What really has given rise to God belief?

[Whateverist]

Happy to hear all opinions and extra credit if you can say where you picked up your idea, but obviously there is no fact of the matter we can expect everyone to embrace. Jews don’t want your Jesus. Hindus don’t need your Abraham. Let’s try not to condescend to or disrespect anyone else’s beliefs. Maybe what goes around will come around.

I’ll start. I think the cosmos is like Quantum Field Theory. From the field of the intermingled potential for energy and mass comes all the many. The field gives rise not only to particles but also eventually to organisms and consciousness. How? Who knows? But the potential had to be there or we wouldn’t be. So that which supports god belief is always already there and is indistinguishable from ourselves and the rest of the flow of being. It isn’t equivalent to our conscious minds. In fact over reliance on that aspect of ourselves can rob us from appreciating what is given which does not require our conscious attention such as creative inspiration and insight. Conscious attention has a contribution to make but it is more in a supporting role.

That’s my hot take on what it is that has given rise to god belief. I prefer to think of it as the “the sacred” without personifying it as a person-like God/gods. I don’t believe it has any engineering or administrative role to play. It is simply finding its way through us as it does and always has through everything else into which it has individuated. We have no particularly important role to play apart from not using our much celebrated free will to interfere too much. If we are sensitive to let it take the lead we can even bring our conscious minds into its service.

 

[LuisDantas]

I have come to conclude that god-belief is a social cohesion phenomenon.

Sure, it happened spontaneously at some point. But it was (and in truth still is) a rare thing and a very personal thing, difficult for other people to understand, let alone share. True god-belief is aesthetical in nature. It can't really be taught with any reliability.

It was the need to keep groups together with a common purpose that led to the idea of a shared belief in "the same" god. It is a very political idea, and it shares with political ideologies the need to accept that discourse and reality are not at all the same thing.

 

[Whateverist]

It was the need to keep groups together with a common purpose that led to the idea of a shared belief in "the same" god.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think that explains why god belief has been selected for evolutionarily and that is the question which got this old agnostic interested in such questions to begin with. But I think it has an intra personal benefit as well. It gives us a rationale -for those who need one- to make time to reflect and take note of intuition as a conduit for deeper wisdom than is readily available to our conscious minds. No evidence of course. This is just a spitballing exercise in an area where no scientific investigation is likely possible.