God's goal for mankind is not to make man intelligent, but to make him good.  It is easy to decry the lack of intelligence in fundamentalist Christians, no less in fundamentalist atheists.  The empirical test of whether God is fulfilling His mission through Christianity, Buddhism, or indeed any other faith is whether adherence to that faith helps people be better people than they would be otherwise.  But that is very hard to measure for two reasons. First, it is hard to measure what constitutes the good; different people have different definitions, some more materialistic, some more aesthetic, some more social.  Second, even if it was possible to measure what was good, it is hard to really know what a person would "otherwise be" absent faith.  It is true that converts have a time of little faith and then have a time of great faith.  But their life circumstances were so likely to change in the intervening period that any apparent increase in goodness could be spurious.

The knowledge that people are "better" if they have some kind of spiritual or religious grounding thus has to be developed logically from something a priori.  What is it about the religious experience that is a priori?  And there, as Kierkegaard tells us, the a priori experience is one of faith in God.  By definition, if one is experiencing faith in God, one is driven towards the good, as can be seen if the notion of the faith experience is unpacked.  Faith in God means thinking that some all-powerful being has one's own best interests at heart, and that because that being is all-powerful, it is more efficacious at helping the individual achieve those interests.  The implication of this definition for the faithful is clear: go forth and learn as much as you can about God because he has your life in his hands.  Different religions approach knowing God in different ways, and as I would maintain that an emphasis on faith in an all-powerful God with whom one has a one-to-one relationship is a pre-requisite for the quest to be good, I would be tempted to limit my definition to the three religions of the book, as well as other religions that seek to emulate them and were brought up in a similar milieu.  This being the case, communication between God and man happens in the way one might expect if one partner is all-powerful and the other is a grub: God writes a book.  So irrevocably tied to the faith experience is a book, and the experience of that book can thus be expected to increase or decrease one's faith and one's goodness.  And as any Sunday school teacher will tell you, great faith is indeed possible with relatively little knowledge of the book in question, but greater knowledge of the book in question is transformative of one's faith and capacity for good.

These comments set the stage for two responses to your comments about the Nightline episode:  the proof of the existence of God and the problem of suffering.  For the proof of the existence of God, I would simply refer the reader to his or her own conscience.  Again, religion is about being good, and God has not given up on any of us, so if we all search our hearts we will find that we care about whether we do right or wrong.  It is a matter of free will whether we listen to that voice, but there it is.  For the problem of suffering, as a Christian I would humbly claim that Christian theologians have worked it out in a clear way by making suffering central to the Christian experience of the atonement, God’s sacrifice of his Son for the sake of the redemption of humanity for Adam’s sin.  This sense of the centrality, the archetypical importance, of suffering in human life, helps people grow spiritually; it shapes their faith; and it makes them more likely to act on the inner voice, or at least try to do so.  But then Judaism hardly needs Jesus to show its experience with suffering, and the origins of Islam as a religion of oppressed people (from Hagar on down) could belie my prejudice on this question.  Indeed, it is the atheists who risk the greatest suffering, because they live in the knowledge that they lack faith.

Harold Wenglinsky