What Difference Does God Make?

My friend Ryan Bell, as part of his “Year Without God” project, recently wrote about the question “What Difference Does God Make?”  His answer was that God makes no difference to his daily life.

There may have been some confusion in how Ryan framed the question.  If there is a God, then God makes all the difference in the universe, because there would be no universe without God.  This is simply a function of the definitions of what theologians mean by the terms “God” and “universe” (or, more accurately, “creation”).  If there is no God, then of course “God” makes no difference at all, and indeed the question of what “difference God makes” is nonsensical, a non-question.  In other words, the question “what difference does God make” begs the question whether there is a God.

I think what Ryan meant is “what difference does believing in God make?”  Even this is a question fraught with definitional problems.  For example, what does “difference” mean?  Given that most human beings through most of history have had some sort of belief in God or the gods, and given that even evolutionary sociobiologists seek to explain such belief  with the language of adaptation, it seems beyond dispute that belief in God / the gods makes a substantial “difference.”  Certainly folks like Richard Dawkins like to argue that belief in God makes a pernicious difference by increasing divisions and violence among humans.

Here I think Ryan meant what positive difference does believing in God make?  This seems evident in his focus on “hope.”  At least some people report that their belief in God gives them “hope.”  Ryan feels he can experience hope without belief in God.  In fact, Ryan feels that at least some of the sorts of beliefs about God he received from his church experience were less hope-filled than how he feels “without” God.

I can’t blame him for that conclusion.  The vision of the “Left Behind” theology so popular in American church culture is hopeless and nihilistic.  The spirituality of pop materialism is far more attractive:  we are on this Earth for a blip in evolutionary time, but we have the capacity to feel and experience life at least for a moment, and so we can find that moment let go of worries about the future.  Don’t think so much; feel, and let go.  That is the message of almost every contemporary pop song, romantic comedy, family-oriented animated film, home furnishing commercial, and so-on.   It is a compelling message, because entails substantial truth, even though it is incomplete (see, e.g., the Book of Ecclesiastes).

But this raises another set of questions:  Who said belief in God is supposed to make an emotionally positive difference to the believer?  Why should a value judgment like positive matter to us?  And what, exactly, do we mean by “belief” in God?  There have been cultures in which belief in the gods produced fear rather than hope.  I can’t imagine that the Moche people, for example, thought of the Decapitator primarily in terms of the category of “hope.”

At this point I think Ryan’s Christian background is already in play.  Christians take “belief” in God to mean “trust.”  Christians want to “trust” God because we believe He is perfectly good and loves us absolutely, demonstrated in the fact that He created us, gave us life, and gave Himself for us on the cross.  We expect that this kind of “belief” will, at least over the long haul, at least in the hard fissures of life, and at least at the end, make all the difference to how we feel and how we live.

Even given these Christian presuppositions, why don’t most non-Christians feel hopeless most of the time?  I think there are at least two  Christian theological notions at play:  the doctrines of creation and grace.

Christians believe every human being is created in God’s image.  We differ among ourselves to varying degrees about the extent to which sin affects our ability to function properly as God’s image-bearers without a specific connection to Christ, but we generally agree that simply being human is a precious gift that entails some basic blessings. Christians further agree that all human beings who enjoy the basic goods of life are given at least some measure of grace.  In fact, this common humanity and common grace is a cornerstone of Jesus’ ethical teaching:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,  that you may be children of your Father in heaven.  He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  (Matt. 5:43-45.)

It is no surprise that, on any given day, both people who trust in God and people who do not trust in God (and people who struggle to trust in God) wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, engage in relationships, and participate in the general goods of life.  This is part of the theology of creation as well as the theology of grace.  The more penetrating question, then, might be whether we can recognize grace and respond in some way to it.