Do we need God –
The recent “Do We Need God?” debate hosted by The Free Press between Steven Pinker of Harvard and journalist Ross Douthat raises a question worth deeper reflection:
Do human beings actually need God?
In his defense of secularism, Steven Pinker highlights three drivers of human progress: reason, science, and humanistic morality. He contrasts these with religion, which he argues lacks proof and has repeatedly led to conflict, prejudice, and violence.
But his critique overlooks something fundamental: human beings have fought just as fiercely in the name of reason, science, and ideology as they have in the name of religion. The twentieth century alone demonstrated that secular doctrines—political theories claiming to be rational or scientific—can produce catastrophic violence. This suggests that the deeper problem is not religion or secularism. It is human nature itself.
What Pinker’s argument also overlooks is the role of doubt. Where God’s existence can neither be proven nor disproven, doubt is inevitable. Faith itself is laden with doubt. It is the discipline of learning to live with questions that cannot be resolved. One might expect the same restraint from secular conviction.
Faith is often caricatured as blind certainty, yet genuine faith lives alongside doubt. Every thinking person knows doubt intimately. We doubt our perceptions, our judgments, even the assumptions underlying our world. Believers and non-believers therefore share the same condition: we all live with uncertainty. Its absence keeps the heart humble. Yet we continue living by accepting, consciously or unconsciously, the premises that make life possible.
What surprised me most was Pinker’s certitude. The kind of certainty we usually associate with religious zeal appears here in secular form. When billions of religious believers are treated as lesser people, not yet advanced enough to embrace secular ideology, the posture begins to resemble the very bias secular smugness claims to oppose—an attempt, in effect, to proselytize disbelief. Disbelief that hardens into dogma and leaves no room for doubt begins to resemble a distinctly twenty-first-century form of secular militancy.
If our beliefs are ultimately grounded in wishes about how the world ought to be, the secular worldview is not necessarily less dependent on hope than the religious one. The difference lies in where we direct our religious or mental hopes.
A believer directs them toward God. But if one rejects God entirely, where do those hopes go? Into open space? Into one’s own convictions?
My own path reflects this tension. I began from a largely secular outlook. Over time, circumstances led me back to my Jewish faith. It helped me raise a family grounded in values my children now pass on to their own children. I realized that faith offered something that reasoning within the confines of my own mind could not. Circling my own assumptions, I could justify almost anything if I tried hard enough. What I needed was a framework set on standards not created by my own preferences.
Faith gave me a discipline that asked me to strive toward ideals not invented by my own biases or moods. I do not claim certainty about God. I live with doubt, as many thoughtful people do. But precisely because of that uncertainty, faith calls me to humility and self-examination.
There is also a practical way to approach the question of belief. It’s a popular basis for jokes (Pascal’s Wager) about hedging one’s bets, but it’s a real consideration; Suppose I am wrong about God. What have I lost? I have lived according to ethical disciplines shaped by centuries of reflection about human nature; rules meant to guide behavior, restrain impulses, and cultivate responsibility.
Beyond that, my faith is not only a set of beliefs; it is also a relationship with those who came before us. To follow a tradition is to honor the moral efforts of generations; it is the passing of the baton, continuing the long generational conversation about how human beings ought to live. For many of us, it is also an attempt to make our ancestors proud; to show that their struggles, hopes, and values were not forgotten.
Critics often point to troubling elements within religious history. Yet moral development itself has often emerged through religious traditions, gradually challenging and refining human behavior. Rules that once seemed harsh adapted to their time, and attempts to regulate societies that had not yet evolved morally. Over centuries those same traditions pushed people toward higher ethical aspirations.
It is also worth remembering that the Judeo-Christian traditions helped shape Western civilization and the American framework that protects secular freedom itself; rejecting that inheritance sometimes resembles the impatience of a child rebelling against the very parents who raised him.
Faith, is not a rejection of reason or progress. It is recognition that human beings—uncertain, flawed, and searching—sometimes need a horizon beyond themselves.
Perhaps the deepest form of reason is not certainty, but humility before what we do not know.
