On the Fruits of God and Religion

In today’s scientific and materialistic world, it’s sometimes difficult to defend religion or any belief in God without being laughed at.

Many intellectuals of our time dismiss the existence of God wholesale, almost out of principle. If anything, religious or spiritual beliefs are often seen as a sign of naivety, gullibility, or stupidity.

Having a naturally skeptical mind, I used to take pride in dismissing my Catholic upbringing at an early age and waving the flag of atheism. It took me awhile before I started warming up to religious and spiritual beliefs and recognizing the purpose they serve in a healthy life. I’m still learning.

One eye-opening book that I read recently is The Varieties of Religious Experience by the influential American psychologist William James. It’s based off of a series of lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh in 1902.

Throughout these lectures, James studies religion from a scientific and psychological perspective.

He doesn’t try to definitively answer the questions, “What religion is true?” or “Does God really exist?” but rather, “How does the belief in God actually change the way people live?”

Throughout the book, James studies religion from a personal perspective rather than an institutional one.

He draws on various testimonies, journals, and written reports of people’s religious feelings, revelations, and mystical experiences, and how these experiences changed the individual’s outlook on life.

In the beginning, James makes it clear the importance of studying religion on a personal level:

“In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case.” (p. 30)

James argues that most “organized religion” has started from one person having direct connection with the divine, and then sharing that wisdom and experience with others.

However, he also points out how once religion becomes too “organized” or “institutional,” it often turns into a rigid set of rules or traditions rather than an honest attempt to connect with God or the divine.

Stepping back, James finds that there are many similarities of religious feeling and conduct between very different schools of thought:

“When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which religion generates are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements.” (p. 504)

William James makes it clear throughout his lectures that he is strictly studying religion from a personal and psychological perspective.

While this use of anecdotal evidence can be controversial in modern psychology, it is not unlike the qualitative methods used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow, or Gary Klein’s research on insight, or other fields in social science such as anthropology and sociology.

The best way to study certain experiences is to simply ask people to describe it to you to the best of their ability.

This is known in academic circles as phenomenology, which is “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.”

While the scientific and objective study of the human mind is a worthwhile endeavor (especially through controlled laboratory experiments), one cannot deny the inherent subjectivity of psychology.

Being agnostic, William James wasn’t a mystical, spiritual, or religious person.

Instead he considered himself a “radical empiricist,” and he defined this as accepting all observations of reality, including conscious experiences from a first-person perspective. He points out:

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed.” (p. 498)

He highlights that subjective reality must be accounted for if one wants the “full fact” of human psychology, and pretending it’s non-existent would be describing a false reality

James only began to give religion a serious thought once his father passed away, whom was a deeply religious man that he had tremendous respect for.

Throughout his lectures, he illustrates how God and religion can be a powerful force in many people’s lives.

On the Fruits of God and Religion

William James is one of the founders of pragmatism.

The essence of this philosophy is that beliefs are often “true” or “real” to the extent that they have an effect on our lives.

James extends this logic to the belief in God and religion, and quotes Matthew 7:16 in the Bible:

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

If someone believes in a God and that helps them to live a better life, then who is anyone else to judge that belief or dismiss it?

Many people have personal stories about finding God during their greatest time of need. When they had no other strength to draw on, they found faith and courage through God to open a new chapter in their lives.

One of the most common examples of this is overcoming alcohol and substance abuse. While it’s not true for everyone, many report that a belief in a “God” or “higher power” helped them to change their ways when they were going through dark times.

Similar experiences have been shared by those who have gone through serious depression, traumatic experiences, or unexpected loss of a loved one.

When external circumstances feel like a prison, the belief in God is often a way to transcend these material concerns and connect with something far more beautiful, meaningful, and grand.

God is a resource that people can draw from when they are running low on inner strength.

The belief in God can change a person’s life. It shifts people’s perspective, values, and actions in a way that gets people to focus on what really matters.

When someone finds God during a dark moment, it is often an unexplainable experience that creates feelings of transcendence, awe, inspiration, and a new zest for life.

This feeling can be so powerful that there’s likely no scientific or rational argument that is going to convince the person that their experience was false.

“This enchantment, coming as a gift when it does come – a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say – is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which would otherwise be an empty waste.” (p. 48)

If one has ever experienced the irrational nature of love, then one should also be able to understand the irrational nature of God.

“Irrational” here doesn’t necessarily mean something that is wrong, only something that doesn’t follow the strict rules of logic or reason. It is beyond reason.

This type of irrationality is more common than we think in our everyday lives, not just in love, God, or religion.

Most people don’t live their lives by a strict code of science, logic, or reason, even when they like to believe they do. People can be strong proponents of science and math, but they don’t use it to govern every decision they make.

When people ask themselves what they want to eat for lunch, they don’t typically use the scientific method or a mathematical equation, they just choose what they feel like eating.

That’s a silly and trivial example, but the point is much of our lives are governed by feelings, intuition, and gut instincts.

The same can be applied to religious life, albeit at a much larger scale. James states:

“There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come.” (p.16)

This inner authority is paramount and unshakeable to the observer.

A mystical experience – or a connection with God, a higher power, or the divine – can completely transform someone’s life for the better. It provides a new sense of purpose, drive, and meaning that completely redefines how someone approaches life afterwards.

Ultimately, William James argument in favor of the belief in God can be boiled down as:

“God is real because he produces real effects.” (p. 517)

How does one find God? That’s something personal to every individual. There’s no right or wrong answer. Being open to the idea is a healthy start.

Everyone’s spiritual path is different. One may find God through prayer, meditation, religious texts, charity and kindness, spiritual retreats, synchronicities, or attending religious services.

One may not find God at all. And that too is OK.

Certain people may not need a belief in God or religion to live happy and successful lives, and that too can be a valuable path if it works best for you. As was mentioned previously, William James never considered himself a religious person, he just took religion seriously as a real phenomenon.

The goal of this article isn’t to persuade you to believe this or that, but to illuminate the very real force that the belief in God plays in many people’s lives.

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