Does it matter if man created God? [View all]

[Soph0571]

Some kind of ritualised behaviour and religious beliefs and practices are probably as old as man and women kind. The earliest signs of religious conviction or feeling is seen in the graves of primitive man who was kicking around in the long and distant past (225000-100000 years back). However – while we may have had some sort of faith construct it took early man until roughly 10,000 BC to get organised about our belief systems and it was another 5,000 years before Hinduism, the world’s oldest living religion, began to develop in the Indus Valley. Evidence does suggest that as Homo sapiens emerged 100,000 – 150,000 years ago and as our brains gradually advanced so seemingly we started to need to believe in something. So the question has to be, did God show himself to man, or did man feel the need to create God?

Human beings are funny old things. We develop our communities, our social groupings and within this societal environment we unite around shared faith (or lack thereof!) structures. The development of a homogenous belief system within a social group has always been a hugely powerful mechanism to help other members of the group identify who is a member of ‘your gang’, especially within an environment where you have to take your belief system on trust (because of inevitable absence of evidence?. Over time as our brains evolved so did our need to try and make sense of who, what, why, where and when. For our early ancestors (and for us) an unpredictable world can be a frightening and disorientating place. Not understanding how or why things worked and not being able to control the outcome of all manner of things (animal migration, weather patterns, harvest success etc.) early man looked left, looked right, scratched his head and found comfort in activities which he hoped might help him exert some control over things he did not understand. Ergo, early man praying to or sacrificing to a deity to try an influence the outcome of events. Seemingly, religious ritual was a twofer for early man, in that it arguably served a purpose in trying to explain the world around them alongside being a mechanism to coalesce social groups.

It was only about 5,000 years ago that the idea of a single creator God developed, prior to this man kind worshipped all manner of polytheistic deities, examples including a strong belief in the supernatural world, animism, river sprites and the Gods of Thunder! Surely God, is a little late to the game? Why do you think it is that idea of a single divine entity came so late to man and women kind? The fact that we worshipped multiple deities in time past suggests that there is a tendency for a construct of multiple divinities to coalesce over time into the sense of a single divinity, after all a single divinity could be seen as more powerful and complex than many divinities and so is therefore a more satisfying experience of worship for the end user. Consequently one could argue that the creation of all monotheistic religions are examples of socially responsive creations, rather than the creator creating them. They reflect the makeup of any given society at any given time, they do things that society wants them to do.

Does it matter if man created God, or God created man? If God has been created by man as a social imperative for mankind to try and understand his purpose, one might suggest that this is a good thing that leads to more settled and happier communities than if the world had always lived with an absence of God. However, this presupposes that God is good (or at least what mankind has done with the construct of God is good). When we look at the term religion are we actually discussing theocracy? In truth theocracies are merely dictatorships with an invisible immortal ruler who cannot be removed and must be obeyed. And therein lies the problem, the God created by man is the ideal tool for anyone wanting to exert political power within a social construct. However, if God created man he compels man to behave in the way dictated by ancient religious text and exerts control through fear. Either way, oh my, what a conundrum!