How Many People *Really* Believe in God and Heaven?
Most people in the United States say they believe in God and Heaven. If all there is to believing something is being disposed sincerely to claim it, then I suppose they do believe. But what if believing something requires being disposed consistently to think and act in accord with one's belief? Then the matter becomes less clear.
Consider the implicit racist (discussed in an earlier blog entry "Do You Know If You're a Racist?") who says (for example) that "dark-skinned people are as intelligent as light-skinned people" but whose pattern of behavior, apart from her occasional avowals to the contrary, consistently reveals racist expectations -- she's surprised when an African-American says something smart; she expects, with no real basis, LeShaun to do poorly in her class; etc. I don't think we want to say that such a person really believes that dark-skinned people are as intelligent as light-skinned -- at best, she's in a muddled state somewhere between believing it and failing to believe it. (See also here my essay "In-Between Believing".)
I suspect most people who avow belief in God and Heaven are in a muddled, in-betweenish state of this sort. What you wouldn't do with a neighbor watching, you would do with God watching, when eternal bliss and suffering is at stake? One could posit massive irrationality here; but it seems easier and more plausible to me -- once one is comfortable with the idea of in-between beliefs and dissocations between avowals and one's real attitudes -- to suspect that such a person doesn't fully and completely, genuinely believe that God watches every move. Why is Hell less frightening than jail? Because, I suspect, belief in Hell is not fully written into the "believer's" structure of dispositions, reactions, and patterns of thought -- just as belief in the equality of the races is not written into the implicit racist's stucture of dispositions, reactions, and patterns of thought.
"Faith" can mean a lot of things. But perhaps we can think of one type of "faith" as merely sincere profession and hope, and desire to believe, without the fully saturated, implicit, taking-for-granted of the truth of the thing that is the province of full and genuine belief.