The Psychological Function of Faith

The sharpest weapon which the atheist utilizes against the theist is the problem of evil. The reader will already be familiar with the sort of argumentation that is involved with evil and God. But whatever the merits of such arguments, it must be quite discomfiting for the atheist to think that, as is generally the case, those who suffer the least evils (in the bourgeois developed world) are the quickest to use that famed argument; and those who suffer the most hunger, poverty, disease and misery--the poor of the Third World--are very seldom atheists; in fact religion thrives among such populations.

So let us unpack a little just why this is, and what people--especially those of less blest lives--get out of faith.

We said above that to a large degree life has rules, and that we know for a given action what a likely reaction from the world is going to be. But those who live lives where there is less constriction to these rules, less guarantee of a favorable reaction from the world, more uncertainty, less predictability and utility of action--these are more likely to turn to God.

If we could just for a moment look at things through the eyes of the faithful we will see why this is. When a man has faith in God, he is in a state--according to his inner psychology--in which nothing can happen to him, nothing can be suffered by him, that is not the will of a God who loves him, who will give him the best, and who will not give him any suffering without a reason, or ultimate redemption. Nothing can come to pass for that man that is not the will of God, and this God has the man’s best interest always in mind; and nothing suffered by him will be suffered in vain, so long as he remains loyal to his God. Certainly he is still subject to suffering, but it is no longer happenstance, no longer helpless suffering. He now has a way to act which will cover not only the predictable sequence of action-reaction of the natural world, but the totality of reactions--including the random and uncontrollable events that may impact him. He worships his God, and this is the action he can take which will guarantee not only the predictable things, but the unpredictable as well; not only the foreseeable reactions to his action, but everything that could possibly come to pass for him. He has found finally the action--worship of God--which will cover and gain influence over all possible sufferings that he could experience, the random and unpredictable as well as the regulated and predictable.

And so he adds a new praxis to his life. The natural praxis is doing actions (such as labor or healthy diet) that have predictable results which he will tailor to his favor. The other praxis is his worship of God, which will cover not only the sequence he could have predicted, but now gives him control over the random sufferings of the world, and gives him reason to expect the best from the random as well as the predictable. Faith in God gives a man confidence that he shall suffer nothing that will not be in his best interest, that there is no suffering anywhere--random or predictable--that will befall him without a reason, and which will not finally redound to his benefit so long as he keeps his faith. And as for that ultimate helplessness--the categorical helplessness of death--he has no reason anymore to fear even this.

The man of faith has now found the universal control, the action that covers all reaction, both random and regulated. Thus is the source of religious faith in those peoples where suffering is greater, life less certain, and random misfortune more common. Suffering and evil become not an argument against, but a reason and motive for, faith in God.