Originally published Monday, January 16th, 2023; edited Monday March 2nd, 2025
My starting point is simple. I imagined that the heart of religion must be belief in something, some god or hierarchy of gods, or at least some guiding theosophical philosophy. Listening to theological debate and, from time to time, participating with zest in these conversations in churches and seminaries, synagogues, temples, mosques, and Buddhist centers, people seem to be arguing about something. In fact, where you stand regarding that “something” is what really matters: Does God exist, and if so, how does this entity or reality function in relation to life and relationships?
Late on a very dark night, I stood on the deck of an overnight boat in New Zealand’s Milford Sound, looking into one of the deepest views of the Milky Way possible from Earth, though the view seemed upside down. They were so clear, I imagined I could count them had I enough time. I tried to hold this “god-question,” and just wait. I practice in a Zen Buddhist school, so I waited a long time. Eventually, I headed back to bed with no answers but strangely refreshed.
As I lay back down in my bed, it hit me: the reason I even entertained the question at all was that my grandmother Catherine’s sister-in-law, Aunt Edna, gave up her opposition to my mother marrying my father, who was neither Irish nor Catholic. That decision produced me. Then, after a predictably angry Irish adolescent turmoil, followed by a thoroughly liberal education, I found myself working through the post-Vatican II version of the Jesuit ratio studiorum, and voila, that produced both my questions and their answers.
I’d assumed that these questions, or a constellation of questions, had been honed down to a few targeted inquiries about a set of principles that undergird the universe and life itself. Among possible solutions, there is perhaps a group that can be labeled monotheist, another animist, others atheist, generally Buddhist or questioning, and purely scientific (my list is not exhaustive). We imagine that, by exercising the revered technique of careful, reasonable debate, time and again over many generations, we come to something at least closer to the way things really are.
We all know that any objective observer has to take their personal proclivities into account when formulating an argument. The point is to be as objective as possible and remove all the personal bits. But my personal questions seemed to be leading in another direction.
Here’s a hypothesis: the questioning itself carries a kind of genetic code.
It is not as if we had a set of mathematical problems that the best brains in the universe had been puzzling over forever, never arriving at a solution. If I could remove the set of assumptions and prejudices that shape and distort my peculiar take on the world, the questions themselves would be fresh and appropriate to the situation that arose. But that never happens. What if they are not designed to do that? The questions themselves are not useful because their answers are totally predictable.
I was trying to find out how many Christians exist in the world. I came across a pretty straightforward analysis of the percentage of people who currently belong to one of the world’s religions and how many are expected to follow those beliefs and practices by 2065. The Changing Global Religious Landscape was produced by the Pew Research Center, so the science behind the analysis is reasonably reliable. Belonging to a religion covers a multitude of sins, but it at least sorts out the proportional weight my fellow humans will be giving to the current ways that the god-question is being addressed in broad strokes. It also provides some predictors, given current demographic information on the social, racial, and cultural makeup of the populations in question. There were some startling predictions: that Muslims and Christians would be numerically equal within 40 plus years; there would be no major religious conversions, lateral shifting due to marriage and other circumstances only; that Buddhists, one of the smaller demographics, would continue to diminish. I’d cast my fate with a non-aggressive sect without much clout.
My beloved “none's” would neither increase nor decrease. Their proportional strength can be predicted by statistically estimating the birth rate among "none” mothers, in the same way that scientists determined the relative number of children born to spiritualist mothers. It was shocking to see that the “none's” were treated the same as any other category. To my mind, their choice not to follow a religion was perhaps the clearest of the intellectual/philosophical positions with regard to the god-question. But the Pew researchers said with confidence their numbers would not increase.
My precious questions about the nature of reality, the existence of god, and the virgin birth had their origin in the moment that Edna gave up her opposition to my mother marrying my father. This is also predictable: in 2065, the same questions will be asked with nearly identical responses. The genetic code does not tolerate innovation or dissent. Perhaps we can apply Darwin to the genetic code of the "god-question": our environment is changing, pressures are shifting, and this will favor different adaptations. However, this will require thousands or millions of years.
