The question is an ancient one: Did God create us in God's own image? Or did we create God in our own image? Today the question is being raised again by persons who have taken it upon themselves to launch new attacks on religious belief.

I like the answer that Arnold Lunn came to. An outspoken British agnostic, in 1924 he had written a book, Roman Converts, in which he viciously attacked some of his intellectual peers who had recently converted to Catholicism. But several years later, he himself embraced Christianity and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Thereafter he set out to respond to the very criticisms that he had himself lodged against Christian belief.

One of those charges was the contention that belief in God is an exercise in wish-fulfillment, the Freudian notion that we fashion a God who can satisfy needs and desires that would otherwise go unfulfilled. His rejection of this contention was a blunt one: "To argue that the hunger for God disproves the existence of God," he wrote, “is as irrational as to maintain that the belief in the existence of cows is an example of 'wish-fulfillment' because the thought of beef makes a hungry man's mouth water."

This gets at the real issue. Either we hunger for God because God created us with that hunger, or we hunger for God because we refuse to accept the possibility that our deepest spiritual hungers—what the Christmas carol describes as “the hopes and fears of all the years”—are ultimately incapable of being fulfilled.

Those of us who believe have come to experience the biblical invitation as grounded in reality: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”