Office of Communications > Weekly Reflection > May 2, 2008

Hitchens attacked the greatness of God.  Dawkins said the whole thing was a delusion, improbable at best and dangerous at worst.  The latest to join the anti-theist club is Maurice Bloch, an anthropologist who maintains that religion is a figment of the imagination.

Less cynical than others, Bloch makes an interesting case.  At the end of the Stone Age, when life was getting a little boring after 100,00 years of the same mammoth meat and fireside conversation, there was a sudden evolutionary thrust.  Forty to fifty thousand years ago, the human neural structure changed and imagination took the stage.

Cave wall murals were in, new tools were fashioned, and our ancestors began to bury their dead.  The restructured brain allowed the late stoners to ponder things that didn’t physically exist, including the possibility that people might live on after death.  Once on the path of the “transcendental social”, the interaction with imaginary beings like God, the relationship between the living and the dead, and idealized moral codes were inevitable.

Bloch may be right.  Faith may come from the imagination, but so does the passion of the Pieta or the critical insight of relativity.  Great human achievements depend on the ability to perceive that which we cannot touch or measure.  If other things spring from the imagination and become real in our lives, why not our experience of God?

A survey of scientists found that 31% did not believe in God.  Who is the God they deny?   Known in Scripture only as “I Am,” our God is elusive, impenetrable, ever-changing.  There is no static definition, only a living encounter described in words made possible through the imagination.  The only proof we’ll ever have is what we find when we seek something more that what we see before us.  Faith may be more than a figment of our imagination; it may be its essence.