The Great Reality

Actually we were fooling ourselves, for deep down in every man, woman, and child, is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself.

We finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our make-up, just as much as the feeling we have for a friend. Sometimes we had to search fearlessly, but He was there. He was as much a fact as we were. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. It was so with us. - Alcoholics Anonymous - p. 55

“For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” - Augustine of Hippo

I find it very amusing that people who would never use the word "god" to describe a creator nevertheless substitute the word "Nature" (often capitalized, no less) as if "Nature" itself were a form of creative intelligence. I say this not to argue for or against either position, only to demonstrate how ingrained the concept of "god" is.

I'm going to play cultural anthropologist here. (That was actually my major at WSU for a time.) The concept of "cultural evolution" says that, in the same way that organisms adapt to their environments, cultures do so as well. And certain adaptations (like kinship systems and cooperative labor) are so advantageous that they occur in every culture. Belief in deities is one of these cultural universals. It finds many expressions, everything from totemic beliefs to our more familiar Western religions, but it is always there. Yet there doesn't actually seem to be any particular evolutionary advantage to it. It just seems to be a fundamental and necessary part of the human mind (or of the human heart, if you will).

Why do I say all of this? Because I very firmly believe that human life divorced from a sense of the divine is incomplete. Bill said it, but he was echoing Augustine (with whom he was quite familiar). And as Carl Jung himself said in 1932,

Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.

(Bill was, of course, a devotee of Jungian psychology and corresponded with him on one occasion.)

This in no way proves the existence of God, but it very strongly argues for the necessity of some form of spiritual belief if we are to live a fulfilling life. So there are two ways of looking at it. On the one hand, if God truly exists then faith becomes the only real foundation upon which to live one's life. If, on the other hand, God is a myth, then it is a most benevolent myth and one we ought not discard in our lust for autonomy.