Belief in God doesn’t come from a fear of death

When I was a teenager someone asked me if I was scared of dying. No, I said, but I’m a bit scared of living.

I want to say the same thing to David Baddiel. In his new book The God Desire he seems to be trying to present himself as a more nuanced sort of atheist, whose Judaism allows him to understand the appeal of religion, even as he decides that he is too intellectually honest to believe.

But his central thesis strikes me as the very opposite of nuanced. He argues, in line with generations of middlebrow atheists, that the desire to believe in God comes from the fear of death. We believers just can’t cope with the unpalatable truth that oblivion awaits, so we perform all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to cling to the opposite possibility.

I just don’t think it’s true. It’s not true from my own experience, and it doesn’t seem a major factor in other believers whose minds I have tried to peer into.