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What In The Human Species Necessitates a God?

rhinefire

rhinefire

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Let's go back in time to the day when mankind first became capable of reason. I cannot help but believe hunger, dispair, fear and ignorance of the surroundings naturally made man look to a God like idea in order to ease the suffering. Why doesn't man simply say, "life sucks but it's all we got". Instead he says, "oh no, this life isn't the one that's really important, it's the life after this one that gonna count"! He creates symbols them calls them God of water, God of light, God of food, etc. He is basically at a loss about how to express his "idea" until...... a person comes along with the gift of gab. Then and only then do folks listen and follow. They follow not so much for the substance of what is being said rather for a sense of hope the speaker tells them about. People with hope are naturally happier than folks with none therefore this idea grows. Who wants to be with a depressed person?! Then there is the good feeling bonding with others gives us so that too perpetuates this thing until there are millions world wide willing to die and kill to keep this thing in motion. I wonder from time to time how many Gods has man created throughout history. Some have come and gone while others remain.
 
I think if you had to narrow it down to one human trait, it would be the ego.

We want to believe that we're special, unique, and know what's going on. Most of us find it terrifying to not know something, and some of us try to fill in the gaps with fantasy.
 
two reasons that do not have much to do with each other.
#1 To explain those things that were beyond understanding.
#2 control group reference group. (it is the basis for all of our laws)
 
Curiosity seems to be the most plausable of the explanations. No one knew how the world was created and got to how it had been. Devising our own explanations for these happenings and having the idea of a supreme being was the only way to try and explain it.

What baffles me that now we do have concrete explanations for how all this has all happened, people still cling to 3000 year old nut case fairy tales.
 
Mankind invented god to explain what they could not.

Then a few "visionaries" saw it could be used to gain power, authority, money and land.
 
I would suggest it was a response to Natural Instincts. How is it that I know what to do in this situation? How is it I know not to eat that? It must be that there is some higher being or force that 's telling me not to eat it!!!
 
I really doubt that the invention of the supernatural came originally from the desire to transcend death. More likely they were explanations of natural phenomena that ancient people didn't understand. They took what they did understand, human activity, and applied that to natural events. That's why lightning is thrown down by gods in the sky. That's why magic animals that act exactly like humans control things. That's why Atlas is holding up the world. The idea that the world functions entirely on its own didn't occur to them, and certainly how it did so didn't occur to them. They had no idea how natural phenomena interact with each other, so they added human agency to the process. Those processes included death and ideas about what happens after death.

That's why various religious myths include ideas like that the sun comes up because god or Apollo or whoever makes it come up, instead of the sun coming up because the Earth is spinning on its own. Or why disease is a punishment for your sins, rather than due to non sentient microbes. Or why anemia and porphyria are really a curse by the undead instead of genetic afflictions. In each case, it's attributing natural events to the agency of human-like beings. Whether it's god, vampires, demons, or whatever, the process is still the same. Ancient people did this because they had no better ideas. We do.
 
Could be becasue there is a God.
 
rhinefire said:
Let's go back in time to the day when mankind first became capable of reason. I cannot help but believe hunger, dispair, fear and ignorance of the surroundings naturally made man look to a God like idea in order to ease the suffering. Why doesn't man simply say, "life sucks but it's all we got". Instead he says, "oh no, this life isn't the one that's really important, it's the life after this one that gonna count"! He creates symbols them calls them God of water, God of light, God of food, etc. He is basically at a loss about how to express his "idea" until...... a person comes along with the gift of gab. Then and only then do folks listen and follow. They follow not so much for the substance of what is being said rather for a sense of hope the speaker tells them about. People with hope are naturally happier than folks with none therefore this idea grows. Who wants to be with a depressed person?! Then there is the good feeling bonding with others gives us so that too perpetuates this thing until there are millions world wide willing to die and kill to keep this thing in motion. I wonder from time to time how many Gods has man created throughout history. Some have come and gone while others remain.
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In order to understand things which they could not, our ancestors applied agency to unknowns to make sense of the world. It is a natural phenomenon in evolution. Applied agency is a survial instinct. You see the grass move, could be a predator - etc etc etc.
 
Tigger said:
I would suggest it was a response to Natural Instincts. How is it that I know what to do in this situation? How is it I know not to eat that? It must be that there is some higher being or force that 's telling me not to eat it!!!
Click to expand...

Millions of years of evolution have shaped our species and our instincts.

The same is true of all species. Birds migrate to the same breeding grounds every year. Turtles dash for the water after hatching to avoid predators. I could go on, but I don't need to.
 
The idea of God was born out of ignorance and despair along with our unique knowledge of the finality of death. A our species progresses out of the darkness there is less and less reason for a cosmic muffin to blame our failures on. Look at religion today, it is strongest with the least educated and most poverty stricken.
 
Knowledge=power said:
Millions of years of evolution have shaped our species and our instincts.

The same is true of all species. Birds migrate to the same breeding grounds every year. Turtles dash for the water after hatching to avoid predators. I could go on, but I don't need to.
Click to expand...

No, you don't need to. There's a difference..... the birds, fish, turtles, etc... are not sentient species (so far as we can tell). They do not question why it is that they do these things. As a supposedly curious and thinking animal, humanity would question their ability to know how to do these basic survival things.
 
It may be really simple. Imagining things that are not really there has low costs and huge survival benefits.

Our rational mind is a great asset, but often it does not have enough information to go by.

When a 'primitve man' walks in the forest and imagines that there's a monster behind that tree, and there's no monster, all he suffered is some caloric expenditure on hyperventilation. But if he - perfectly rationally - asserts that he has no empirical data to think that there's anything behind the tree - and in reality there's a tiger laying in ambush - well, his "atheistic" mind disappears from the genetic stream leading to us.

Naturally, bad things-behind-the-tree are balanced with good ones, and small things grow into big ones - all the way to the Abrahamic God stretched across the Universe.

We are hardwired to believe and mythologize.
 
Tigger said:
No, you don't need to. There's a difference..... the birds, fish, turtles, etc... are not sentient species (so far as we can tell). They do not question why it is that they do these things. As a supposedly curious and thinking animal, humanity would question their ability to know how to do these basic survival things.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Birds, fish, turtles, and every other species do not contemplate that their instincts could be given by a God, because they have not evolved a large and intelligent brain with which to do so. This should show you that you don't have to believe in God to have instincts. Plus, there are other sentient beings which do not believe in a God and have instinctual behaviors. Dolphins, elephants, even cephalopods such as octopi, and squid just to name a few. Notice I didnt even mention primate species, which is a given.
 
You can't prove there is no God. I cannot prove there is. I simply have faith.
Lachean said:
So no evidence then? Okay, but faith can be used to support the demonstrably false. Its a terrible reason to believe something is true.
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Knowledge=power said:
Exactly. Birds, fish, turtles, and every other species do not contemplate that their instincts could be given by a God, because they have not evolved a large and intelligent brain with which to do so. This should show you that you don't have to believe in God to have instincts. Plus, there are other sentient beings which do not believe in a God and have instinctual behaviors. Dolphins, elephants, even cephalopods such as octopi, and squid just to name a few. Notice I didnt even mention primate species, which is a given.
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Again, the difference is that human beings (so far as we can tell) have a different level of sentience than those creatures. Regardless of where it comes from, we operate on a different level than they do. Instinct does not mandate a divine inspiration, but in a species with the (supposedly) higher reasoning powers that we possess, it is likely to breed questions about the origin of both those instincts and the species itself. Humanity has filled that void with religion.
 
Metaphysical expression is natural.
 
mak2 said:
how do you "know" there is no God?
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We do because no one that has claimed that there is a god has proved it. Therefore gods are just an imagination and wishful thinking. It's as simple as that.

In addition, we know how humans think. We know they want to gratify their ego and we know what they will do to achieve that goal.
 
Oh, this is God argument 101. Absence of evidnece is not evidence of absence.
Paralogic said:
We do because no one that has claimed that there is a god has proved it. Therefore gods are just an imagination and wishful thinking. It's as simple as that.

In addition, we know how humans think. We know they want to gratify their ego and we know what they will do to achieve that goal.
Click to expand...
 
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