God is an instinct for Authority. Nature is hierarchic, every species dominates or is being dominated. Evolution and the creation and progression of human consciousness and thought is a part of that hierarchy. Consciousness is part of the nature and it’s laws. We have instincts to progress and preserve life. With the evolution of Consciousness, the basic instincts weren’t enough, the curiosity of homo sapiens was too vast to be dominated by those instincts. As humans started to be self conscious, our brains started working differently. With every generation of early, self-conscious humans, one idea stayed the same: authority. Whether it be tribal supremacy or a leader, the basis for civilization and society has been created. I think that this natural instinct of self preserver and authority laid the groundwork for religion and God. God is supreme authority, a universal power. God is a gestalt: It provides supreme authority over all humanity and provides the answers to all questions. It’s an ideal idea which limits our mind to the likes of nature and it’s one rule: complete progression.
Okay.
Indeed, also presumably natural.
This strikes me as slightly counter-intuitive, if one were to accept your previous two points.
Now this is mere conjecture. What makes you think our brains started to work differently? In what way? What benefit would the species derive from a progression that remained rooted in the one idea of authority?
But why would it have? In one breath you both insist that our belief in authority has allowed us to subject ourselves to leaders in a productive manner, and that our belief in authority has led us to posit an all-authoritative God to which we are subject absolutely. In the first sense, we are being, presumably, naturally beneficial, but in the second, we are being nonsensically and a-rationally creative.
Again, this is anti-natural. How would consciousness (a natural phenomenon, subjected to natural laws – as you’ve claimed) have developed “an ideal idea” that works against nature? That is: an ideal that “limits our mind[s] to the likes of nature and its one rule: complete progression”.
In essence: I’m just not sure I follow.
Only now I see the gaps in this theory I’ve written. I do understand that the biggest mistake was to include consciousness in the natural cicle and law. Maybe the brain and it’s structure is the product of nature, but the operating system it created is not, it follows it’s own rules.
About 30-400,000 years ago in Europe - and at similar times around the world there occured a ‘creative explosion’ that’s evidenced in the sudden occurence of artefacts.
‘If human evolution were an epic, the upper paleolithic would be the chapter where the hero comes of age. Suddenly after millenia of progress so slow it hardly seems like progress at all, human culture appears to take off in what the writer John Phiffer has called a ‘creative explosion.’ At a German site called Vogelherd someone picked up a piece of ivory 32,000 years ago and carved an exquisite horse in miniture – mouth, flared nostrils, jowls, curved haunches and swollen belly all breathlessely realistic. Before Vogelherd there were no representational horses…’
‘The Neanderthal Enigma’ James Shreeve.
But the idea of God was most definitely not a reaction to the questions asked by early humans. At least not the idea of the God of monotheism. An and Enki of the Sumerians, for example, predate the God of Christianity by several thousand years. And the only reason we know of the Sumerians’ beliefs is because of their developed writing skills. Doubtless, humans worshiped many other deities before them; and doubtless, these Gods differed in ways unthought of from the God of Christianity. Consequently, it doesn’t make any sense to speak of God, in the singular, universal sense of the concept, as having been posited as the answer to the questions asked by early humans.
I use the term God very loosely, I do not specifically refer to the Christian God or multiple Gods of Egypt and Sumeria. The idea is that we irrationally created a supreme authority out of our nature for authority, whether it be multiple Gods or beings.
Ah, understood. In that case, either you haven’t added anything to the discourse, or you’re proposing what I take to be an extremely weak argument. In the first case, you’ve claimed that humans posit the supernatural as an explanation for what they couldn’t figure out themselves. This is nothing new. In the second, you claim that humans posit a supreme authority out of a natural instinct to subject themselves under an authority. I take this to be a weak argument.
Sorry , Self preservation does not logically lead to creating a being that is of the utmost power to fear who could also possibly cause harm to ones preservation.
But yet ancient tribes feared gods. They tried to please them with sacrifices and rituals.
Didn’t the ancients fear gods because their gods were nature gods on whom the people relied? Isn’t that why the sun became the preeminent god? The sun disappeared (died) every night and was reborn every morning. Miraculously, so did most people, so they had an affinity to the sun and began to ascribe human attributes to ‘him.’ What pleased man would surely please a god.
Whether or not this became instinctual is hard to say; but I don’t think of it–belief in god(s)–as instinctive, the way fear is instinctive. Fear, I think, came first; then came fear and awe for the various manifestations of nature, much of which revolves around death and rebirth. Even human sacrifice can be explained in that way.
The original question was “is A the same as B?” Unfortunately, neither A nor B were defined. That is why I am not able to answer the question.
Appreciated K. Perhaps sept, can answer.
It is similar to what Freud thought about the superego being detached from the ego and granted to an external power with a friendly and impressive mask. The attraction to the people would have been that it allowed them to release in a burst of violence great quantities of repressed energies from the Id. Perhaps nature does use this mechanism, this trickery - to accomplish here aims - power.
If this is true:
Then it suits that humanity would have an instinct for obedience.
but the instances for such this instincts to come to fruition would be rare.
You can only evaluate God as an idea with certain impacts and influences when taking for granted that God isn’t real.
Taking for granted that God isn’t real, theism needs no further criticism. The implication of your position is that if there was some other myth/lie/manipulation that furthered your ideals of progress, you’d endorse it.
Just yesterday,I wrote the same thing in another discussion, to which I answered “Yes” - that the idea of “God” came as a result of our species’ search for the Alpha. It is logical that, as our species grows, so does it’s Alpha - when, at one point, we begin to number in the thousands or even millions, our Alpha inevitably becomes all-powerful, provided there is no real sense of how big our pack really is - and it appears infinite.
Fear has no place in the story of hierarchy - respect does. Alphas can not lead their pack through mere muscle, they need to ensure respect and trust through “calm assertiveness”. I posit that fear became a part of the human understanding of hierarchical only after their number became so great that they were no longer lead by Alphas, but by unstable individuals. Provided this is true, we can understand why humas expected their gods were the same way - revengefull, angry and seeking fear to feed on.
Irrationally? How can anyone discuss things philosophically with that kind of bias.