The Churches and Modern Thought An inquiry into the...

The Rationalist asks: What grounds have we for assuming that the existence of religious belief points to the existence of a religious instinct? Is not a man’s religion determined by the geographical accident of his birth? Has not his religion to be diligently instilled into him from the cradle? How, then, can it be said that man is by nature religious? How can it be said that the craving for a deity is instinctive? To this the Christian apologist may reply that, however much the precise form of the religious belief may be due to education, no belief of any kind could be engendered without a predisposition to accept it. Have we not seen, however, that primitive beliefs were the natural offspring of fear and wonder? Inability to account for phenomena, ignorance of the laws of nature, and those abnormal psychical experiences concerning which science has but now commenced to furnish natural explanations, all combined to turn primitive men into staunch supernaturalists. For the same reasons, children in years as well as children in knowledge have always been predisposed to belief in the supernatural. This predisposition (it can hardly be called an instinct) may be universal, but it does not lead necessarily to belief in a deity. For that there must be education. If it be an instinct, it is not a religious instinct, although a soil eminently suitable for the sowing of supernatural dogmas.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, that the origin of religious beliefs and the process by which ancestral beliefs have been assimilated can be left out of consideration—in other words, that the ethnologist’s theories of the evolution of the idea of God and the educational factor may be disregarded—the supposition that there is a universal religious instinct must be relinquished if, as the Rationalist contends, religious belief itself is not universal. Is such a contention warranted by acknowledged facts? Into this we shall now inquire.