel God’s presence, and if my heart suddenly tells me thy there is no God — I will cease believing. Either way, the real source of authority is my own feelings. So even while saying that I believe in God, the truth is that I have a much stronger belief in my own inner voice.” (275)

So this is coming in a section that is talking about our thoughts and minds being the ultimate source of reality and meaning in our lives. And while I think Harari doesn’t have a handle on what Christians would say, think, believe or practice throughout a lot of his book I think this quote is full of things that Christians will say in order to back up their belief in God, “I feel God’s presence so that means He is real.”

Though we say things like that, I don’t think that it necessarily follows, as Harari believes, that the ultimate source of authority for Christians is actually our own thoughts, our own inner voice. 

When we talk about our relationship with God we are talking about something, an objective experience, that is often above and beyond what we can communicate in normal language. But just because we are bad at communicating what we are experiencing and what we know to be true, doesn’t mean that the objective experience isn’t real and just our inner selves (which Harari will later even argue doesn’t exist) determines our beliefs. 

There are often times in the lives of a Christian in which we do not feel God’s presence. There are times that, to gratify whatever desire we have in that moment, it would be easier to believe God isn’t real. Yet, we know, that He is real. The objective fact we build our lives on, despite our feeling and the desires of our inner selves, is that God is real. 

It’s a shallow thing to say that a person only believes in God because they choose to believe in God, as if we thought Him up ourselves (which is of course Harari’s argument). Instead, we react to what we experience externally to us, filtered through our experiences, for sure, but not created by our inner monologues. This doesn’t even take good theology into account. If we are talking about Arminian Christianity then sure; you could make an argument that people choose God, but it still wouldn’t be right. But good theology also includes the truth that God chooses us. We aren’t the sole agent in coming to God, though our choosing Him is important. God is actively involved in our salvation and in drawing us to Himself. So to say we choose God because of our inner selves explaining our experience as “god” doesn’t take into account the fact that God is active and at work, that the Holy Spirit is with us, and that God chooses us too. 

“I believe in God,” as C.S. Lewis once famously said (but he said Christianity) “as I believe the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”