Creating God

[Divine Insight]

Here's a good program that explains how and why humans created God due to evolutionary pressures.

Creating God

So there's the evolutionary explanation of how religions came to be.

[Neatras]

Yup, piggyback off of the known psychological phenomena where perceived agents inhabit the environment and have an active control over the health of the individual, sprinkle in spiritual animism, let it ferment for a while until the spirits start looking human enough to project your emotions onto, and just a few thousand years later you've got yourself a god.

I note that the featured speaker highlights how different sizes of communities adjust the type and quantity of gods, especially in bringing up how hunter-gatherer groups tended to lean more toward trickster spirits; less of a punitive monotheistic deity. However, I would've liked if he had walked through the steps; monotheism doesn't appear out of nowhere, it historically has depended on the aggregation of pantheons into a monolatrist system, which finally settles on flat monotheism. Showing the incremental steps behind how society tended to lean toward monotheism as its size increased would've been illuminating, given the data he's collected.

[Divine Insight]

However, I would've liked if he had walked through the steps; monotheism doesn't appear out of nowhere, it historically has depended on the aggregation of pantheons into a monolatrist system, which finally settles on flat monotheism. Showing the incremental steps behind how society tended to lean toward monotheism as its size increased would've been illuminating, given the data he's collected.

For me it's already obvious how that evolved.

In early polytheism the Gods often had disagreements and even fought with each other. For this reason they kept inventing more powerful Gods. But the time Greek theology was well established Zeus became generally accepted as "The God of Gods".

The ancient Hebrews then took this idea a bit further proclaiming their "Top Dog God", to be a jealous God who commands that they shall not have any other Gods before him.

That's still a polytheistic idea if you stop and think about it, because what sense would it make to demand that no one have any other Gods above a monotheistic God if no other Gods actually exist?

So the God of the Bible actually began as a polytheistic idea slowly evolved into a monotheistic theology. And even that doesn't really hold up when the Bible has the Canaanites going off to worship Baal. So it was still a polytheistic religion by the time of the story of the Canaanites.

Then it slowly became a more monotheistic religion until Christianity came along. But Christianity didn't want to revert back to polytheism so then invented a brand new nonsensical idea of a "Trinity". A polytheistic theology that isn't truly polytheistic at all, HONEST!

It's just a monotheistic religion that has a God who has an extreme personality disorder and even prays to itself. That's all.

Buy into that, and the theology can sell you anything at that point.

[ttruscott]

Yup, piggyback off of the known psychological phenomena where perceived agents inhabit the environment and have an active control over the health of the individual, sprinkle in spiritual animism, let it ferment for a while until the spirits start looking human enough to project your emotions onto, and just a few thousand years later you've got yourself a god.

What a lot of absolute...psychobabble! No description of the "known psychological phenomena" nor "perceived agents". No proof of nor even definition of spiritual animism" nor what "let it ferment for a while" might mean in this context...

and all we got here is a serious effort of misdirection.. Serious.

[Neatras]

[Replying to post 4 by ttruscott]

Yup, just psychobabble.

No foundation for any of this.

No studies, no scientific basis.

No discussions over how religions develop over time from an evolutionary perspective.

ttruscott, my friend, your claims of "misdirection" expose a huge blind spot in your thinking where you've completely dismissed the possibility that religion itself is propped up, not by truth, but by a necessity for social cohesion.

You accuse me of psychobabble, but the problem is... I've long since learned how desperate the religious are to make that accusation.

You want information on "perceived agents," well we can just walk through modern examples of the high diversity of religions that show how religion is nothing special, just a consequence of psychology.

For example, the animism present in Native American religions in recent history show the high level of hyperactive agent detection that went into projecting personified characteristics onto non-human objects.

We can study the Greek pantheon, the classic example of polytheism that follows after in the spiritual tree of life.

There's Monolatry, such as what the Hebrew people had in various points in history.

Then there's full-blown, classical monotheism.

ttruscott, your ignorance of religious evolution and historical development shouldn't be grounds for you to accuse me of psychobabble. If I didn't have any kind of evidential support in favor of my position, I wouldn't make the claims. But the timeline is clear: spiritual animism was among the earliest religions. Then, polytheism. Then, Monolatry, and finally monotheism. As plain as day in the archaeological record.

[AgnosticBoy]

Here's a good program that explains how and why humans created God due to evolutionary pressures.

Creating God

So there's the evolutionary explanation of how religions came to be.

I was hoping to find a transcript but haven't been successful so far.

Does the speaker distinguish between spiritual experiences and religion? I think that distinction is important because you can have one without the other. Besides being brought up into a religion, some become believers because of an experience. There's a notable neurosurgeon who came to believe in the afterlife because of an NDE. Religion to me is just a framework that people develop to explain experience and perhaps the evolutionary explanation covers on the religion aspect.

[Divine Insight]

There's a notable neurosurgeon who came to believe in the afterlife because of an NDE.

That would be Eben Alexander. There are problems with his claims that have been addressed by other neurosurgeons. Eben want to claim that it would be absolutely impossible for him to have had any sort of conscious experience while he was out.

There are two problems with this. One problem being that even other neurosurgeons don't agree that he can make that sort of claim. He simply doesn't have sufficient information to know whether his brain could still dream or not.

The second problem is that it has also been suggested that he could have had these dreams after the surgery and during the period when he was recovering. Obviously his brain had to be functioning just before he awaken. And there would be absolutely no way that Dr. Alexander could know precisely when he had his dreams.

Finally, there was absolutely no information in his dream that he couldn't have already known save for his claims of having supposedly seen an afterlife. But the problem with this is that descriptions of an afterlife cannot be verified to be accurate.

So this is hardly "proof" as he calls it. His experience may seem to be "proof" to him, but it's certainly not any kind of verifiable proof of anything.

Not only this, buy why is it that people who have NDE always seem to have experiences unique to their religion?

I think Dr. Michael A. Persinger has demonstrated a far better secular explanation for the "God Experience" via his "God Helmet"

[AgnosticBoy]

[Replying to post 7 by Divine Insight]

Good points. I will say though my point does not require that the experience be true or accurate in an objective reality sense. It only requires that the experience involved something spiritual (perceived as such by the person) and that the person accepts it as true.

For instance, there are religious scholars that believe that Christianity was started because of a belief in the resurrected Jesus. The disciples believed they experienced Jesus after he was crucified. The book of Acts talks about the apostle Paul's experiences of Jesus and this played a role in his beliefs. That's not to say that the beliefs were true, but the experiences occurred and spurred a belief.

My point is different from your view regarding 'evolutionary pressure' but it's still a naturalistic explanation (assuming the experiences are hallucinations). However, I don't see any reason to restrict myself to only naturalistic explanations in all cases unless you can justify accepting that position as opposed to being open to BOTH natural and supernatural explanations if or when the evidence allows for it.

[Divine Insight]

However, I don't see any reason to restrict myself to only naturalistic explanations in all cases unless you can justify accepting that position as opposed to being open to BOTH natural and supernatural explanations as the evidence allows.

Why should we be open to "supernatural explanations"? Especially when they aren't "explanations" at all.

For example, if there truly was a supernatural God that people could experience, how then do you explain why so many people have had such widely different supernatural experiences of this God?

If there was anything to it should everyone have experiences that point to the same God?

So it's more than just "supernatural explanations", it's supernatural tales that aren't even consistent.

Compare this with the evolutionary theory of how man created their Gods and their religions which actually does explain everything.

So in the end, the so-called "supernatural explanations" aren't really explanations at all.

So there isn't any question of which "explanations" we should be open to.

The secular explanations are actual explanations.

The religious experiences that people claim to have do not explain anything supernatural at all. So there isn't any "supernatural explanation" to even consider.

Calling it an "explanation" is already a mistake.

It's not like you have two valid explanations to chose from.

One explanation makes perfect sense ("i.e. the secular psychological explanation".)

The other so-called "explanation" is no explanation at all. All it amounts to is tales of visions, dreams, or the imagination that people have experienced in their minds. And these descriptions don't even point to the same conclusions. They typically point to people imagining to have experiences associated with the religions they were brought up to know about.

I just don't see where there are two different explanations to be open to.

The secular evolutionary explanation is the only meaningful explanation we have.

And by 'meaningful', I'm talking about being consistent and actually making rational sense. I'm not talking about someone's personal subjective judgement that something might be emotionally meaningful to them. I'm talking about rational meaningfulness, not emotional meaningfulness.

So it's not like there are two rational "explanations" to choose from. There's only one. So there's no other explanation we need to be "open" to. People claiming to have had religious experiences is hardly a rational explanation for anything. Especially when the people who have had religious experiences insist that this is always evidence for the religion they were brought up to believe in.

That should tell you volumes right there. In fact, that type of experience actually confirms the social psychological evolution explanation. This is exactly what the social psychological evolution explanation predicts.

[Aetixintro]

Here's a good program that explains how and why humans created God due to evolutionary pressures.

Creating God

So there's the evolutionary explanation of how religions came to be.

This is just unfair. God is not created. God is the unmoved mover! The Bible is honest thinking "inspired by God" as solutions to all mysteries of reality with human beings in it. The writers, no matter how many, have been early philosophers, giving accounts of reality on matters of souls, divinity, humans in the World, ethics, "God is spirit", etc.

I find it Atheistic and misrepresentation of Christian belief to say that the whole of religion is due to psychology (as in Sigmund Freud). Never do the true religious people say that their religious conviction is due to psychological mechanisms. The word for this is religion as opposed to science (and "wart"-religion).

"Wart"-religious on Blogspot, Whatiswritten777: https://whatiswritten777.blogspot.com/2 ... gious.html - "at least as religious claim for the Atheists and others".