When I was a kid growing up in London, my favorite TV advert was for Ready Brek, a British breakfast staple not unlike Quaker Instant Oatmeal. I never touched the stuff. No way was I conceding Coco Pops for something even Oliver Twist wouldn’t want more of. I liked the pitch, not the porridge. It promised something magical. Eat this with hot milk and you’ll glow like the midday sun.

Even back then, to an 8-year-old who still half believed in light sabers, it seemed like grade-A twaddle. The rattle of a stick in a swill bucket, as George Orwell called advertising. But what seductive swill. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to live life cozily ensconced inside their own personal force field?

A TV advert for God would make the same claim. Swallow this to feel warm and protected.

The big Ready Brek bowl in the sky’s compelling brand proposition came into sharp focus for me back in 2023 when, in the same week, I reviewed David Baddiel’s novella The God Desire and saw the West End show The Book of Mormon.

Both left this lifelong atheist with the same nagging thought that I’d spent the best part of 50 years getting faith completely wrong. Perhaps it isn’t a human flaw after all. Perhaps it’s a human function.

Evidence for God might be as convincing as a Theranos blood test, but nobody is swayed by a Supreme Being because of the cold, hard data. Believers believe for much the same reason that British schoolchildren ate that cereal back in the 1980s: because of how it made them feel. Because of an imagined sense of warmth.

Why have humans blindly clung to belief for thousands of years? Why, in an age of gene editing and AI, is God still topping the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)