Buster Daily

Well duh. Ha ha. As long as anyone has claimed the existence of gods someone surely has disagreed.

I have always wondered about the universality of god-myths. Why do all cultures invent gods/spirits to explain the unknown? I imagine a bunch of marginally educated 12 year olds dropped on a desert island somewhere. Would they or their descendants invent god myths to explain the unexplainable? I know the answer is yes, but I don't know why.

Vorkosigan

Because God-belief stems from teleological biases in human cognition. In order to participate in a complex society of social primates, humans are born with an innate bias to attribute intentions to things in the universe. No baby could ever discover that things have intentions -- indeed, it could never discover what intentions are. It has to be born with two innate abilites -- it is born with a definition of what intentions are, and it is born knowing that some things have intentions and some don't. Humans are born knowing that the world is full of Other Minds. It is part of the "theory of mind" that humans have that enables them to interact with each other.

Humans impute purpose to everything, including inanimate objects. To the unscientific mind the world is a vast purposeful universe full of significance; accidents do not happen. If one dies in an earthquake, one must deserve it, since all things happen for a purpose. If one's daughter is born blind, she did a bad thing in a past life, or you did in this one. It was moderns who invented accidents.

This purpose-imputing machinery functions all the time and we are so used to it that we don't even notice it. If your computer breaks, you say "Machines hate me" and everyone around you nods, although it is absurd to think that machines have feelings and can take action. If it rains on your day off, you say "Of course, on my day off, naturally it rains" with the implication that the universe is out to get you. You always impute Other Minds to everything, no matter whether it really has one or not. Neither you nor anyone else finds that strange, although it is really weird when you think about it.

This idea of purpose or intention, the teleological assumption, is absolutely crucial because it enables you make predictions about the future behavior of objects in the world, and to understand and catalogue their past behavior. If you had no idea that things could have intentions, you'd have no clue what that tiger in the tree, bending its legs and swishing its tail, is about to do to you. But since you can impute intentions to it, you can take action.

Once you understand the teleological bias it is very easy to see why we believe in the supernatural. What are demons, gods, poltergeists, etc -- simply a disembodied Other Mind, which you magicked up out of your inevitable cognitive bias, which imputes intentions to everything. It is one of the ways you make sense out of the world. The Christian God is simply the Ultimate Other Mind, creating purpose for the whole world.

There's more, but that's basically it. Hence, your 12 year olds will eventually hit upon the supernatural solution, it is built into them. My own speculation is that saints and atheists are people with different Other Mind traits -- saints are people with an especially powerful sense of Other Minds Out There, whereas many atheists have a lower sense of disembodied Other Minds. The two sides don't understand each other because the former lives in a fantasy world pregnant with significance injected into it by her own mind, whereas the atheist doesn't see such a world at all. Modern science simply gives us a toolkit of concepts and methodologies and vocabulary that justify and support the atheist's sense that she lives in a world that is not pregnant with significance.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

Because all cultures reflect the tendencies of human cognition and there is very little which disturbs and frightens us as much as a lack of control. It is why we mastered fire. It is why we formed cities and governments. It is why we have central air conditioning and bug spray. And it is why we tend to prefer to imagine that somebody or something has control over all the things we don't and why we also tend to imagine that we can somehow influence that entity or entities thereby obtaining some measure of control for ourselves. Prayer and sacrifice, though often specifically framed as not constituting attempts to obtain control by way of the Divine Entity, are clearly just that. There is no real difference between throwing a virgin into the volcano and saying your bedtime prayers. Both are superstitious attempts to exert control over the uncontrollable.

When nature results in a typhoon or genetics results in cancer, you have no control and that is psychologically unacceptable. Praying to a god to save you or even having faith that a god is controlling events ultimately to your benefit creates an illusion of control over the uncontrollable which addresses a powerful and deep psychological need.

mikem

The early Christians were regarded as atheists by their contemporaries weren't they because they only believed in one god? Atheism has always been a reaction to some religious system. I think the bottom line here is that if there were no "believers" there would be no "atheists", because we wouldn't need a word for either condition.

No Robots

It wasn't because of the singleness per se, but because of the wholly abstract nature: no image, no statue, no representation, no material manifestation at all. To materialists like the pagans, immateriality=non-being. The same is true of course for our modern-day materialists.

Chili

Interesting quote and I like it. I testifies on behalf of ex nihilo creation if a fable can generate power, wealth and beauty.