By Joshua Shrode
How odd that a compassionate God uses such a mode … a book … to communicate with his mostly illiterate creation. By odd, I mean ridiculous…not of God but of us to look at a book written in a real human language and think, “Perfect! Obviously God’s word!” A real human language is a constantly evolving thing. Meanings drift. Spellings change. Pronunciation shifts. Metaphors and even definitions lose their intelligibility or gain totally different ones.
Fortunately, the Qur’an says it will tell you when it is to be taken literally and when figuratively … and then doesn’t. Nor does it say when it should be taken historically or anecdotally, mystically, or how a text can be read. Why would God choose such a terrible way to reveal himself?
A truly good God would just speak to us … all of us .. whenever we had a question. When someone was misrepresenting his intent, he’d correct them in real-time and discuss why he felt a certain way or gave such an injunction or command or allowed such evil to occur due to some greater good. If he did suffer himself to write a book, it would be self-translating and modify itself to the belief system of the reader, such that it could reveal itself with the clarity and distinctness of raw, uninterpreted sense data. We could still choose to believe or not believe, worship or not worship, follow or not follow, of our own free will, but there would be no disagreement that God was real, and this is what he says about himself and his creation. In fact, this is the only way a good God, a compassionate God, a God who did not revel in billions of blind men, women, and children stumbling in ignorance towards their eternal doom, would act.
We call this “informed consent”. When I have more information and more knowledge, I can make better choices or at least make more informed choices. As I’m writing this now, I am being misinterpreted by every reader at some point in my argument. But anyone need only ask and I’ll clarify…personally. How is it that I, a being so much more limited than God, can do what God never does? I want people to interact with as accurate an interpretation of my ideas as is possible. To do that most effectively, I must know that misunderstandings will happen, and I will try to correct them to the best of my ability. If I am unwilling to clarify even the grossest misunderstandings, I cannot hold someone responsible for failing to understand my intent or my belief.
Unfortunately, we decided at some point that our stories were Truth and that science was a threat because both make claims about the natural world, and often these claims conflict. There is a battle for the future of humanity. If Science wins, we may actually have a future. We will at least face our problems in the here and now and tackle them in a manner up to the task and not colored by theological squeamishness. If Theism wins, then God help us all. My money, as much as it saddens me to say, is on theism stamping out progress. Theism has a long and glorious dalliance with fear and has cultivated its use to high art. And as science has shown, fear is the most motivating of forces.
My contention then is that God is but a sideshow; I highlight the absurdity of a supposedly compassionate God relying on ambiguous scriptures to guide us. Theological —Islamic, Jewish, Christian—stem from the same flawed medium I rail against. A divine presentation would know each reader, communicate, update, and respond. It would’ve spared us centuries of book-burning and observatory-wrecking. Instead, we’re left with human squabbles over divine intent, proving my point: a good God wouldn’t play hide-and-seek with truth. And so we can dispense with the notion.
Teaching people to be moral, to respect the human dignity in each of us, to hold ourselves to a high standard, to strive for the sublime, all of this is possible without God…at least I hope it is.
I try to understand religion in terms of the evolution of human cognition. One of the great leaps in human cognition probably occurred well before Homo Sapiens. One of our precursors, possibly as early as Australopithecus, developed the capability to attempt to understand basic cause and effect relationships. This cognitive skill was most likely used in persistence hunting, as the prey often ran beyond the view of the hunters. No problem; they would infer from the local topography the likely path of the prey. Hominids continued to develop their understanding of physical cause and effect, giving them greater power to anticipate events and provide for them.
A crucial intermediate step was the realization that the motions of the sun permitted predictions of annual events: the changing of the seasons, the annual flooding of the Nile, migrations of animals, and so on. This seeded the idea that somehow celestial behavior controlled terrestrial events.
But some crucially important events defied all attempts at understanding their causes. Lightning, windstorms, floods, earthquakes, droughts — lots of phenomena simply refused to show their causes. Yet the need to predict such events was of immense importance to early peoples. They HAD to find an answer.
At this point, they jumped from one mental module (look it up) to another: the ‘social relationships mental module’. Instead of thinking in terms of physical cause and effect, why not approach the matter in terms of social cause and effect?
All they needed to do was postulate the existence of powerful people who were the causes of these events. Obviously, these people had to be very powerful, and it was equally obvious that they had to be invisible. Perhaps they lived in the sky, or atop inaccessible mountains, or in the ocean, or under the earth. But they could observe human behavior, which meant the humans could manipulate these powerful people by kissing up to them. Give them something, something valuable. To insure that it was going to these gods, the best thing to do was remove it from human access. Burning it was a good solution. Also, saying nice things about the gods was good. Saying bad things about the gods was very, very bad.
Of course, none of these things worked, but it was easy enough to convince the population that these techniques had always worked swimmingly in the past, and if they didn’t work now, it had to be due to somebody messing things up by improper behavior. If we just hunt down these sinful people and kill them, the gods will be satisfied and perhaps next time, our sacrifice will work. By a remarkable coincidence, this strategy also served to eliminate anybody who challenged the power of the priests.
Thus was religion born. Later, just as small social structures with lots of local kings merged into larger social structures with just one king, religions merged all the specialist gods into one all-powerful god. Monotheism echoed social conglomeration.
Nowadays, of course, many of us have left behind such superstitious nonsense. We don’t believe that some god is controlling our fates. Instead, we believe that secret groups of powerful people are manipulating our fates. Perhaps it’s the Gnomes of Zurich, or the Illuminati, or a secret group within the Catholic Church, or antifa, or the deep state. That’s much more rational.
Isn’t it?
Absolutely wonderful read. So true.
My wife is afraid of dying so believes in god because she thinks she will be reunited with loved ones. I believe in science and nature which gives me much more choice and a far more colourful one.
thanks for the comments. JGM
thanks for this Chris. You description of the origin of religions is just about right. And the parallels with all the conspiracy theories are apt.
Thanks, Chris! I really like how you’ve expanded on this. That jump you describe from physical to social cause and effect makes perfect sense as a way to explain how the idea of gods could emerge naturally. And the connection you draw between the rise of monotheism and the consolidation of social structures sounds spot on. It fits perfectly with what I was trying to get at. The notion of “a God who writes a book” says quite a bit more about how we think and organize meaning than about any divine choice. Scripture feels like exactly the kind of communication system a species like ours would come up with. It actually raises a deeper problem about divine authorship itself. If meaning depends on the intention of the author (not an uncommon view) and the author is said to be omniscient, timeless, and wholly transcendent, then that intention would be inaccessible to finite minds like ours. A being whose thoughts are eternal, perfect, and unchanging couldn’t express meaning in a medium that’s temporal, ambiguous, and context-dependent without collapsing its own transcendence. So even if a divine book existed, its real intention would remain inscrutable and we’d only ever be reading our own reflections back into it.
Why did God write a book? Wrong question. Right question: how did God inspire men (mostly) to write a book? Answers: mostly through inspiration, I think. Ruth’s agenda may have been a beginning of feminism ( shhhh! don’t say that too loud). Inspiration is an attribute of conscious beings. Even certain apes, craving ways of enjoying the sweet treat of termite consumption, figured out how to “go fishing” into termite nests with straws, thereby enjoying the treats, without destroying the source. Innovative and conservational, in one fell swoop. Pretty smart, for apes…yep.