Why Did We Evolve the Notion of God? (Creator, Darwin)

[Mestemia]

The comfort zone.
As we learned more about how the world works and come to realize that less and less was caused by demons, devils, gods, etc. the less we needed God to "protect" us from them.

[kai]

Originally Posted by Mestemia

The comfort zone.
As we learned more about how the world works and come to realize that less and less was caused by demons, devils, gods, etc. the less we needed God to "protect" us from them.

and that he wasnt responsible for the crops failing or the tide coming in etc etc etc

[angellous_evangellous]

Originally Posted by rojse

Why do you say that?

Many different people have imagined far less powerful gods than the creator of the entire universe. For example, out of all of the greek Gods, only Zeus created the universe. There were other gods for different areas, such as a god for war, a god for different cities, gods for different natural phenomena, gods for many major occupations, and so forth.

For the simple reason that if we created God, God was not and cannot be our Creator.

[Francine]

Originally Posted by rojse

For example, out of all of the greek Gods, only Zeus created the universe.

That was a neat trick, considering how far down the family tree Zeus was.

Family tree of the Greek gods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by angellous_evangellous

For the simple reason that if we created God, God was not and cannot be our Creator.

The notion that our basic idea of deity is a product of evolution does not logically imply there is no deity.

[angellous_evangellous]

Originally Posted by Francine

That was a neat trick, considering how far down the family tree Zeus was.

Family tree of the Greek gods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's not like there was widespread agreement about this. Greek and Roman mythology both had a lot of variation, which is evident on a cursory reading of the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

[angellous_evangellous]

Originally Posted by Sunstone

The notion that our basic idea of deity is a product of evolution does not logically imply there is no deity.

Precisely. Only that the deity that exists cannot be our Creator. It's the connection between idea and divinity that is key.

[Persephone]

Going back to a quote from Sunstone on the first pageof this thread:

Why did we evolve this design or impulse to personify things? What evolutionary reasons brought it about?



I don't know... but really, don't we even do that same kind of thing to people? We observe a few key characteristics and invent a whole personality for them- including friends, strangers we meet and public figures. It starts with stereotyping and just keeps going. Is it merely our need to understand the world around us? Is it that we just making logical assumptions to fill in the blanks of our knowledge?

Applied to inanimate objects- we take their key characteristics and repetitive behaviors to have some guide to their future behavior. We name them because we are, each of us, are completely alone in the world. Our consciousness has no direct contact with anything else. We seek the company of those people who we relate to the most- who our consciousness akins to,albeit indirectly; through our words and actions. In the end, though, they can't be there ever instant of our lives -( who would want them to be?)- and people will change unpredictably. Naming and inventing a consciousness for an inanimate object gives us control and company.

It's my belief that this is much the same reason why we evolved the notion of God and prayr. This and Carl Sagaan's idea that we need hierarchy- God judges everyone because there must always be someone higher in the chain of command. (Dragons of Eden)

[logician]

Homo sapiens personifies many things because we only understand what we know; a god that does not have human traits is an unknown or foreign trait to humans, thus the personification of many gods throughout history. Does this make them real? NO, it's just makes them familiar.