ThorsHammer

Silly. If it's a thought, then another thought can be greater - based one a definition of "greater". It's like one child telling another child that he can think up the largest number there is, and the other child adds one to it.

angelo

I still believe that the idea of gods came with the evolution of self consciousness. The evidence is in the way man started burying his fellow man in orderly fashion 50 thousand years ago. Before then, as far as I know, no such burial places have been found. The worship of ancestors slowly became the worship of gods, until some schizophrenic had a delusion and people believed him. that would have been the first prophet. Don't laugh, I think mental illness invented God.

GenesisNemesis

Well, to answer the first question of the OP, I don't think it was any one reason that God was "thought up". In fact, I don't even think God was "thought up". Now, I'm not saying we are "hard-wired" for religion, but I think we're hard-wired for making meaningful connections about the external world, but sometimes those meaningful connections get mixed up when we invoke the idea of the supernatural (the unexplained miraculous occurances to explain the already unexplained) into the experience, thus making it more and more complicated. A lot of times, we can perceive connections and meaningfulness in unrelated phenomena. This is called apophenia. I believe this is mainly the reason for the belief in the supernatural, supernatural beings, etc. But there are also other reasons: a need for hope, a need for community, a need to fit in with the tribe, a need to believe that there's a reason for everything that goes on in the Universe, a need for loyalty and acceptence... the list goes on and on.

GenesisNemesis

Because it invokes unnecessary miraculous explanations, which gets the scientists angry.

If other animals besides humans are aware of their consciousness, shouldn't it be proper that God would be an explanation for them, too?

Because those "answers" are incredibly vague.

They reject it because the reason the believer gave is questionable. However, the non-Christian should give reasons for its questionability.

I've never seen this happen before, so I don't know. :huh:

Atheos

I'd like to focus on the following question from the OP:
That's certainly a reasonable question. Here are a few answers:

For an explanation to appear credible it needs to be credible. Christian tradition is attended by the following absurdities:

• Lies about historical events: Herod never had a bunch of male babies slaughtered, Herod and Quirinius couldn't have been alive at the same time, There was no darkening of the sun for three hours (or every civilization in the world would have all kinds of records of it), Matthew's "night of the living dead / zombie invasion" would also have been one of the single most reported events in history yet no records of it exist apart from the christian tradition, the four resurrection accounts are irreconcilably contradictory in both trivial and non-trivial ways, etc.
• Absurdies regarding natural phenomena: It would be impossible for the devil to take Jesus to a high mountain and show him all kingdoms of the earth unless, of course the earth was (as most people believed 2000 years ago) flat. Ditto Jesus ascending into the clouds and promising to descend with trumpets so everyone in the world can see him at the same time. A pool where an angel "troubled the water" occasionally and whoever could win the footrace to get in the pool immediately afterwards would be healed of whatever disease he or she had. :rolling: (Certainly consistent with the proposition that god hates amputees).
• Absurdities regarding morality: If christianity is true (few things are as impossible to define as "christianity") then rape, pilliaging, murder, genocide, theft, child abuse, slavery, etc., are all forgivable sins. People who gratuitously commit all these things all their lives can still go to heaven if they believe in Jeezus and ask him for forgiveness. But a good, law abiding skeptic goes to hell because of the one unforgivable sin: skepticism about an arguably incredible religious package that is not objectively different from other available religious packages (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wiccanism, Paganism, etc)
• The single most absurd proposition of all: That a god capable of creating a universe as vast as the one in which we live could possibly be so petty as to give a rat's ass how individuals of our species behaves. And that that same god would be so obsessed with how we behave that he'd have to arrange some grand scheme in which he ultimately commits suicide by pissing off a bunch of Jewish religious fanatics and gets himself crucified so he can offer a human blood sacrifice to himself so that he'll feel better about it.

My question is, have you ever actually stepped back and tried to evaluate your religion from the perspective of an outsider? It's hard to do, but if we can't evaluate how we look in the eyes of others we never grow.