Gods Pop Up When You Least Expect Them Nicole Scott Free Inquiry

Deities are popular, and every human culture seems to invent at least one and often many—Apollo and Osiris, Odin and Tlaloc, Yahweh and the Holy Trinity. Most of the popular gods are neither plausible nor attractive, and it is not difficult to reject them. There is little to like about the obsessively jealous and narcissistic god of Abraham, who smote the Assyrians and demanded the genocide of the Canaanites. Calvin’s Protestant god—who requires the arbitrarily chosen “elect” to spend eternity praising him while he subjects their friends and loved ones to hideous torture—is even worse. But like the game of Whac-A-Mole, when we knock down belief in one god, another pops up. Expurgating belief in gods is more difficult that we imagine, and it is especially difficult when that belief operates nonconsciously within a larger unified system.

Belief in a just world is a subtle, pervasive, persistent, and destructive remnant of religious belief. Researchers find evidence of this belief in every culture studied, and it exerts its baleful influence on believers and nonbelievers alike. One of the pioneers of belief in a just world research, Melvin Lerner, called it a “fundamental delusion,” and another, Adrian Furnham, described it succinctly: “The [belief in a just world] asserts that, quite justly, good things tend to happen to good people and bad things to bad people despite the fact that this is patently not the case.” When we consciously scrutinize belief in a just world, the falseness of that belief is painfully obvious: generations of enslaved persons suffered brutal unjust treatment while plantation owners including George Washington enjoyed wealth and privilege and are admired as exemplars of virtue; innocent children suffer from war, disease, abuse, drought, and famine; minority groups face discrimination, harsh treatment, and even genocide. Unscrupulous power too often triumphs over innocent virtue for us to consciously believe that the world is just. But the problem with belief in a just world is that it exerts its insidious influence nonconsciously and operates by transforming victims into villains.

An obvious example of belief in a just world—in which belief in a just god is manifest—is the doctrine of “original sin” proposed by Augustine and adopted as Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Augustine struggled with the “problem of evil”: How can a just and omnipotent god allow the suffering of innocent children? We must conclude that those suffering children are not innocent: they are evil and justly deserve the suffering inflicted on them by a just god. Unfortunately, belief in a just world rarely operates in such an open and obvious manner, and it usually works well below conscious awareness.

One of the most extensively researched areas of belief in a just world involves the treatment of rape victims. Rape is a brutal, traumatic, and deeply destructive crime. An innocent person suffering such horrific abuse poses a powerful challenge to our belief in a just world, but this belief is resilient and finds a solution to the conflict. The rape victim was not innocent: she “dressed provocatively,” “led him on,” was “asking for it,” and got what she justly deserved. Blaming the rape victim is just one of other examples of  the damage  belief in a just world can do: the poor are indolent and probably drug abusers; victims of racial violence were arrogant; the victims of imperialist aggression were posing severe threats, and so the “preemptive strike” was just; the “wrongfully convicted” who spent years in prison “must have been guilty of something.” On the flip side, those who enjoy wealth and privilege are the industrious “job producers” who deserve their luxuries. When we look hard at belief in a just world, its implausibility is obvious, but it operates out of sight and avoids such careful scrutiny. Nevertheless, its influence is powerful. Our popular slogans reflect its force: “What goes around comes around”; “You reap what you sow.” Call such nonsense the law of Karma, and it passes for wisdom.

If the world is just, then there must be a divine force that governs it; and if we believe— nonconsciously, for the most part—that the world is just, we are assuming the existence of that divine power. George Santayana was a brilliant essayist and insightful philosopher who taught at Harvard with William James and Josiah Royce. He was both an avowed atheist and a devoted practicing Catholic. Bertrand Russell quipped that Santayana believes there is no God and Mary is his mother. Those who reject belief in God while still under the influence of the belief in a just world are a bit like Santayana: we believe (at a nonconscious level) what we consciously renounce. The nonconscious belief in a just world is widespread among philosophers who consciously reject belief in the divine force that it requires: it is evident in the widely accepted Kantian shibboleth that “ought implies can.” A just world—a world ordered in a just manner by a just god—would be a world in which I can do anything that I ought to do; unfortunately, that is not the nature of the world in which we actually live. Robert Alton Harris—a brutal murderer—ought to have treated people with respect and kindness rather than callously murdering them in the course of a robbery, but Harris—himself the victim of a brutal, loveless childhood, an abusive adolescence (including repeated sexual assault in a juvenile “justice” facility), and several years as a young vulnerable man in the violent, exploitative world of a maximum security prison—was quite incapable of such positive behavior when he committed murders. The crimes he committed were wrong, and he ought not to have done them. But if we imagine that Harris could have suddenly transformed into a person dramatically different from the character shaped by his brutal history, that requires belief in a miraculous godlike capacity.

Belief in a just world survives as a nonconscious deep belief that transforms victims into villains, but it is aided and protected by another deep and profoundly implausible belief— implausible, that is, in the absence of gods and mysteries and miracles. In this case, the belief in individual moral responsibility is celebrated and vigorously defended. How can this be a just world when some live in profligate luxury while others are homeless, destitute, and miserable? Both the poor and the prosperous are morally responsible for their lives and their choices and justly deserve their opulence or their suffering.

When we look hard at any person’s character or choices and ask why they chose or developed as they did, the answers come down to two radically different alternatives. Either the individual’s character and choices were the result of a long series of complex causes—a combination of genetics, early conditioning, environmental influences, and a multitude of other causal factors that shaped the person—or at some point (or points) there were special first cause or causa sui choices that had no causal antecedent. Such miraculous first-cause, self-making powers have a long history as a justification for individual moral responsibility and just desserts. The fifteenth-century philosopher and mystic Pico della Mirandola was not the first to make such an appeal, but his elegant version was framed in a rich account of God granting such miraculous powers exclusively to humans: “Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature.” Five centuries later, C. A. Campbell proposed a similar first cause “contra-causal” free choice as the basis for moral responsibility, a free “creative activity, in which … nothing determines the act save the agent’s doing of it.” Roderick Chisholm based moral responsibility on possession of “a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved.” For Jean-Paul Sartre, the special power of free will that makes us morally responsible for ourselves and all our acts is the power of self-created “being for itself.” It requires being a godlike first cause that “escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God.” Even if you can swallow the miracle-working powers, there remains the fundamental problem of who is making these absolutely unqualified self-determining “make yourself out of nothing” choices. On what basis—other than caprice—could that ethereal preexistent being make its own formative choices? Nietzsche gave the fatal verdict on the dream of miracle-working causa sui self-making: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic” that requires the ability “to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.”

Readers of this article are likely to be vigilant thinkers with polished critical thinking skills and what psychologists call a strong “need for cognition” (an eagerness for hard deliberation) and a robust “cognitive self-efficacy” (confidence in one’s own ability to solve problems through careful thought). Those are valuable powers. But such capacities (or their opposites, including the unfortunate tendency toward “cognitive miserliness”) were shaped by causes and conditions that were not of their own making or choosing; in short, they are lucky to be effective and diligent critical thinkers. Whether they are “chronic cognizers” or “cognitive misers” is not something for which they are morally responsible. Certainly, their own efforts played an important role in developing their critical thinking abilities, but that they had the inclination and the ability to exert those efforts and did so effectively (rather than seeking to enhance their auras or become spiritually aligned with the divine light) was ultimately a matter of good fortune. We do in various ways “make ourselves” through pursuing our goals, making choices, and striving to develop and achieve. But those widely divergent efforts and choices were the product of distinctly different raw materials, workshops, tools, and training, and a deep examination of those critical causal factors destroys the plausibility of “self-making” as grounds for moral responsibility.

That does not mean that the readers of this article never actually accomplish anything, that the efforts they make have no effect. To the contrary, they can and do accomplish a great deal, including genuinely creative and positive acts. Those accomplishments come through them and their own abilities and efforts: they do not bypass them in some spooky fatalistic manner. But that they have (or lack) the ability and the fortitude to accomplish such successes is ultimately a matter of their good luck and not something for which they are morally responsible. Deeper inquiry deals a fatal blow to religious beliefs, whether they be the obvious religious dogmas or the mutually supportive commitment to the belief in a just world and moral responsibility.

Belief in a just world is a comforting belief, and believing we have special powers that make us morally responsible is charming, so what’s the harm? When we believe that the world is already just, we excuse ourselves from the essential effort to make it so, and when we combine belief in a just world with moral responsibility, treating victims as villains is an easy step. Taking effective steps to help those who suffer from poverty and other systemic forms of oppression becomes a double wrong. We are taking resources from the wealthy, thereby depriving them of the just desserts of their virtuous efforts, and we are providing help to those who justly deserve to suffer the consequences of their vile characters and behavior. Punishing those shaped for crime and economic failure by our grossly inequitable society is a virtuous act of righteous retribution, and that blinds us to the deeper problems—problems that those enjoying virtuous affluence do not want to hear about in the just world that rightly rewards them. Belief in a just world and moral responsibility comfort the comfortable and privileged who are receiving their just desserts and who owe nothing to the less fortunate. We don’t need to provide real help or fix social problems: everyone—no matter the harsh conditions or brutal childhoods—has godlike powers of reason and will and is morally responsible for using or abusing them.

Belief in deities and miracles blocks inquiry, stifles thought, blesses complacency, proclaims the virtue of the wealthy and powerful and privileged, and blames victims. The religious elements in the belief in a just world and moral responsibility are subtle, insidious, and destructive. The belief in a just world—and particularly belief in a uniquely “just country” that enjoys the special favor of God and offers “liberty and justice for all”—makes it difficult to look carefully and honestly at the deep flaws of slavery, racism, mass imprisonment, cruel penal policies, and gross economic inequity: in a just world or a super-just country, such wrongs cannot exist. When we cannot acknowledge the wrongs, we cannot begin to fix them.

When disease is caused by God’s wrath and cures are inexplicable miracles, then serious inquiry into deeper causes is blocked. When both prosperity and poverty are products of special powers that establish moral responsibility and just desserts, then the deeper causes of injustice and inequity are invisible. Rejecting belief in traditional deities was the easy part. Clearing away the destructive debris that remains from such belief is the difficult but essential task.

Deities are popular, and every human culture seems to invent at least one and often many—Apollo and Osiris, Odin and Tlaloc, Yahweh and the Holy Trinity. Most of the popular gods are neither plausible nor attractive, and it is not difficult to reject them. There is little to like about the obsessively jealous and narcissistic …