Sometimes, I really wish there were a God

When I was a kid growing up in London, my favorite TV advert was for Ready Brek, a British breakfast staple not unlike Quaker Instant Oatmeal. I never touched the stuff. No way was I conceding Coco Pops for something even Oliver Twist wouldn’t want more of. I liked the pitch, not the porridge. It promised something magical. Eat this with hot milk and you’ll glow like the midday sun.

Even back then, to an 8-year-old who still half believed in light sabers, it seemed like grade-A twaddle. The rattle of a stick in a swill bucket, as George Orwell called advertising. But what seductive swill. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to live life cozily ensconced inside their own personal force field?

A TV advert for God would make the same claim. Swallow this to feel warm and protected.

The big Ready Brek bowl in the sky’s compelling brand proposition came into sharp focus for me back in 2023 when, in the same week, I reviewed David Baddiel’s novella The God Desire and saw the West End show The Book of Mormon.

Both left this lifelong atheist with the same nagging thought that I’d spent the best part of 50 years getting faith completely wrong. Perhaps it isn’t a human flaw after all. Perhaps it’s a human function.

Evidence for God might be as convincing as a Theranos blood test, but nobody is swayed by a Supreme Being because of the cold, hard data. Believers believe for much the same reason that British schoolchildren ate that cereal back in the 1980s: because of how it made them feel. Because of an imagined sense of warmth.

Why have humans blindly clung to belief for thousands of years? Why, in an age of gene editing and AI, is God still topping the popularity charts? That’s the question at the heart of my satirical novel Error 404, published last week. In it, science finally achieves what generations of atheists could only dream of: proof, beyond doubt, that God is a human invention.

Mic drop. Debate over. Atheists win.

But rather than giving birth to a rational Eden, the baby is born screaming and the God-shaped hole is filled by something far more sinister. Science is forced to confront a question way beyond its remit: if you kill God, what on earth do you do with human nature? Which leads to a broader and even more fundamental question: is faith more important to us than facts?

The answer is an almighty yes.

Such inanimates as rocks and trees have no quarrel with time and space. They don’t lie awake in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. wondering what existence means. They are entirely content with Douglas Adams’s assessment of reality: “For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). 

But when it comes to intelligent apes, you have a creature uniquely ill-equipped to live with the knowledge of its own mortality. So uniquely ill-equipped, in fact, that it evolved a psychological sixth sense. Not for detecting predators and prey, but for detecting morality and meaning. We experience our extra sense in the same way we experience sight and sound, even if it only exists because our brains insist it does.

This sixth sense has one job: to stop us from losing our minds. To convince us that our existence matters more than whatever the average sea sponge got up to 500 million years ago. To persuade us that the universe is paying attention. That it gives a flying asteroid that we exist. That there is a point. Someone behind the wheel. A reason we are here rather than somewhere else, or nowhere at all. That everything happens for a reason. That it is meant to be. That it’s all God’s plan.

Militant atheists, my former tribe, blithely insist God is a glitch. Control+Alt+Delete, uninstall superstition, install reason, and before you can say “observable reality,” we’ll all be happily nodding along to a Christopher Hitchens audiobook over our morning Coco Pops.

But God is no glitch. God is our operating system, embedded into our bones. We have to believe we are going somewhere.

We are the child in the back seat, forever asking, “How much longer ’til we get there?” No sensible parent replies, “Never! We’re rotting in this car for the next 80 years then ceasing to exist.”

Even if you’ve been stuck on the highway for so long that you’re eyeing the empty water bottle in the glove compartment as a potential toilet, you soothingly say, “Almost there. Almost there.” Not because it’s true, but because it’s the only helpful answer. “Almost there” keeps the void at bay. “Almost there” is fiction with function. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called it “psychological oxygen”

Of course, facts matter. Facts matter most in every other aspect of human life. But facts doth butter no existential parsnips.

I’m still an atheist. You won’t find me on my knees unless I’m struggling with my 30 daily push-ups. I’m not about to start living Leviticus loca. But writing Error 404 answered a question that has nagged me since childhood.

I went to a Jewish primary and secondary school. I went to cheder and had a bar mitzvah. I’ve watched friends and family give their lives over to blind faith – obsessing over what they eat, what they wear, and when they pray. 

Jews have 613 rules and regulations covering every aspect of daily life. Writing “G-d” instead of “God” isn’t one of them, although I suspect some readers will have winced at the heretical “o”s peppering this piece. S-rry.

I used to suspect – arrogantly, in hindsight – that the root of such obsession was self-delusion. I no longer think that’s a good enough explanation. Not by a long way.

I no longer see God as something to be proved or disproved, but as humanity’s greatest evolutionary gift. Our existential Swiss army knife. The ultimate psychological tool to fix our angst.

Faith is a full-packed suitcase of broadly decent ideas, ready to be passed to the next generation. It gives us purpose, binds us together, encourages us to have children and convinces us our lives matter. It gives us something to live for. A reason to go on. If the woolly mammoth had a God to believe in – a mythical beast called Tuskadon or Fleeceus Maximus – it might still be roaming the African plains today.

All of which leaves us atheists in a bit of a bind. After all, if we’re determined to tear down the churches and synagogues, we had better be ready to build something taller in their place. Something as capable of answering the questions every human asks. Something to provide genuine meaning and hope. Something to give people another reason to glow. 

–

Error 404 by Richard Ferrer, published by The Book Guild, is on sale now, priced £9.49.