Is the divine a projection of the highest human values rather than a transcendent reality that grounds them?
The theological view is that God = love/unity/goodness. Many Christian and some Neoplatonic thinkers identify God as the source of love, unity and goodness, meaning we didn’t invent God as love; rather, we discover that what we call ‘love’, ‘unity’ and ‘goodness’ are shadows or reflections of a divine reality that is their ultimate source.
I argue that ‘God’ is the name we give to the value structures we most deeply honour, love, unity and goodness, and that such theology is really anthropology in disguise. In this view, it’s not that God is the source of love, unity and goodness; it’s that we elevate those ideals and then read them back into a transcendent being, thereby making them into God. If you take the realist route, you can say that we call God love/unity/goodness because those are the deepest features of reality, and “God” is the name of that reality.
In short, the common debate treats God as identical to these three ideals, whereas my suggestion flips the direction and asks whether these ideals are the real foundation and ‘God’ is merely the label placed on them. Both are valid philosophical perspectives, and the question I’m posing essentially revisits the age-old debate between theology from above (God as prior) and theology from below (God as constructed from our highest values).
True to form, : and the arguments can be further narrowed down:
Whether the ideas and the ideals and the identities can form a less complex entity, or whether such can retain their more complex tripartite , formal organizational values ; and whether the onus should signal a link that’s more essential then the other two. The answer to this question remains unsettled until that parable drives it asunder:
I think Mark 12-17 answers that : the ideas, the identification and the ideals’ common root rest as a link to connect the three into one, to a simpler constitution , before the opposite can occur, that is, can the form, as a process of unifying the idea to the ideal form preform that function?
The answer Jesus gives to the tax collector extends into the eternal question, right between alliance to political authority and the highest authority belonging to the non literates power of God, therefore, God’s rule is imperative over that of the state.
I feel I am searching for more than for definitions of God but the defining characteristics which are representative to what Ghandi was aiming for reflect this struggle to go beyond which face comes up,.
Edited: I would argue that our projection shows how the collective spirit of humankind is a mess. The story I am beginning to shape seems to rest on this insight: that human beings do not simply perceive the world, but continually cast themselves into it. What appears “out there” often bears the imprint of what is unresolved “in here,” including our fears, our desires, our capacity for both destruction and devotion. When seen in this light, the diversity of religious imagination begins to resemble a kind of vast, fragmented, contradictory, and searching collective self-portrait.
Religious traditions, including the Bible, can be approached in this way. Not only as systems of belief or moral instruction, but as records of psychological depth. They trace, sometimes with unsettling honesty, the full range of human possibility: from cruelty and self-deception to compassion and self-giving. The apparent contradictions within such texts may not be flaws to be resolved, but reflections of the inner dissonance they attempt to articulate.
In many of these traditions, one finds recurring images of conflict, light and darkness, good and evil, fidelity and betrayal. These are often cast as cosmic struggles, but they may equally be understood as inward ones. The question is not only what exists in the universe, but what is active within us and, crucially, what we choose to sustain.
The old image of “feeding” one side or another speaks directly to this. It suggests that orientation is not fixed, but shaped over time through attention, action, and repetition. What we attend to grows in significance; what we neglect recedes. In this way, the dramatic language of cosmic battle may be pointing toward something more immediate and intimate: the ongoing formation of the self.
If this story takes this seriously, it need not resolve the tension into a simple moral conclusion. It can instead dwell within the complexity, showing how the same individual can move along that spectrum between harm and care, fragmentation and coherence. The question, “Where do you want to go?” then becomes less an abstract or theological problem and more an existential one. It asks not for a declaration, but for a direction that is revealed gradually in how a life is lived, what it attends to, and what it ultimately chooses to nurture.
A metaphysical divinity in a natural sense but certainly not in a spiritual or ethical sense. The logical arguments for a ‘ground’ of Being, or first cause, or eternal somethingness (that entropy doesn’t effect) are all just bare ontological conclusions about what exists simpliciter. The anthropomorphic features are added by us… and here is where we begin projecting.
Such things as ‘purpose’ (teleology), ‘objective goodness’ (moral facts), ‘providence’ (love of creation) are all reflections of how WE relate to the world and create and do shit.
It is our healthy vanity that seduces us into believing that because we are so badass… whatever is behind the universe has to have some kind of special relationship to us… we can’t just be a mere natural phenomena with no reason or purpose other than what is naturally selected for over millions of years of evolution. We get hung up on the anthropic principle as well.
The second largely unconscious cause of the longing for a divine guardian figure is leftover psychology stuff from when we were childrens that’s now embedded in the psyche. The Feuerbach-Comte-Freud triadic theosophicus criticus theory suffices here for explanation. Jung went a bit overboard with the extra-phenomenological mythology, though. We want a pure Husserlean analysis of the most immediate structures of the most accessible forms of the most accessible objects of the most accessible experiences we can have when in ‘religious thought’… we want to know what exactly we are doing, why, and how we have managed to believe possible a god other than Spinoza’s.
But really, when you consider the size of space, the amount of stuff in it, and the length of time it has existed, it doesn’t seem at all impossible that some atoms might bump around and form molecules and then cells and then concertos eventually.
Now, if space were like just our solar system or galaxy and the time it’s been around was like only a billion years, then yeah, we could be like yo that is pretty cray, bro. But no… our universe seems more like a giant positively charged void that exploded into a bunch of sparks that are slowly settling and going out. Like Zizek’s cosmic catastrophe where things exist by mistake. But the little pet science project of some god it seems certainly not.
Like William Blake, I see the imagination as the real and eternal world, of which this physical universe is merely a shadow. He believed that true art and creativity were essential for breaking free from the constraints of reason and materialism. His belief in the unity of opposites and in the importance of imagination in transcending the limitations of the material world continues to inspire and challenge our understanding of creativity and the human experience.
That said, the Bible functions better as an anthology of writings illustrating the state of the human mind than itas a historical narrative, and its projections show up the spectrum of such considerations. The problem is that scriptures have always been used to validate power structures rather than test our empathy and moral bearings.
I understand the call for phenomenological clarity and intellectual honesty about the genesis of religious belief, and arguing that once we strip away projection and mythology, we stand before Spinoza’s God of nature alone. But are we not forgetting something inherent in humanity? Religion might not merely arise from human need but express something essential within being human itself.
Perhaps an openness to transcendence, or an orientation towards meaning, value or ultimacy, is built into human consciousness. Thinkers such as Max Scheler, Paul Tillich and Martin Heidegger viewed this as a fundamental aspect of existence; human beings are not merely self-contained organisms; we are beings who contemplate the nature of existence itself. In other words, the ‘religious’ impulse may not be a remnant of childhood psychology, but rather a manifestation of our capacity to seek the infinite and question finitude itself.
What has perhaps been overlooked is the transcendental nature of longing itself, and the fact that our orientation towards something beyond ourselves is not a psychological accident, but rather a fundamental aspect of consciousness. If religion is a form of projection, what we project may reveal the contours of our deepest self, namely the self that yearns not only for safety, but also for contact with ultimate reality, however it is reframed or redefined.
I agree that when we consider the vastness of the universe, the age of its matter and the randomness underlying molecular and evolutionary processes, the notion of a divinely planned ‘pet science project’ seems insignificant, if not absurd. The mere existence of conscious life may simply be matter’s potential realised, rather than evidence of teleology.
However, phenomenology does not deny vastness or contingency; rather, it asks what the experience of meaninglessness or vastness reveals about human subjectivity. Even when we feel small in the face of billions of galaxies, something inherently human still stirs within us: wonder, awe, anxiety and moral questioning. These responses, though cosmically local, are phenomenologically absolute within consciousness.
Thus, even if the universe is indifferent, the fact that we experience its indifference as meaningful is a phenomenon in itself that is worth describing. The ‘forgotten human’ may therefore be precisely that meaning persists even in a disenchanted cosmos. Our capacity to experience absurdity meaningfully is paradoxically sacred in itself.