atonal chaotic

Humans are able to attribute some things to mechanism and some things to agents. Attributing something to a mechanism allows you to understand and predict it by understanding the mechanism. Attributing something to an agent allows you to understand and predict it by interpreting the mind of the person responsible. Odd things happen when things get misattributed.

Believe lightning is a natural phenomenon, and if you can understand how it works (recent development) you can learn to avoid and take advantage of it. Believe lightning is skydaddy getting angry, and you fall into interpreting every peal of thunder as editorial commentary on your thoughts and actions.

In some societies, they don't believe disease is a natural phenomenon. Even today, many people believe if you get sick it must be either punishment from the gods or a spell cast by a witch. Since you know you're a Good Guy, it can't be the gods punishing you. So you make a list of your enemies and start killing them. When you get better, you assume one of the last enemies killed must have been the witch. Go Good Guys. News leaks to the western world of witchhunts in Africa every few years.

Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe history just happens with the passage of time and the actions of people. They believe the precise events of history must have been planned out by some agent, engineered to produce current political and economic power structure.

And theists believe there is Someone in charge of the whole universe.

Different applications, same misattribution.

Amedeo

While you try to figure out who thought up God, have you stopped to think WHY you THOUGHT of asking this very particular question, "Who thought up God?"

It's not by chance that you asked about God rather than gods, and that you imagined somebody thinking up God rather than finding God or beholding god.

You see, you thought of GOD because, whether you are a theist or an atheist, you live in a Christian culture that supplied the word God (or, in Greek: Theos, or in Latin: Deus, or in German: Gott, and so forth). So, you mean "the one God", just as you speak of "the sun" or "the moon." Furthermore, the God of the Christians is something that is thought or spoken forth; the name does not refer to an evident reality like the sun or the moon. (And remember that the Greek writers of the Christian scriptures used the word THEOS to translate the Biblical idea of "ONE God," when in fact the Israelites would have referred to the Lord or the Father, and seldom used the proper name, Yahweh, or the word for the supreme Gods, the Elohim. So, while the Bible has actually two gods, Moses' henotheism established ONE god to be worshipped and served, and that was that. So, Israelites, Christians, and Muslims always speak of ONE god: God or Theos or al-Elah.)

The Israelitic God is a thought God -- not an evident or encountered God. So you wandered who THOUGHT UP God. No, its was not the prophets of the Israelites, because they inherited both the Elohim and Yahweh -- more ancient Gods of Middle Eastern origins.

For the origin of the name/concept of "god", take the clue from archaic Greek which was preserved in classical times. They used sentences like this, "The god ["o theos", meaning Zeus"] rains." The god in question was the EVIDENT mighty sky that rains or thunders or throws flashes of light. All of the ancient gods were evident [not thought-up entities, although there were also imagined monsters and other supernatural beings]: the stormy seas, rivers, volcanic fires, the winds, etc. In effect a god was an overwhelming or super-human power that returned again and again or was perennially present. (The gods were the mighty immortals, even before they were personified and made the objects of cult. Religion arose in the second Age of the Gods, we might say. ) It is from Neolithic times that we gets invisible gods who operate on the world from behind the scenes. It is in this world of ecclesistical religion and invisible gods who speak through prophets that there is the possibility of a human fool arising and saying, "There are no gods."

The doubting, denial, or systematic disregard of the gods occurred in Greece in the 6th century B.C. Those few people who strove to understand the events of the world according to the constitution of the world itself were called philosophers: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, etc. etc.

Headache

No, the purpose of the post was to show how the notion "god" came about. This is, in a few brief sentences, the gist of how religion came to be.

A handy dandy way to explain what people did not know and to gain control and power over the tribe, to get the best food, the best women, the best shelters etc.

kennethamy

Well, I suppose it is a possibility, but it is rather simplistic. There are other theories around which are more complex and more explanatory theories around. After all, what was it about some people rather than others which enabled them to do that? Your theory is very like that of Karl Marx who thought that religion was an instrument of the ruling class to keep ruling. His phrase was, "religion is the opiate of the people".

uncool

It seems to me that the best explanation would be that, when the idea of a hierarchy came about, the ones at the top would want even more power. The way to do that is to get the people below to worship you. Once they were already at the top, it wouldn't be hard to slowly seem more and more godlike, over many generations, until those at the top were considered gods. Once that happened, though, the people at the top might be overthrown - but the idea of godhood might remain, and stories about gods would begin to propogate.

Just my idea, no idea whether it's true.
=Uncool-

kennethamy

Or how to tell whether it is true. It is, in other words, just a speculation.

Headache

Holy canoly, man!

Of course it's oversimplified! Geeez!

I just boiled the invention fo religion into a few lines, of course it was more complicated, but what I presented was the gist of what happened and why.

EternallyI

Which one do you tend to agree with? Descartes's theory presupposes God's existence and the others don't seem to address the origen of the idea only the functions people use it for. Am I wrong in saying that?

EternallyI

This sounds pretty dumb.

notasheep

Yes, it does. But it was the best explanation that Mog could come up with at the time.