You can see why the secularist might feel cheated. Every argument he makes against religious belief runs up against a great foggy X-factor called “God” and a useful hedge called “the Fall of Man” and an ace up the sleeve called “grace.”

He argues that people take to religion as a crutch, because they can’t get through life without help—or, as he thinks, the illusion of help—and the Christian and Jew and Muslim smile benignly and admit they can’t. They explain that we are crippled by sin and death, and God has graciously provided the aid we need. The lifesaving ring someone throws you when you are drowning remains real even though you want it desperately.

He may also argue that we believe in God because we have a “God gene” and are hard-wired to do so, and again the religious believer smiles benignly and admits that we might well have a God gene. He suggests that a loving creator might well arrange our wiring to make belief easier, knowing how hard it will be for us.

Or the secularist may argue that we believe in God because we want to claim Divine sanction for our worldly interests and desires, and points to the allied and German soldiers in World War I singing hymns as they tried to kill each other, and the religious believer shakes his head sadly and admits that many Christians have done this from the beginning. He shrugs and explains that God loves his creatures even though they make a mess of his gifts, and that some of them get it right anyway.

No evidence of the human origins of religious belief will upset the religious believer, because he can always appeal to a very convenient, and conveniently mysterious, relation between God and a defective humanity. It’s all grace, he will say. What seems like good evidence that religion is a sham looks to the believer like yet more evidence that God loves us.

The secularist must feel cheated. He’s playing cards with a rulebook that says, “Whatever hand you have, his is better, because all his cards are wild cards.”

I thought of this when running through my files looking for an illustration for a column I write for our diocesan newspaper, and finding a story from the bright, stylish, and very intelligent magazine New Scientist with the headline “Dear God, please confirm what I already believe.” Reporting on a study of religious belief, the news story began: “God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues.”

As it turns out, the writer was more certain of the conclusion than the scientists whose study he described. They kept saying “may,” although the few quotes in the article suggested that they really wanted to say “is.” The study, led by a professor from the University of Chicago, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study had found that people tend to think that they believe what God believes, or that God believes what they believe. (You may feel an Inspector Renault in the casino moment coming on.) The scientists involved then asked some of their subjects to do things that might change their beliefs, like write a paper arguing for the other side—the article mentions capital punishment—and found that people tend to change their beliefs and at the same time change what they thought were God’s beliefs.

Read More: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/11/secularist-cheating