GOD How Come?  

This is not a screed against the existence of God. By now, most of you know that I doubt that such a being exists. In formal language, I'm a probabilistic atheist, that is, the chances are negligibly different from zero. Still, in spite of my enlightened opinion, it is clear that belief in God is epidemic among humans. But, the begged question is how did that happen. I must say that a cursory examination of the net provides little that informs so I will leap in here to explore what I think is a plausible understanding. Please note that plausibility is not evidence, I doubt if any evidence can be found and thus we are all entitled to our points of view.

Animals live in a state of nature. They know enough to find food, produce progeny and how to respond to danger. Lacking any one of three, the species could not exist. Think of the buffalo; they are with us only because of human sufferance; we slaughtered them. Animals do not wear clothing and do not have the capacity for abstract thought, so unfamiliar with predators they never figured out that humans became their deadly enemy.

Well, we are animals and thus we also lived in a state of nature. For millions of years our forebears reproduced, ate and survived enough so that they could change into us. These activities required that they learn the habits of animals and plants, that is, the regularities they saw around them. But, they also saw disruptions, sometimes violent and deadly: babies died, hunters died, people died, etc. With all their practical knowledge of nature, they faced considerable chaos; and chaos meant they could not make any sense of their world much less make useful predictions. Without knowing the why of things,l they could not determine solutions.

Still, they had a model at hand, themselves. They knew they had motives and made plans and thus assumed there was plan-fulness and motivation in the world around them. Why did a tree fall? Perhaps, in emulation of human experience, its spirit (Soul; Essence) died. Whatever, they shifted from state-of-nature living to populating living things with spirit and thus perceived orderliness. Again, using human models of hierarchy, they shifted to higher order spirits, they developed over-arching gods who could be asked for favors. May Poseidon give us fair winds. May Zeus favor my enterprise. Ares, let me survive the battle. And, it worked! Either the winds were fair or if not, they were angry for some reason and required atonement (recompense). In either case, the universe remained orderly. Remember how Oedipus staggered through life unaware of his crimes? Everything he did as king provided benefits to all, but the angry gods did him in. Unwittingly, he had broken their law and they broke him for that transgression. But, the gods had rules, motives and reasons; their universe was orderly.

The gods accounted for everything, had their own sense of justice and punished humans or rewarded them often capriciously. They were human writ large. Zeus was a womanizer and a rapist. He and his wife bickered and often opposed each other in marriage. The gods became angry, did stupid things, felt guilt and randomly interacted with humanity, but they explained things. Ares in charge of war, Aphrodite, love, Apollo, the sun, they kept things going. And, they could be urged to do to this that or the other thing. But, they also were perceived to be in conflict with each other with humans as their pawns.

The Greek Philosophers struggled with understanding the gods and humans' place in the universe. The Stoics thought the only difference between the gods and humans was that the former were immortal. Otherwise, no difference. Epicurus insisted that humans soul dissipated at death and that the gods had nothing to do with us. Aristotle offered a considerably more sophisticated version of an indifferent god and Plato talked around the topic and concluded that belief in god was good for maintaining civic order.

Things remained as they were for thousands of years. The Hindu religion has the distinction of the oldest extant, but Judaism has a strong claim. While the Hindus have a single god, she/he/it remains aloof with three manifestations and a multitude of other gods. Some have called that religion a tradition as well as a belief system. Judaism, following earlier manifestations of idea developed first henotheism (many gods with a preeminent one) and then monotheism.

More about monotheism v polytheism next week.

Through space we are inevitably hurled

On a planet we egotistically call our world

Tossed often into the pits

We can only live by our wits

Ignostically with flags unfurled.

Ignostic refers to ignoring the problem of getting god (if such exists) to help us. I emphasises that we humans have to solve our own problems.

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