Open Letter to My Students 75: Do I Believe in God?

Google “Song, ‘I Believe’” and you get some sixty entries. The most famous dates to 1953, and has been sung repeatedly by the likes of Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Glen Campbell and Barbra Streisand. “I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard; I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word.”

Conclusion: Americans may believe in different things, but they all believe in believing. 

I am never surprised, therefore, when people ask me if I believe in God. When I pose that question at congregations where I teach or consult, most people hesitantly raise their hand, but only when given a choice of “Yes, but….” Mostly, Jews avoid the question.

And for good reason: it isn’t a Jewish question altogether.

To be sure, the entire rabbinic tradition just assumes the existence of God. But belief is less central for Jews than for Christians. That is because, from their very inception, Judaism and Christianity went different ways. 

Christianity was popularized by Paul, a first-century Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor; so was influenced heavily by the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition that asked questions of belief. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, remained true to the biblical focus on behavior: what we should do, not what we should believe. Classical Christian literature is theological; the Jewish equivalent is legal. 

 To be sure, Jews are not uninterested in matters of faith. But we are quicker to doubt tenets of belief and slower to adopt them officially. 

The church father Tertullian (160-240) is usually credited with saying, credo quia absurdum, which religious sceptic Voltaire (1694-1778) translated as “I believe because it is absurd.” Although Tertullian may not actually have said it^[i] (let alone meant it that way), it is sometimes cited as a justification for believing in what science and reason doubts. Isn’t that the point of faith after all? 

Not necessarily. When I say I believe in my son, I may have all kinds of evidence to back up my statement. And in any case, I certainly don’t mean that I believe in his existence. Similarly, when I say that I believe in myself, I have in mind trusting my ability to make good decisions, not deciding after some serious doubt that I exist. Does “I believe in God” affirm God’s existence? I don’t usually use the expression “believe in” that way.

We might, of course, ask, “Do you believe in Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster?” There we do question actual existence. But is God like that? 

If you press me, I’d say I do believe in God, but the way  William James did: not because the evidence supports it; and certainly not because it is absurd; but because there is no evidence either way — if God is beyond time and space, what kind of evidence could there even be? And where there is no evidence, James declared, we should choose to believe whatever will help us live a better life. It’s like the question we ask of a new acquaintance, “Does he like me?” If we wait for certain evidence, we will never trust enough even to begin establishing a friendship.^[ii] So we assume the best and see what happens. 

So too with God. I don’t assume (for example) that God inevitably heals the sick; I have evidence against that. But believing in “God,” as some supportive presence beyond me that explains the order in the universe while affirming the good and the just within it is something that I find helpful. As I said in an earlier letter, faith is a strategy we employ more than a thing that we “have.”

But we need not go that far. For over a century now, we have known that to get at what words mean we need to watch how they are used.^[iii] Instead of asking if we believe in God, we should ask how we use the word God in the first place. 

If my cancer test comes back negative, I may say, “Thank God.” If I promise to attend your wedding next year, I may add “God willing.” I do not believe that an entity named God saved me from cancer or cares whether I attend your wedding. God is not an entity altogether. When I say these things I am simply testifying to the extreme importance of “escaping cancer” and “getting to the wedding.” I use the word God to name those things that are of inestimable importance to me. My life is richer for elevating them that way – a whole lot better than “Gee whiz, I’m cancer free,” or “Yeah, I’ll try to get to your wedding.”

God is not a piece of furniture in my life; not some thing that I feel obliged to describe and refurbish on occasion, to make God fit nicely with other things in which I believe. God need not be a thing to still be a reality: something like loyalty, love, beauty and harmony. I experience all of these and have words for them.

When it comes to God, I start at the wonder that the human condition entails. At hand right now are a return of spring and life and color and joy; a family Passover seder; a newborn baby cousin; a multitude of new ideas that even at my age I find exhilarating. At hand too are daily headlines that testify to the loss of honesty, integrity, love and compassion — attributes that I consider essential. I invoke “God,” as the best means I have to do these things justice. 

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^[i] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/i-believe-because-it-is-absurd-the-enlightenment-invention-of-tertullians-credo/69340C3AF8366E79BCF3BDD804DED82E

^[ii] William James, The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1897) pp. 23–4.

^[iii] Cf., e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953: 4^th ed. London: Blackwell, 2009); J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For a nice summary of this school of thought at Oxford, see Nikhil Krishman, A Terribly Serious Adventure (New York: Random House, 2023).