Why We Need God. Corollary.
A: We need God? Why?
B: To give us hope for a better life. Here, we suffer pain and disease and war. We lose loved ones. Without God, what would you tell a mother who just lost her child? And for justice.Evil people often prosper and good people suffer. What do you tell the man who spent 40 years in prison for a crime he did not commit? And without God, why would anyone be moral? Why not just steal and rape and kill if you can get away with it? And without God, death is the final end. We live and we die and we are gone. God gives meaning to life.
A: OK, so youre saying that belief in God gives benefits to individual people (hope for a better life, even for an eternal life; lessened fear of death; hope that eventually evil will be punished and good, rewarded) and to society in general (less crime).
B: Yes, and there are more benefits as well.
A: OK, so can we suppose that to gain such benefits for itself, the Greeks invented Zeus; the Romans invented Venus; the Norse invented Freyja; the Aztecs invented Quetzalcoatl; the Egyptians invented Isis and Horus; the Incas invented . . .
B: Yes, yes. But whats your point?
A: I was getting to my point. . . . the Jews invented Yahweh; the later Roman Empire invented Jesus? That seems like an obvious corollary to what youve been saying.
B: No, thats wrong. Its outrageous. Certainly, almost all known human societies had their own invented gods. But to say that my Gods, I mean, the Gods of the Holy Trinity. Wait, that didnt come out right. . . .
A: Human societies have a need. They fulfill that need by inventing gods. The genuine God (if such exists) allows almost all humans who ever lived to be born into a society that has false gods. Why should you think that youre special? Do you believe youre so very different from all the people who have ever lived? Do you really believe that you were born into a society that worships the one true God, while most of the people who ever lived didnt have that privilege? Not to mention people alive today.
B: What are you? Some kind of atheist?
A: No. Im just a guy taking things to their logical conclusion and asking obvious questions.
B: To give us hope for a better life. Here, we suffer pain and disease and war. We lose loved ones. Without God, what would you tell a mother who just lost her child? And for justice.Evil people often prosper and good people suffer. What do you tell the man who spent 40 years in prison for a crime he did not commit? And without God, why would anyone be moral? Why not just steal and rape and kill if you can get away with it? And without God, death is the final end. We live and we die and we are gone. God gives meaning to life.
A: OK, so youre saying that belief in God gives benefits to individual people (hope for a better life, even for an eternal life; lessened fear of death; hope that eventually evil will be punished and good, rewarded) and to society in general (less crime).
B: Yes, and there are more benefits as well.
A: OK, so can we suppose that to gain such benefits for itself, the Greeks invented Zeus; the Romans invented Venus; the Norse invented Freyja; the Aztecs invented Quetzalcoatl; the Egyptians invented Isis and Horus; the Incas invented . . .
B: Yes, yes. But whats your point?
A: I was getting to my point. . . . the Jews invented Yahweh; the later Roman Empire invented Jesus? That seems like an obvious corollary to what youve been saying.
B: No, thats wrong. Its outrageous. Certainly, almost all known human societies had their own invented gods. But to say that my Gods, I mean, the Gods of the Holy Trinity. Wait, that didnt come out right. . . .
A: Human societies have a need. They fulfill that need by inventing gods. The genuine God (if such exists) allows almost all humans who ever lived to be born into a society that has false gods. Why should you think that youre special? Do you believe youre so very different from all the people who have ever lived? Do you really believe that you were born into a society that worships the one true God, while most of the people who ever lived didnt have that privilege? Not to mention people alive today.
B: What are you? Some kind of atheist?
A: No. Im just a guy taking things to their logical conclusion and asking obvious questions.
Comments (45)
The same reason we need art "in order not to die of the truth." ~F.N.
A selfish use of God. You only want him whenever the circumstances turn bad. Just accept our daily lives are unpleasant.
My condolences as the average educated person should do.
"Thou shalt not sodomize!" The authorities cried. "You're under arrest."
"But God told me it was ok bugger the barista."
"Blasphemy!" the police priest shouted. "You've been deluded by Satan."
"But what does God say about North Carolina's hog farm pollution calamity?"
"Shut your trap! Sodomizer! Grace comes to the deserving."
_______
God gets to trounce secular rule because he is associated with ultimate values by his/her/its cult members. In current times this is very dangerous.
Many use God as an excuse to get what they want (power/wealth). Others are persuaded to follow by a senseless appeal to faith.
This is the old, traditional explanation atheists have used to explain the purpose of god. God as white lie. So?
Like a fish needs another set of gills :wink:
Edited to make sense.
I guess it made sense but not in the way I intended. Lol
:fire:
@Bartricks claims that, evolutionarily speaking, there needn't be any real reasons for beliefs though we think/feel there are.
We are survival machines, not truth machines notwithstanding the fact that, in a way, the truth shall set you free.
Characterizing an argument to dismiss it is not the same as addressing it, especially since there are 2000-year-old, traditional explanations still being accepted and discussed today.
Thus, the atavistic prevalence of group / wishful / magical thinking (i.e. faith) over defeasible thinking (i.e. truth-seeking); the cognitive priority of just-so stories over sound inferences.
:smirk: :up:
Tradition being 'accepted and discussed' over time means very little. Hinduism is 4000 years old and has 900 million followers. It is accepted and discussed, but is it true? Is it more true than Christianity? Or is it the case that religions, like most social groups, offer people a sense of belonging and purpose and something to do on weekends? Having met quite a few atheists who used to be fundamentalist Christians - the common observation is that very often what keeps people from leaving religion is the social contact, belonging and community. God/s may not play as big a role as people think.
Remind me what the conclusion is again, if you don't mind.
I see. :up:
Quoting Art48
Subsequent to this you say:
Quoting Art48
And this suggests that one or more faiths are not invented but genuine.
1. Logical necessity: Is there anything about this universe that requires the existence of God for an explanation?
2. Emotional necessity: Safety blanket/imaginary friend, someone who'll always be there no matter what!
Personally, I'm committed to moral realism. And this led me to theism, or the belief that God exists to explain moral realism. Of course, there are those who become moral anti-realists because they realize that moral realism may require theistic belief, and theism is "too high of a price" to pay for moral realism. The moral arguments for the existence of God are the most compelling to me.
Why do you need God in order to act morally?
I don't need God to act "morally" in the sense that I think plenty of people who don't believe in God act morally. But personally, I need God as an explanation (or justification) to why objective moral values exist and that our faculties (rational and emotional) correspond to the existence of these values. It may be strange to say but JL Mackie (and his argument from queerness) actually pushed me towards theism as an explanation to why our moral intuitions could track true or false statements.
What morality are you referring to that depends on God? Does one need God to not kill, steal, or lie?
Isn't not harming others pretty straightforward and practical?
I agree that avoiding harming others is indeed straightforward and practical, and I think it serves as a good guide for our own behavior. The issue I see is when trying to convince other people that they should agree with us and not harm other people. Plenty of people are sexist, racist, etc, and while they realize their actions cause harm to another group of people, they simply do not care (in the same way I realize I don't care that my eating of a steak has likely harmed a cow).
When I say "harming humans is wrong," I want this statement to express an ethical statement that is "true" in the sense that it goes beyond my personal preferences for what "right" and "wrong" is and refers to an objective fact about the universe. If emotivism is true and all ethical statements are just expressions of feeling or attitude, rather than assertions or reports of anything, then convincing people of my meta-ethical viewpoint amounts to manipulation. If emotivism is true, I cannot give people good reasons for following what I deem ethical behavior because, despite how I may feel, the underlying justification for my ethical propositions does not exist. Therefore, trying to change peoples' ethical viewpoint on what is "right" or "wrong," or what forms of harm I think they should care about, amounts to treating them as means to my own personal ends.
In other words, say someone's actions harm a group of people, I show them how their actions cause harm, and they respond with "why should I care?" Under emotivism, I cannot give them good reasons for why they should care. Me saying they should do anything is a teleological claim that I must either be willing to justify, or admit that I am lying to them and trying to manipulate their behavior. If moral facts exist (i.e. harming other humans is objectively wrong and this is a fact of the universe), then I can give them a good reason for why they should care-they are wrong or mistaken about how they should behave or treat other people. In other words, with moral realism, we can talk about when someone's moral sense is "faulty" in the same way we may argue someone's vision or hearing is faulty when not functioning "properly." But of course, we need to define and justify what "properly" is and means for humans.
That is how a sociopath answers.
Morals are norms, shared customs.
Quoting Paulm12
Quoting Agent Smith
Of course not. "God" is the ultimate "mystery" (according to Abrahamic (& Vedic) traditions) and a "mystery" does not explain anything. "Mystery created it", "Mystery commands it" beg cosmological and ethical questions, respectively, and therefore cannot answer them.
:up:
When you put it that way, it becomes crystal clear. Attempting to solve a mystery (the universe and all in it, imcluding ourselves) with another mystery (God/s) is just plain stupid! Why compound our woes so foolishly?!
Perhaps it's part of the territory of unknowns - we can only imagine/speculate and while we get points for creativity, truth & reason take a hit.
To be fair, I've never personally met a theist who has said that God/gods is/are a mystery. Most (usually Christians) argue that one can come to know God personally. Deists, following neoplatonism, along with Stoics argue God can be "known" through our use of reason (i.e. reason is the way we become like the gods)
Apophatic theology is a legit branch in the philosophy of religion and speaks volumes in re whether god(s) are a part of the solution or part of the problem.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
Xin (heart-mind). God(s) is(are) an emotional need (crutch/fetish as you said in your previous post). They/it falls under the rubric of desiderata (ignoring the late Christopher Hitchens' views on the horrors of a celestial dictatorship) rather than facta.
if someone, anyone, could do something, do you think they would do it or not do it?
Think of a carpenter: he or she could make a table or a kitchen cabinet, but instead he or she starts a new religion afresh from a stale old one.
The notion that God explains anything cosmological or ethical is a failure on the part of religious culture. God is not an object of knowledge, but is an object of faith (and as we all know, knowledge and faith are contradictory at best). Yet, it is incorrect to call God an "object" because God belongs entirely to subjectivity. Subjectivity has been lost in religious culture, but it is always relevant to the individual who genuinely observes his personal faith.
It is an existential crutch because existence is heavy.
A good portion of it is irrational, so we have irrational faith as a way to cope with it. More recently, our generation has developed some crazy-ass anti-psychotics to help cope with the irrationallity of our existence.
Another portion of existence is rational, and for that we have reason, from which we construct our logic and beliefs (along with our toys and amusements) to help cope with it.
Fish bicycle. That is a great concept! How would it operate?
Comprehending God is like staring at the sun. In one instance you become catatonic, in the other you go blind. That is why God is the eternal mystery, the instant you apprehend/contact It, It simultaneously incapacitates you and renders you incoherent.
Talking about one's knowledge of God is in the same category as an account of bigfoot or the great UFO.
:lol:
Which doesn't require a commitment to theism to argue.
Hell, there's a very good change religions had adaptive value. Which can, of course, be quite different from truth value, or not, case by case.
I can't see bicycles having adapative value for fish. I don't see any possible argument.
Google adaptive value theism or belief in God and you will find the issue taken seriously by scientists and others who are not committed to theism as a true model. And then I'm sure by some theists also.
You will not find scientists arguing that bicyles are potentially adaptive for fish.
Of that fish seek out those who produce them.