these are topics that i wouldn’t expect to have to argue again anymore in my life. it almost sounds surreal, and make me sad, but still, from time to time, i am in the situation where i realize how lost some people can be. thankfully these are issues that have little to no effect in their daily lives (how else could it be), so the issues is not that much of a practical problem as it is of philosophical concern. you know, once you don’t have to fight for survival, when your stomach is happy everyday, then is the time when you can do philosophy.
i wish there wasn’t people believing in and needing a religion, but so i wish we weren’t polluting our planet, we weren’t promoting wars in the third world to keep our first world comfy, gender violence didn’t ever happen anymore, or so many other things. sadly, however, we are not there yet. so we still do have people who do believe, and who need to believe, which is a symptom of a much deeper problem or disadjustment. so things will take longer that we wish – we just have to accept it.
anyway, there was this facebook discussion today where, as i said, very surprisingly to me, the matter of god was in topic. after the first shock (wait, are we still discussing this? what kind of reality are these people living in? pity… etc etc), i for once couldn’t resist to drop a line and get a bit involved. i’m not sure this was the proper thing to say, but this is what i anyway shot:
God surely originated as an artifact of our need of causality in our thinking mechanism, and then it got recasted to its current form by the human cultural egoncentrism and self projection.
Which of course isn’t very explicative and clear unless you are already in my state of mind. It does however clearly show a very naive evolutionary explanation to the origins of god (yes, in lowercase, of course), but eh, this was facebook, or a blog, or some other sort of web 2.0 shouting mechanism, so who cares. Anyway, it takes no time to write two or three paragraphs letting my brain explain the above with random sentences, and it costs no money. So here we go:
God surely originated as an artifact of our need of causality in our thinking mechanism, and then it got recasted to its current form by the human cultural egoncentrism and self projection.
In other words, human evolution surely rewarded brains that looked for “reasons” to the events happening all around. Knowing the “why”s let humans predict consequences and anticipate future facts, a very very usefull gift for survival. However nature is in itself decoupled from our interpretation of it, which evolved to be strongly causal, up to the point where some “source mother causes” and primitive “whys” needed to be found. All natural cultures found their own. Some even found the _one single_ primitive cause of all possible events.
Another human brain artifact, and somehow a natural extension of the primitive causality, is “intention”. Once humans, learnt to analyze causes, they could start to predict things and take action based on the expected future. However, they could go further, and start behaving for, the taking decision for, and being active into modifying that future, actively building a future they would want for themselves, which again, promotes survival. Causality allowed humans to control their faith. Therefore, they projected this thought to nature: that primitive cause and explained of the nature surely have to have an intention too, probably a very humanly intention. The “why” (things happen) became “for what” (things happen). And from there to picturing the cause of everything as a human not only involves no difficulty, but it is in fact convenient. How else can one transmit a culture and questions of nature through telling stories humanized ‘why’s – human-like gods. We even gave them names! All cultures did it, it was all so hardwired in the same brains that allowed us survive this long.
All in all, the universe is of course brutally unaware of reasons, laws or causality. However human brain projects its own mechanism into it, in form of gods, religions, physical laws, and other reasoning artifacts. It’s natural to do so, and it’s has been probed to be usfull too. Here we are after all, still alive, and not only that, but even exploring reality far beyond our our own expectations.