“I mostly find a belief in God superfluous,” a friend confided.
“Mostly?” I asked.
“I sometimes send a short prayer to God asking for assistance when I’m feeling really sick.”
There is an adage about there being no atheists in foxholes. Fear is a great motivator. When desperate, we are likely to avail ourselves of any salvation. I recall the comedy routine in which a reporter (Carl Reiner) asks the two-thousand-year-old man (Mel Brooks) how people got around back in the cave man days.
“Fear,” Mel replied. “You saw a saber-toothed tiger, and you ran like hell.”
We are programmed for survival; our instincts take over until we can figure out what the heck is happening. We also want to put explanations onto inexplicable phenomena as a way to capture safety. However, like my mom and dad, I’m more atheist than agnostic by preferring rational explanations. That’s why I was surprised when mom expressed a newly found opinion.
“Marvin, I think there must be a force greater than we know that set everything in motion.”
“Are you talking cosmology?” I wondered.
“No, I’m talking about a spiritual yearning. There are just too many incredibly complex functions in the interactions of everything on Earth and throughout the universe without a knowing force.”
I decided not to argue with her, not now when cancer was destroying her body. If she found relief in intelligent design, I was not about to argue or contradict her.
“That’s a comforting thought,” I responded.
I recently became of an age when there is significantly less of a future than a past. And I imagine a bit of fear drove me to draft a will, ensure my finances are in order, confirm that my family knows how to access information necessary to continue without me, and wonder whether that ache in my chest is the onset of a medical event. However, so far fear of the unknown has not provoked pseudoscientific beliefs.
Thank God.
Excellent, Marvin!