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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Fading away The ineffable god By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: July 17, 2005 In my first column I looked at the evolution of religion. I pointed out that belief in the supernatural fulfilled three important functions in early human existence – it explained our origins, established a moral code and fostered a sense of community. The creation of the gods was inevitable as human beings developed imagination and the ability to reason. Imagination allows us to conceive of events that occur at a time or place where we are not present – in the past or the future, a mile or a continent away. The ability to reason encourages us to ask why events occur. The problem with imagination is that it often fails to distinguish between the real and unreal. Because we can imagine it, we often assume that it is real. There are two problems with reasoning. The first is that we are often not very good at it. Like any other skill – whether swimming, driving, office management or any other activity – the fact that we do it at all makes us think that we do it well. Yet spend an hour reading a daily newspaper or watching Fox News and you will soon realise that many, if not most of us, do not understand the difference between assertion and argument, between false and true logic, between information and misinformation. Bring together the inability to distinguish fact from fiction and the inability to reason and you get conspiracy theories – two of my favorites are that Queen Elizabeth is either a lizard or a drug smuggler – and religion. Go back one step. Religion emerged at least partly to explain the universe in which early humans found themselves. (I discussed the other reasons – a sense of community and the development of a moral code – in that first column.) Given the limited information available, it made sense at the time to conceive of gods drawing the sun across the sky or expressing their anger in earthquakes and thunderstorms. By the time of the Greeks, however, 2,500 years ago, the discrepancies between the theory of the gods and the reality of people’s lives and the world they lived in had become so great that the intelligentsia were aware that Zeus and co. and their Mount Olympus home were no more than figments of the imagination. Alternative theories began to emerge. The individual gods with their very human attributes had become untenable, but much remained inexplicable and a strong argument could still be made for the supernatural. There was a shift away from deities that looked and acted like ordinary men and women towards a single, more distant god. Enter Yahweh, remote and awe-ful, the sole survivor of the several gods who begin the Old Testament. We can call the Greek and Norse and Hindu and other polytheistic gods Religion Stage One – supernatural beings who are both similar and close to the humans who created them. Yahweh and his alter-ego Allah are Religion Stage Two – a single deity who inhabits not a nearby mountain but a “heaven” that exists beyond reality. The Stage Two god is the one worshipped by fundamentalists. He may be more remote, but he still has human – particularly male – attributes. He’s prone to anger and violence and he’s obsessed with sex. Like any male who is uncertain of himself, his primary concern is to control sexual behavior – people can only indulge when he allows them to. At least in his guise as Allah, he’s slightly more generous, offering sex to some men as a reward. Unfortunately, this God is also unsatisfactory. His explanation for the creation of the world is laughable and his personality unpleasant. More thoughtful believers set him aside in favor of a newer deity – love, as personified by Jesus and, in Catholic theology, Mary. This Stage Three God is even more remote than his ancestors; he is almost inhuman and the process by which he created the universe much less clear. Stage Four – which appears in Buddhism – has made little inroad in America. In this final manifestation of religion, there is neither god nor creation, only souls eager to break free of the cycle of reincarnation. Our increasing understanding of the universe has swept aside the need for a god to create it or a god who is a distorted reflection of ourselves. The only option left to thinking believers is a distant deity whose involvement in the creation of the universe is minimal and whose only function is reassuring love. God has evolved from the all too human to the ineffable – beyond description and beyond relevance. Most belief in America today wavers between Stage Two, the fundamentalist god, who meddles in human affairs promoting hatred and Stage Three, the ineffable god who stands aloof. It is time to let both fade back into the nothingness from which we created them.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |