Day 52 – the majority opinion
According to various Gallup surveys, 94% of Americans believe in God and 90% pray. –PATRICK GLYNN
The last reason I will offer for belief in God lies squarely in the realm of the subjective. I call this the Argument from Personal Testimony, because it directs our attention to the voices of men and women who believe in God and claim to have experienced Him in some way.
In every time and culture, the notion that God exists has been the overwhelming consensus. You will not find one era where theism is overshadowed, one period where atheism reigns supreme. Sometimes that belief has been rather primitive and other times mature, but it has always been there, this tidal wave of opinion in the direction of God. He may be perceived by some cultures to be unapproachable and by others to be near, but only occasionally has He been declared to be nonexistent. The theist, therefore, is solidly in the ranks of the history’s majority. If the weight of personal testimony is used as a gauge, to believe in God becomes the easy choice.
The majority is not always correct, however, and atheists are quick to point this out. The sad history of Copernicus and Galileo is evidence enough that strength in numbers is not always proportional to degree of truth. They alone were perceptive and brave enough to declare to an incredulous public that the earth was not the astronomical center of the universe. They were in the minority, but they were on the side of right. The majority proceeded to compound their error by persecuting anyone whose opinions differed from their own. “It just might be the case,” the atheists warn us, “that our minority opinion about God is also correct and will be proven so in due time.”
This argument notwithstanding, I believe there is good reason to maintain, when it comes to belief in God, that the majority opinion is true. I do not believe that theism would have remained the consensus opinion if it were false. Is it not amazing, once everyone conceded that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that belief in God went unscathed? Wouldn't it seem likely that theism would suffer when the fallacy of an earth-centered universe was exposed? How was it possible for such belief to remain supreme in the face of evidence that seemed to threaten it at its very core? I do not think it would have weathered that storm unless it was true.
Over the past two centuries, the continued embrace of theism by human beings in the face of the Scientific Revolution is likewise a paradox that can best be explained by its veracity. With the immense popularity of Darwin and Freud in the classroom and the neglect therein of creationism and traditional ethics, one would have expected atheism to have made huge gains. Within certain populations, it did. By the year 2000, 90% of psychologists had dismissed the existence of God as untrue, indeterminate, or irrelevant. These skeptics, however, still remain the overwhelming minority. Today, the overall picture of humanity given to us by independent pollsters is of a group of people whose faith in God has refused to yield to cultural and scientific trends. Incredibly, ninety-four of every one hundred Americans still profess belief in God, a fact atheists would like to blame on the public's ignorance of any alternatives. I would assert that the ubiquity of humanism in public schools and college campuses over the past forty years makes it doubtful the masses believe in God simply because they are uninformed. The truth is they are well informed yet continue to believe.
Science and knowledge will continue to evolve. Old ideas will be discarded and new ones embraced. Discoveries will come that seem to undermine faith. Faith will not be fazed. It will emerge stronger, wiser, and deeper. Belief in God will always remain the constant in the equation of the universe. It will never die, because truth never dies.
Daily Quotation
Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, 171.
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