The recent “Do We Need God?” debate hosted by The Free Press between Steven Pinker of Harvard and journalist Ross Douthat raises a question worth deeper reflection:

Do human beings actually need God?

In his defense of secularism, Steven Pinker highlights three drivers of human progress: reason, science, and humanistic morality. He contrasts these with religion, which he argues lacks proof and has repeatedly led to conflict, prejudice, and violence.

But his critique overlooks something fundamental: Human beings have fought just as fiercely in the name of reason, science, and ideology as they have in the name of religion.

The twentieth century alone demonstrated that secular doctrines—political theories claiming to be rational or scientific—can produce catastrophic violence. History shows that human beings have fought just as fiercely in the name of reason, science, and ideology as they have in the name of religion. This suggests that the deeper problem is not religion or secularism. It is human nature itself.

What Pinker’s argument also overlooks is the role of doubt. Where God’s existence can neither be proven nor disproven, doubt is inevitable. Faith itself is laden with doubt. It is the discipline of learning to live with questions that cannot be resolved. One might........

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