God

Despite false equivalences, religion (or spirituality) and culture aren’t the same thing. Religion deals in fundamental archetypes and universal ideas whereas cultures change continuously - and depending on the stock you place in metaphysical archetypes - culture oscillates between religious axioms. Culture is nestled inside religion. A perfect example of the more obscure manifestation of this is atheism which whilst denying the existence of God and dismissing religion adopts many tropes of religion. Atheism is the most boring of all the religions. That is not to belittle the arguments of atheism which do offer a meaningful critique of religion and especially the cultural histories that have surrounded religions. However, one large error that atheists make is to lay many of the world's atrocities at the feet of religion when there are many human crimes committed in the name of and in apparent absence of god. 

What the article seeks to explore is the possibility of religion without religion or belief in god without the belief in god. Whilst seeming like an obvious contradiction, it is not necessarily obvious what real or belief could mean exactly in the context of a human being and the metaphysical realm. If the religious instinct is an evolutionary trait of human beings, and therefore offers some practical utility on the scale of the individual and the collective, it raises the question to whether it’s reality beyond the human matters at all. The inference here is that god could be in the body of human beings - like native software or part of our internal architecture. Religion did not need to be questioned in this sense before the enlightenment age in which scientific enquiry proved and disproved things to be empirically true. Atheists who generally believe in the empirical method point to there being no evidence in any empirical sense that god is real and yet billions of people believe in some sort of god. 

The metaphysical is incorrectly placed in opposition with the scientific method positioned as if they are either mutually exclusive or exist in opposition to one another. The cross cultural prevalence of religion on a global scale means that religion or god is certainly real to many people. Whether it is an illusion or not, it is a real illusion – it is a real phenomenon and it is actually happening. What the empirical method demonstrates is that there are multiple types of reality. There is real in a universal sense and there is real in a human sense. There are degrees of reality that are empirically true but are not tangible to human reality. There is compelling evidence that reality as perceived by a human being is largely an illusion - that is to say not real - and yet it is real, in as much as real has any sort of utility. It is at this point of enquiry where the  concept of utility points to a necessary attribute that something we define as real must have: utility. Concepts, frameworks, stories, ideas and illusions reach some level of pointlessness once they are without utility in the context of human experience. A large utility of discovering another self-aware species would be to compare notes on reality. We are tool orientated creatures and without another self-aware comparably intelligent species, notions of reality will also have a speculative element. It is the isolation that we experience as the only other self-aware species that perhaps in part informs the religious instinct. Being alone feels wrong. 

Different forms of reality (human reality) and (non-human reality) don't provide solutions for belief in god without belief. To start from the most basic point, we have to provide definitions of god and its antithesis. If we are to consider god without dogmatic belief in religious texts we have to define god in preferably simple terms that do not stray from universally accepted definitions. Starting from the simplest point possible, it is obviously not a coincidence that in English God is essentially the word Good and that the Devil contains the word Evil: God is the highest good and the devil embodies highest evil. There is no doubt that humanity has found value in the collective abstraction of experience and projection of experience into symbolic and ultimate ideals through universal narrative forms. Storytelling is a human universal that’s depth goes way beyond entertainment. We see this now in films and books alike: Star Wars and Harry Potter are recent examples of stories that contain many religious axioms and archetypes that speak deeply to people on what could easily be defined as a spiritual level. 

The kind of belief typically expressed in traditional religious practices and even in notions of spiritual belief in god is conceptualised as something that happens inside. It is an inner belief that god is true that makes a connection to god tangible. However, belief does not necessarily mean this. From an existential viewpoint there are different types of belief, belief internally and belief in action. It is widely considered that these are the same thing but can in fact exist entirely independently. This is best dramatised in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Age of Reason between the characters Daniel and Matthieu. Matthieu has all of the right feelings about morality and Daniel is filled with bitterness and hatred. But Matthieu, despite knowing the morally correct things to think and to say to himself, cannot bring himself to act out belief. Daniel is the opposite and despite having a dark soul acts out the morally good. 

If we consider God as encapsulating the ultimate good, and belief as being separated between two primary modes: the internal and the action, then the existential view would be that belief is more closely embodied within action. This is because action in line with this ultimate good is what manifests the ultimate good in the world. Speaking religiously that would mean a way for god to shine through the individual – speaking practically it would mean to embody and manifest the ultimate good. The internal aspect of religion would therefore speak to humanities' need to conceptualise an ultimate ideal – a body that encapsulates the highest ideals and gives us something to imitate. From this perspective, the conscious belief in the existence of God is not required in order to believe in God because we act and embody belief. The human race has evolved as a religious species with the utility being to help us conceptualise our place in the world. Perhaps, to experience the full spectrum of what it means to be human – to experience the metaphysical and our human potential – we need to act as though we believe in God and not worry about whether we do or not.