Introduction

Due in large part to input from friends, both in the comments below and via email, I undertook to completely rewrite this page. (See original version.) This required a full re-examination of the question(s) I was trying to answer and the answers themselves. Thank you to everyone who provided input from varying perspectives.

The question this page intends to answer is: “Why do people believe in God?”

I didn’t make up the question; I have repeatedly seen it asked, both online and in person, and I’ve seen others attempt to answer it. I am almost always disappointed in the answers so I set about to examine it for myself.

First, it’s important to note the context and intent when the question is asked, and by whom, because it can mean different things. When the question is posed to the atheist by a believer, it is very often a form of argumentum ad populum, sometimes called the “bandwagon fallacy” or the argument from common consent. In those cases, it is typically phrased slightly differently: “Why do you think so many people believe?” It isn’t meant as genuine inquiry into the reasons people believe in god(s). Instead it’s used as a rhetorical device meant to assert illogically: “Of course God is real; almost every human in existence believes in some form of it.” Such statements phrased as dishonest questions can be dismissed.

But the question can be posed genuinely. For example, when evaluating my own loss of faith, I generated the question inwardly. What I was trying to get at was whether I was missing something incredibly important as I knowingly moved from the believing majority into an oft-marginalized minority. It was a big moment of self-doubt. What if there’s a REASON everyone else believes in God, some evidence I’ve overlooked? In this case, at least for me, it was a question worth exploring.

I suppose it is possible for a believer to genuinely ask the question, either to herself or to others, though I haven’t seen it except in cases like mine where the believer is beginning to fall away. To most believers I have known, the answer is self-evident and the question absurd: Of course people believe in God, because God is real. Since God is real, people believe in God. I have even met many believers who insist that everyone believes in God, even atheists.

But here, I want to take the question at face value, assume it is literal. One reason I had trouble with it at first is that I didn’t realize it’s actually multiple questions rolled into one. Do we mean people today or people in the past? Are the reasons even known? If so, are they universal?

The Origin Of Belief

Certainly it’s worth looking into the origin of belief — in God, pantheons of gods, spirits, souls, the spiritual world, etc. Because today’s ideas about God don’t exist in a vacuum — they didn’t arise in any one person’s imagination. Said another way:

If no one had originally believed in gods, taught about them, wrote about them, sang songs about them, developed complex rituals and social structures related to them — if none of that had happened, then no one today would believe in gods. To me, this is self-evident, but I have a healthy skepticism of that phrase. Imagine a world much like ours, but without any religion, no holy books, no sacred sites or temples, even without words like holy, sacred, god, heaven, hell, etc. In such a world, in which all previous generations had no god beliefs, what is the likelihood of a new generation arising that suddenly believes in gods? I think the likelihood is zero. Thus, it makes sense that one of the reasons people currently believe in gods is that people before them believed in gods.

So why did the people before us believe in gods? None of them came up with it either. My parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, old pastors, etc. — all the people who told my generation about God — none of them began believing in a new god. They all had forebears in belief, as did those forebears, and the ones before them. This kind of thing has been around for a long time. The earliest civilizations uncovered by archeologists included temples, shrines, idols, etc.

The short answer is, obviously, no one knows how it all began.

We can guess, though, and some guesses are more educated than others, based on what science has discovered about the human brain and our past evolution, among other things.

Given the known background of humanity, that we evolved over millions of years from an ancestor common to all great apes (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), and given the nearly unanimous assumption that no animals other than modern humans hold god beliefs, it stands to reason that there was a point in our development at which none of our ancestors believed in gods. In fact, it is commonly agreed that before a certain point none of our ancestors had the capacity to do so.

This has led many thinkers to conclude that two developments went hand in hand: (1) the capacity to hold spiritual beliefs, and (2) the development of spiritual beliefs.

In his 2002 book Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, And The Human Prospect, biologist Paul R. Ehrlich argued: “Religious ideas can be traced to the evolution of brains large enough to make possible the kind of abstract thought necessary to formulate religious and philosophical ideas.” He theorizes that as soon as our ancestors became smart enough to contemplate their own mortality, they began to “seek a belief system that appears to justify those tribulations”. Famed science popularizer Stephen Jay Gould basically agrees, writing in 2007 (The Richness Of Life) that religion might “record our human response to that most terrifying fact that a large brain allowed us to learn... the inevitability of our personal mortality.”

It seems reasonable to me that early humans or their immediate ancestors with increasingly larger brains began to contemplate such things as mortality or “where did we all come from?” But to me it’s a massive leap from those questions to the idea that there are powerful invisible spirits creating and ruling worlds. Something’s missing in the middle. I’m not alone in thinking there are missing steps here; many scientists and researchers are certain other factors were involved besides “bigger brain = thinking about more stuff = religion.”

For example, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his 2006 book The God Delusion, proposes a “theory of religion as an accidental by-product — a misfiring of something useful”. He argues that the tendency to believe religious assertions must have come from somewhere, and guesses that it must have served an evolutionary purpose at some point. From a natural selection standpoint, this means our ancestors with a genetic tendency to believe without evidence survived to have more grandchildren than rivals without that tendency, therefore passing on this disposition. He offers several suppositions as to why natural selection might have favored such a tendency, but no real proof for either (1) his explanation for the tendency or (2) the existence of such a tendency.

More recently I read a 2018 article in Psychology Today that looked at the same question, and it made more sense. Psychologist David Ludden wrote that yes, the evolution of greater cognitive capacity must have had something to do with it, but it was only the first step. Early on, he theorizes, humans evolved a “sense of agency” (the awareness that we can intentionally cause things to happen). We were then able to extrapolate from this that others, too, have agency — something that helps in our social interactions. We in fact over-developed this assumption of agency in others to the point that we often infer intention where none existed. (“That jerk just cut me off” instead of “He probably didn’t even see me”.) Then he points out:

“Because of hypersensitive agency detection, we also have a tendency to infer intentionality in natural processes or inanimate objects... Because the natural world is complex and acts in mysterious ways, we detect agency all around us.”

This is called animistic thinking and it’s a universal human trait, especially common in children — which can either be nurtured or corrected as they mature — and in hunter-gather societies. By the time agricultural societies developed, Ludden says, this animistic thinking began to shift into stronger, more developed ideas about the spiritual world.

For me, it all falls into place if we combine the animistic thinking mentioned by Ludden with the contemplation of mortality mentioned by Ehrlich and Gould. Tribes began to give names to the “spirits” they assumed inhabited or controlled the sea, the weather, the sky, the Earth, various animals, and these names were passed on to children (perhaps with the help of the tendency mentioned by Dawkins). Stories were told about those named spirits, and characteristics assigned to them. Then, once tribes began to settle into more populated agricultural communities, those old legends grew more intricate and detailed.

And now the story is caught up nearly to the time of the earliest fragments of written language we’ve discovered. These show the tendencies of cultures to deemphasize lesser gods and focus on the more powerful ones, until a few societies started asserting a single God.

Again, these are suppositions and somewhat educated guesses about our prehistory. Regardless of which ultimate causes of religious beliefs are the true ones, it happened, and someone wrote it down and someone else made statues and others constructed temples and rituals, and these were often adopted and enforced by the governments of those societies. And most importantly, they told their children about it. Which is how we got to today.

Why Do People Believe TODAY?

Here again I subdivide the question. One is why do currently living people begin to believe in God (or gods)? The other is why do they continue to believe. I think the answer to the first is obvious.

Initial Belief

To me, it’s obvious that the reason most people initially believe in God is indoctrination. I think this not only because that’s how it happened for me, but because there really isn’t another way for it to happen. (Indoctrination often has negative connotations, but it can be a neutral word that means “the process of inculcating (instilling by persistent instruction) ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies...” [Wikipedia]. Other definitions: Cambridge, Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com.)

“Persistent instruction” is the key.

It comes from parents, extended family, the church, education (in some instances), government (in some countries), public figures, and friends. It surely isn’t always intentional or systematic, though it often is. Day after day, week after week, the same platitudes and concepts are repeated. In the early formative months and years, even as a child is learning to understand language, speak on her own, read, and write, the words and concepts of the locally dominant religion are pressed on them. I generalize in order to keep the page short. Every family, church, school, government, and circle of friends will be somewhat different.

Even when parents or other relatives aren’t participating in full-bore Christian teaching, they at least normalize it, make it clear by words and deeds that this belief is the correct, acceptable one. I don’t think I need to list any examples here; even my apologist readers admit this occurs and reinforces the intended belief system.

In Christianity, it’s actually mandated that adherents indoctrinate their children:

“Train up a child in the way he should go and, when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

—Proverbs 22:6

(See also Deut. 6:7, which commands parents to “diligently” teach the commandments to their children, speaking constantly about them in the house, when walking around town, when going to bed, and when waking up. Deut. 4:9-10 says basically the same thing, and again in Deut. 11:19. Ephesians 6:4 instructs Christians to indoctrinate their children. Psalm 78:4-7 covers it as well.)

I said above that there isn’t any other way it could happen, which isn’t entirely true. There are, hypothetically, other vectors via which people today could begin believing in God or gods. For example, direct revelation — which a handful of people actually claim (and in the churches my family attended when I was a child these anecdotes were highly prized). In almost all cases, however, these voices, visions, and dreams purportedly present a god-idea that is already common, and already known to the person who claims to experience them. In other words, the indoctrination came first. In a handful of such stories I’ve seen, a person claims to have belonged to one religion at the time of the revelation, and then switched to a different existing religion based on the experience. These are so rare, and so difficult (impossible, really) to verify that I don’t think they can figure any further into my deliberations on the topic.

Another possibility that is sometimes claimed is reasoning. There are verified instances of nonbelievers becoming believers through a process that they claim is logical and reasoned. However, in all of these cases I’ve read about, the person in question “reasons” herself into the existing religion that’s already dominant in her surrounding culture. (In the example case of C.S. Lewis, he was raised Christian, abandoning that faith in his teens, and then returning to it in his early 30s. He claims to have been an “atheist” in the interregnum, yet apparently continued to believe in magic and some forms of mythology during that time.) So, again, the indoctrination came first.

I have yet to hear of any person, either currently living or from recent periods of verifiable history, who had never been taught any precepts of a particular religion but then arrived at knowing/believing them via simple reasoning or direct revelation.

Continuing Belief

Whatever the reason for initial belief (and I assume it’s always indoctrination), I am also curious about why people continue to believe, or — in the case of those who temporarily fall away — return to belief.

Perhaps a big one is inertia. It’s easier to continue on the path you’re already on than to search for another. For many, religion becomes part of the background setting of their lives, something they don’t have to think about often but is always there to fall back on in times of stress, loss, worry, or fear. Once inculcated, the belief system is just there.

For me, at least, closely examining my initial beliefs was exhausting. I can easily imagine a person avoiding all that time and effort and simply sticking to the path of least resistance. One way I know that’s exactly what many people do is by how often I’ve heard the phrase: “I’ve never given it that much thought.”

The inertia is helped along by constant reminders, some more subtle than others, especially if one continues to exist among the same (or similar) people and communities. As I broke with my own previous faith, I was startled at how many bits of life I began to notice that insisted on reminding me of Christianity. Many of the reminders are in one’s own brain, a result of successful childhood indoctrination, though here I focus specifically on those facets of daily life outside oneself.

For the pious, habits like regular church attendance or consumption of religious music and reading material often serve as the most effective reminders. But even for those believers who aren’t so devoted, the reminders are there. Things like funerals and weddings, though there are secular versions, often serve as highly religious functions — designed to evangelize and/or reinforce faith at every step.

But wait. There’s more.

Unless one relocates to a pristine wilderness or a faraway nation where the particular religion of one’s indoctrination is rare or prohibited, one can never escape these regular reminders. Political speech is peppered with references to the locally dominant religion; everyday lay speech includes habitual mentions too. Even in nominally secular nations like the U.S., laws and policies frequently cower to faith (even more so when a certain theocracy-favoring party gains in power). Public schools often promote prayer or post scriptures (though courts have repeatedly ruled it unconstitutional). Government itself, from the smallest city councils to the U.S. Congress, promote prayer and “faith-based initiatives”, and in the states where I’ve lived most often, Christian messages are regularly painted onto law enforcement vehicles and attached to walls of council chambers.

Churches themselves might be the most obvious visual reminder. In most cities I’ve called home, the number of churches is always greater than the combined number of booksellers, centers for higher eduction, homeless shelters, and structures belonging to other religions.

Pop culture — the same pop culture that youth pastors had warned us away from — is riddled with not only religious references, but constant assertions that religion (and the blind faith behind it) is real, true, effective, good, and honorable. Realizing this was like escaping from an aquarium only to find that the aquarium had been floating in the ocean the whole time. I’m now convinced that the Very Concerned Christians were wasting their energy worrying that movies and music and TV were turning us away from religion; and in fact I now believe the opposite.

It’s been pointed out to me that these expressions of religion, faith, spirituality, and other magical thinking in pop culture are almost certainly due to the existing belief among humans rather than the cause of it. I think we can stipulate that is true while also acknowledging that they serve to reinforce the existing belief for those who hold it.

(I originally listed many examples I noticed in recent years. In hindsight such examples aren’t necessary because by definition “pop culture” is popular — most of us are aware. Still, I would be interested in a more thorough look at various pop culture media and their references to religion, faith, gods, spirits, magic, etc. I think the one that bothers me the most is news media, which at least pretends to be objective and forthright, but regularly uses theistic language and concepts as if they’re true, as in the CNN example I originally provided — see screenshot.)

Here is a good time to return to Ludden’s article, in which he also discusses proximate causes of belief — that is, given our history of belief, what are the more immediate and ongoing causes? He divides these into three groups: cognitive, motivational, and societal. Some people thought about it (cognitive), some fear death or social isolation (motivational), and others work to fit in with those around them (societal). Perhaps for many believers, some degree of each is in effect. My only quibble with Ludden here is that someone who “believes” in order to better fit in with society is not actually believing, but pretending to believe — much as I would do if someone held a sword to my throat and demanded my adherence to one faith or another.

Many of these explanations for continuing belief can be condensed into one phrase: “it’s easier to believe than not to”.

How Easy Is It To Throw Off Indoctrination?

It’s fairly well accepted that people (generally) remain in the religion they were born into. When Pew Research Center reports that “Americans change religious affiliation early and often”, they are typically referring to changes within a particular religion, such as Catholics becoming Protestants, or Methodists switching to non-denominational churches. All of those religious affiliations share a core set of beliefs that differentiate Christianity from other religions. In actuality, people raised without religion tend to remain without religion. Christians tend to remain Christians. Muslims tend to remain Muslims.

Some of us do actually switch from the religion of our childhood to another, entirely different religion — or to no religion at all (as I did). Some of us do this in defiance of the surrounding culture (as I did), while others make the switch toward the dominant religion in their culture.

I would be very curious in a study that looked at the percentages of actual religion-switching. I want to know which is more common, being raised without religion and later becoming religious, or being raised religious and later switching to without it — and how common is either. It would also be relevant to know the context: has the person’s family remained in the old group, or switched with them? What is the dominant religion of the surrounding culture? For example, I would expect the numbers to be different in the U.S. (where Christianity is dominant) than in, say, Pakistan (where Islam dominates) or Iceland (where non-belief is very common).

I have looked for, but haven’t seen, such a study.

All I have are anecdotes — my own, of course, but also those of others who have told their stories. I have met (mostly online) many atheists who say they were raised in Christian homes but easily tossed the beliefs aside and felt no qualms about it. During my time in the church, I met many people who claimed to have once been without belief and strongly resisted it for many years before finally “giving in to the Holy Spirit”, who was allegedly pressuring them to become Christians. (Mostly, of course, I have known people who didn’t switch belief systems at any point.)

For me, throwing off the indoctrination was incredibly difficult. Like many Christians, I was taught as a youngster two very important roadblocks to falling away from faith. First, we were taught not to question the beliefs. Doubt is sin. Questions are rebellion (also sin). Secondly, we were taught very illogical thought processes, so if we ever did question certain core beliefs, these circles of illogic would lead us back to where we began.

Even after working up the courage to doubt and question, and even after slipping beyond some of those illogical circles, the process was brutal, not only mentally and emotionally but physically — because stress takes a toll on the body. It required multiple tries, thousands of written and spoken words, hundreds of sleepless nights, countless conversations with believers and skeptics alike, and years of reading varying works — from both apologists and non­believers. Several times, I shrugged off the search and decided to continue believing in the God I’d always believed in.

And it’s never been thrown off entirely, and probably never will be. My thought processes, especially the unconscious ones, are awash in religious references. Every tune I’ve ever caught myself humming or whistling has always been a hymn or religious chorus from childhood, sometimes crossing over into religious Christmas music. (Rare exceptions are patriotic songs, also learned in childhood.) I still have dreams that involve religion, and probably always will. The fear of Hell was driven into me so strongly in childhood that I yet fear it, though I now know it isn’t real. (And if I ever discover it is real, I would never worship the monster God who created it or allowed it to exist.)

Conclusion

Perhaps the only way to discover, with any degree of certainty, how these various factors influence belief in gods would be a highly unethical and currently illegal experiment in which human babies are raised in varying controlled environments — some entirely free of religion and its associated references, others with high degrees of indoctrination, and perhaps a third group with no childhood indoctrination but common cultural references sprinkled throughout.

Note: I am NOT suggesting that this experiment should take place. I mention it only as a hypothetical, for purposes of thinking about it. In my view, those humans raised with zero indoctrination, teaching, or any associated references would never come up with religion. Especially if they had the benefit of modern scientific knowledge. (Some science fiction books, like Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs Of Distant Earth, have tried to postulate colony worlds or other situations in which humans come of age entirely free of god-claims.)

Assuming that will never happen, I think it’s safe to say for now that (1) the origins of belief likely had to do with increasingly capable brains grappling with a complex natural world that presented no immediate obvious explanation for itself, (2) that almost everyone currently alive who believes in a god or gods began to do so because they were taught it, and (3) that they continue to believe for a variety of causes that mostly boil down to inertia.

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