Continuing with the case against God which I outlined here:

5) The origins and continued existence of the “God” concept are easily explained by the social and psychological functions and needs it serves. When those functions and needs change, “God” changes, too. There is no reason whatsoever to think that an actual being called “God” inspired the idea of “God” or that the idea of “God” is anything more than a human invention.

A) Occam’s Razor (also known as the Law of Parsimony) tells us that assumptions should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Simple hypotheses which explain all the evidence are to be preferred over more complicated ones.

If we wake up in the morning to a wet yard and road, the hypothesis that it rained in the night is far superior to the hypothesis that it rained in the night, a group of 1026 men came by and dried everything off with blue cotton towels, and then elves emerged from hidden holes in the ground and used magic wands to make everything wet again. Although both hypotheses explain the evidence, the first is more likely to be right because it makes fewer claims, its claims are general (“it rained in the night”) rather than specific (“the yard was made wet by precisely 3,455,709 raindrops which fell between 3:17 and 3:51 this morning”), and none of its claims are out of line with science or common experience. When it comes to explaining anything – including the origins and continued popularity of the “God” concept – simple, general, and natural explanations which cover all the evidence will always make more sense than unnecessarily complicated, overly specific, unnatural ones. Thus, the statement “God is a product of the human imagination just like the unicorn” is far more likely to be correct than “God actually exists and revealed Himself to us when He came to earth in the form of Jesus 2000 years ago, allowed Himself to be crucified on a Friday, and then raised Himself from the dead by a divine act of will.”

B) The “God” concept isn’t based on or spread by evidence and logic; believers in the “God” concept instead grossly contort evidence and logic in an attempt to justify that which they want to believe. Historically speaking, belief in “God,” spirits, and similar concepts can be traced back to pre-literate, pre-scientific times – perhaps as far back as 75,000 BCE when Neanderthal Man still lived. According to God: Myths of the Male Divine by David Leeming and Jake Page, our ancestors used costumes, masks, dance, art, music, sacrifices, stories, and drugs to discover, comprehend, and interact with “God” – not evidence and logic. “God” – from its earliest days – seems to have served emotional and social needs more than any intellectual ones. Belief in “God” today is far more often the result of childhood indoctrination than of any objective, logical analysis of reality undertaken after the mind has reached maturity. As such, the arguments in defense of “God” put forth by theists and theologians seem to be intellectually dishonest rationalizations of emotion-based beliefs which were formed independently of those arguments and tend to persist even when those arguments are discredited.

“To understand [the] peculiarities of theology, one must remember that theology, and indeed any systematic discussion of God, was born as a defensive maneuver. It is the product of a distinctive historic situation…. The word theology is encountered for the first time in Plato – at the point where he proposes to expurgate Homer’s epics to rescue belief in the gods from the cynicism of the Greek enlightenment (Republic, 379). The theologian defends his religious heritage by sacrificing its plain exoteric meaning.” – Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, p. 180.

C) We know that people today are far more capable of inventing stories and telling lies to serve their own ends and needs than they are capable of putting forth a science-based, logical argument which runs counter to their prejudices, inclinations, desires, and interests. We know that ancient people and children alike have invented countless non-existent creatures. We know that people have believed in countless, mutually exclusive conceptions of “God” which serve their needs just as countless children have believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. Given the utter absence of evidence people can provide for their Gods, we are no more justified in giving them the benefit of a doubt and thinking “Maybe those Gods exist” than we are in giving children the benefit of a doubt when they claim Santa exists.

D) Psychotherapists like Freud have hypothesized that “God” is merely the human father figure projected onto nature itself out of a basic human need to find comfort and security in a dangerous world which often denies us both. Professors such as Stewart Elliott Guthrie have hypothesized that “God” is merely the result of the trans-cultural human tendency to impose order and consciousness on chaotic nature – a tendency which is revealed when we look at clouds and other random data and events and see faces and other things which actually exist only in our minds. Psychologists such as Stuart Vyse have demonstrated how easily humans assume or infer order and purpose were none exists. Books like Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko and Inevitable Illusions by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini show that feelings of “God” no more prove the existence of “God” than feelings of deja vu prove we have somehow already experienced a current event. Neurobiologists such as Dr. V.S. Ramachandran have traced feelings of “God” to odd electro-chemical activity in the left temporal lobe of the brain. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has described how some patients with severely impaired short-term memories will invent plausible (but demonstrably false) accounts of recent history in order to convince others and themselves that they’re still in touch with reality. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins have explained the “God” concept as mere “meme” – just one idea of many which randomly arise and mutate from other ideas and must compete for survival in the individual and collective consciousness much like genes arise, mutate, and compete in the biological sphere and species arise, mutate, and compete in the world at large. The survival of any given meme can depend less on its truth or absolute value than on its appeal to our often illogical minds and its functionality within a given context.

The bottom line is that the human mind is obviously willing and capable of mistaking its own imaginings for objective reality – and it is especially willing and able to embrace those imaginings in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When it comes to explaining the existence of the “God” concept, it is simply far more likely that one or more of the natural, scientifically-derived psychological/neurological hypotheses are correct than that the absurd, undetectable entity called “God” actually exists.

E) The “God” concept serves many personal, familial, social, cultural, political, and national functions which seem to have inspired its invention, prompted its development over thousands of years, and kept it alive in the popular imagination right down to this day. According to Michael Shermer’s How We Believe, even most theists say that people believe in “God” because doing so is a comfort and not because logic or evidence requires them to do so. The way “God” can serve as a device by which arbitrary values and traditions are rendered sacred, preserved, and transferred from one generation to another is obvious, and it is perhaps no more obvious than when contrary interpretations of “God” tear a family, tribe, or nation apart. From ancient times until today, politicians, national leaders, members of the clergy, and others have used “God” as a means to bind their followers together, gain power, obtain wealth, and direct hatred against their enemies. As people, times, and needs have changed, so has “God” and related concepts.

Only two constants seem to exist:

1. Virtually no one invents or embraces a concept of “God” which runs counter to his or her most important needs; and
2. “God” and related concepts have never been based upon objective logic or verifiable evidence, hence these concepts’s infinite malleability and adaptability when confronted with changing needs and conditions.

F) “God” serves as humanity’s security blanket in a harsh world. “God” is the handy, prefabricated, easy to apply answer whenever real answers require more thought, patience, and effort than the average person can or wants to expend. “God” serves as a mental pacifier – a just-so story custom designed to stifle nagging questions, a drug-like quieter of raging doubts, the out-of-tune whistle which allows late night walkers to ease themselves past the graveyard without succumbing to the primordial phantoms of an imperfectly evolved mind. “God” can be a scapegoat or a savior, an avenger or a listener, an excuse or a lucky charm. “God” can be virtually anything people want “God” to be, and as such “God” is the best imaginary friend a person could ever ask for. This merely makes the existence and prevalence of the concept of “God” understandable – it does not make it true or acceptable.

G) There are an infinite number of mutually exclusive concepts of “God” one might believe in. The odds of any one of them being true are infinitesimally small. Given the utter lack of logic and evidence to support any of them, we are logically obliged to refuse to believe in any of them. Given the absurdity every conception of “God” seems to harbor at its core, we remain logically obliged to reject them all as absurd and untrue regardless of the practical benefits belief in absurd things might bring.

As I hope to make clear again soon in the conclusion to this series, those practical benefits are far less clear, sure, or significant than many theists would have us believe….

Go to Part 6A