Is there a God-shaped hole?

New findings about the appetite for transcendence

We are born with a yearning for the spiritual and transcendent, and the difficult truths about life that we learn about as we grow older—such as the inevitability of death and the existence of terrible injustices—further push us towards faith. Without religion, or something close enough to religion, we are unhappy and unsatisfied. Blaise Pascal was wise when he said that secular pursuits can’t quench our thirst—“the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” As it’s sometimes put, there is a God-shaped hole that we all need to fill.

I know a lot of people who believe all this. But I’m becoming increasingly confident that all of the above sentences are false.

There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense. There are plausible enough accounts of how we could evolve other appetites, including basic ones like hunger and thirst, and fancier ones such as a desire for respect and a curiosity about the world around us. But why would evolution lead us to be wired up for spiritual yearning? How would that lead to increased survival and reproduction? Perhaps it’s a by-product of other evolved appetites, but I’ve never seen an account of this that’s even close to convincing.

I know the theistic response here: So much the worse for biological evolution! Some theists would argue that the universal yearning for the transcendent is evidence for divine intervention during the evolutionary process. They would endorse Francis Collins’ proposal that God stepped in at some point after we separated from other primates and wired up the hominid brain to endow us with various transcendental features, such as an enlightened morality and a spiritual yearning for the Almighty.

I think there are a lot of problems with this view (see here for my critical response to Collins’ proposal), but the main one I want to focus on here is that it’s explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. There is no good evidence that spiritual yearning is part of human nature. Children are certainly receptive to the religious ideas that their parents and the rest of society throw at them (they are very good at acquiring all forms of culture), but I’ve seen no support for the view that they spontaneously express a spiritual yearning that isn’t modeled for them. Children raised by secular parents tend to be thoroughly secular.

What about a milder claim? Maybe we’re not born with a drive toward the transcendent. But surely any reflective and feeling person will come to seek the transcendent in response to encountering death, injustice, the seeming randomness of tragedy and good fortune, and so on. That is, any reflective and feeling person will come to think: There has to be more going on here. There has to be some underlying order here; something spiritual and sacred and moral. And so any reflective and feeling person will be drawn to religion and spirituality.

I used to think this was plausible enough, but I just came back from a conference where I heard Tony Jones talk about this work with Ryan Burge. Jones and Burge are the principal investigators of a Templeton-funded project studying Americans who claim to be not affiliated with any religion. There are a lot of these “Nones”—about 30% of Americans, with the proportion rising to 45% when you look at Gen Z.

Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and the conference organizer went around to each panelist and asked what their most surprising finding was. Rather than try to quote Jones from memory, I’ll draw on his Substack post where he talked about this finding. (This post is also where I got the Pascal quotation I used above.)

His finding concerned a specific subgroup of “Nones”. As Jones and Burge find, not all the self-described “Nones” really reject the transcendent. Some of them are indistinguishable from religious people—they just don’t like to call themselves “religious”—others fall into the category of “spiritual-but-not-religious”. The interesting finding concerns those Nones who are totally secular.

Another large group — 33 million Americans — we classify as the Dones, or the Disengaged. Ninety-nine percent of them report praying “seldom or never.” Same for how often they attend a religious service. They’re not going to get married or buried in a church. They’re not going to let their kids go to Young Life camp.

And here’s the finding.

And they don’t have a God-shaped hole. They don’t long for religion, and they don’t miss it. You might say they’re filling that hole with other things (travelling soccer teams, mushrooms, Crossfit), but that doesn’t show up in the data. Their mental health and well-being indicators are a couple points lower than the Nones who look more religious, but it’s not a massive chasm. They aren’t religious or spiritual, and they’re just fine, thank you very much.

The title of his post is: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole.¹

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Just to balance things out, there are three claims about human nature and purpose/religion/meaning that I think are true, and worth emphasizing.

First, just to get this out of the way, nobody would deny that some people have a God-shaped hole. I’ve met atheists who tell me that they envy the solace that they think religion provides, and I’ve met religious people who tell me that they derive great meaning from their faith. I don’t think these people are lying.

But this is a much weaker claim than the view that we all have a God-shaped hole. As an analogy, I’m sure there are people who wish they played pickleball—it looks like so much fun!—as well as pickleball players who say that their sport gives them great satisfaction. But you wouldn’t conclude from this that there is a pickleball-racket-shaped hole in the soul of all of us.

Second, I do think that religion is in some sense a natural outgrowth of the human mind. If you dropped children on a desert island and waited a few dozen generations to see the society that they came up with, my bet is that this society would include religion. But the universal appeal of religion has little to do with spiritual yearning; rather, it arises from the naturalness of ideas such as supernatural beings and mind-body dualism. (For details, see my article conveniently titled Religion is natural, or my book Descartes’ Baby.)

As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, the claim that religion is about morality, spirituality, or the answers to “deep questions” is only true of more recent religions. These are not features of religion more generally. In a review of Wright’s book, I described early deities as “doofus gods”.

Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.

Religion is universal, and in some sense natural, but the sort of religion that is universal and natural has little to do with spiritual yearning.

Third, I agree that we are drawn towards meaning; this was a central theme of my book The Sweet Spot. But, along the same lines as what I just said about religion, the sort of meaning that we are drawn to isn’t inherently spiritual or transcendental. Meaningfulness encompasses such secular activities such as deep, satisfying relationships and difficult pursuits that make a difference in the world. Some people do find meaning in religion, but this is just one source among many.

I’ll end on a personal note. All my life, I’ve heard about how everyone is drawn to the transcendent. I never felt this myself, and assumed that I was strange—missing something important about being a person. It’s nice to know that I’m not strange at all, at least not in this way.

1. What about the small drop in mental health and well-being? I’m not surprised to see it; there is abundant evidence that, in America, religion provides a bump in happiness and satisfaction. But as Robert Putnam finds, this bump comes from the social engagement that religion provides, not anything having to do with belief or spirituality.