Is God Dead? Just a Mind Game?
The Bible skeptic Michael, that we have been engaged with for many weeks, asks a very important question: “Isn’t all religion just a mind game?” After all, it was the German philosopher Karl Marx who famously said; “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of the soulless condition.” No doubt, critics of religion have long argued that it is a mind game we play with ourselves to soothe a fearful soul in a hostile world. Survival of the fittest surely selects for those who have the best coping mechanisms, right? No doubt, as soon as prehistoric men evolved enough to realize that everyone dies, his mind then evolved to find a resolution. Just so happened, religion fit the bill. Darwin himself considered there to be “an evolutionary derivation of mind and morality” as a product of natural selection. In other words, Darwin thought belief in God to be just a mind game as well. Very well then, let us begin once again from the common ground of modern science (twenty-first century science, that is).
