this perspective, people believe in God because it is so easy to believe in invisible supernatural presence, and the great religions are elaborations around this basic core. !
Belief in the Invisible
Yet it is also true that in many ways it is hard for people to believe in the invisible, intentional being of God, at least in some ways and at some times. It is one thing to believe in the abstract that there is a good and loving God; it is another thing to believe that this God loves you in particular this very afternoon when your car has broken down in the rain. Many Christians struggle at some point with whether God exists or with whether they understand God’s nature. A young man may come to university as a devout Christian, take a course on religion, and begin to wonder whether Christ as well as Krishna are cultural constructions. A depressed woman may understand herself as devout, but find that when she sits down to pray she feels that no one is listening to her prayers. And always there are times when terrible things happen to good and faithful people who often continued to believe in God in the abstract, but who find that they can not longer pray at all. The struggle between espoused religion (the religion one asserts; the Nicene creed) and lived religion (the way in which one experiences God from moment to moment) is central to the life of the Christian, and perhaps to the lives of most believers.
The problem for believers is that to experience the Christian God as present, one must override three basic features of human psychology, features that are also part of our evolutionary inheritance. A person must override the
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expectation that our minds are private, an expectation so substantial that researchers have shown that it develops around the world at a more or less similar age and can be found even in non-human primates. A person must override the expectation that persons are visible. And finally, a person must override the expectation that love is conditional, as it is for all social beings beyond a certain age, when right behavior is expected as a condition of human interaction. At least, some versions of Christianity expect unconditional love.
The deep puzzle of faith is not why but how. How is it possible that people are able to violate such fundamental expectations of presence? The answer, in part, is that they do not. For most Christians, it will be a lifelong process to believe in all times and in all ways that their God is real for them in the way that their church tells them that God is real. As the psalmist laments: “how long wilt thou forget me, Oh Lord? For ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13: 1). What they do to make God plausible for them depends upon their understanding of God and on what the social world of a faith teaches about how to experience their minds and bodies to find evidence for God’s presence.
Learning to Sense the Presence of God
In 2004 I set out to study ethnographically the way God becomes real for people in a church that would exacerbate the cognitive burden of belief. I chose an example of the new Protestant church that grew up after the 1960s. * Those churches set out as an invitation to experience God as concretely and as vividly as God had been experienced by the earliest
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