God: Irrational Rationality

I had one of those "eureka" moments today. Maybe it's something ridiculously obvious to everyone else, but it never occurred to me. Or maybe I just Figured It Out and it's time for me to be acclaimed along with Abraham, Aquinas, and Nietzsche.

Belief in God is irrational. Sure, various folks have tried to argue otherwise (Locke's "The Reasonableness of Christianity" comes to mind), but most people - even believers - acknowledge that at best, this belief is not based in reason. They may argue that the existence of God or not is a question that reason can't answer, which I suppose is fair. But it's still irrational. And yet, most humans (when pressed on the question by an opinion pollster) believe in something we commonly call "God".

The irony is that humans are (to my knowledge) the only creatures to have this belief. We're also (again, to my knowledge) the only creatures capable of reason. Goldfish don't believe in God. Pigeons don't. Dogs don't. Chimpanzees don't. Whales don't. Apparently it takes a rational being to believe in something so irrational.

Which makes perfect sense, actually. This was my "eureka".

Humans believe in God not in spite of of our rationality, but because of it. We are rational. We want the world to be explicable in rational terms. But it isn't. The world is crazy, unpredictable, and chaotic. Maybe on some super-newtonian, sub-quantum level it all makes sense, but not on any level we can appreciate. It just doesn't make sense from here. And we can't accept that.

So we fabricate an irrational belief to accommodate it. We create God.

So we can still believe in a rational, knowable world. It all makes perfect sense... really, it does. And when it doesn't, well... the Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn't He? It's the perfect escape hatch. Even those of us who - quite rationally - don't believe in God, sometimes want there to be one.

Even if it's only to vindicate our belief that somebody, somewhere - even if it's a nonhuman spiritual entity with the necessary omniscience - actually grasps the rational explanation behind it all.