Is man 'programmed' to seek a 'god'?

[CELTICEMPIRE]

I don't think man is "programmed" to believe in a God, I think it's more that man sees how complicated the universe is and knows that it can't have been an accident.

 

[cardgame]

I don't think man is "programmed" to believe in a God, I think it's more that man sees how complicated the universe is and knows that it can't have been an accident.

One of these sentences ideas does not compute with the other.

 

[Gatsby]

Is man 'programmed' to seek a god? By which i mean is there anything inside one's psyche which demands such a consideration? Or is the idea of a god something attributable hazily to some past stage of human development, which will be negated in following aeons?

The answer to that question depends on the data and underlying worldview you use. Is it the flag or the wind that moves?

 

[Souron]

Man is not programed to seek a god, but he does have a bias toward seeing human faces and ascribing human behavioral traits to everything.

We know we're going to die, and we're not too pleased with the idea. Religion/spirituality/whatever is all the result of human vanity. We don't want to be annihilated, so we make up fantasies to comfort ourselves. We aren't "programmed" to this behavior, just extremely susceptible to it.

Religion isn't about what happens when you die. Christianity and Islam are just two religions that emphasize it greatly. Other religions aren't about that.

 

[warpus]

The answer to that question depends on the data and underlying worldview you use. Is it the flag or the wind that moves?

Or maybe the wind and the flag are both still and it is your mind that moves

Spoiler :

 

[Souron]

Also, as I said somewhere today, it's all boils down to personal preferences - "to believe or not to believe - that's the question".

If you have a choice in what to believe, then you're best off believing in things for good reasons. Otherwise there's a good chance that you're wrong. And if your wrong, and do things based on false premises, that can lead to unfortunate decisions. Especially since things of religious significance tend to be important.

No.

A god is usually a smokescreen for "I don't know". God of the gaps, call it what you will. God is the answer to all the basic seemingly unanswered questions out there: Where do we come from, why do we exist, how did the universe begin, etc.

A god is the perfect answer because a god is basically.. well.. a super-powerful and amazing creator of the universe who is capable of anything. Fits the bill perfectly!

So when early man was looking around and trying to answer the questions I mentioned earlier, a god was just a natural way to do it (no pun intended).

We are programmed to seek out answers, to figure out our place in the universe. God is a good placeholder for that because it's an easy answer that you don't have to think too much about. Plus what if you don't actually know the answer? God. Why did that volcano errupt? It was a god. How did we end up on this planet? A god created us.. etc. Easy answer to questions we don't know the answers to. It leaves people feeling satisfied - it's good to have answers to questions.

Edit: So I guess my overall point is that we are driven to figure out the unknown. A lot of the unknown remains unknown to us, such as the birth of the Universe. It feels good when an unknown is answered - so we strive for it. That's my explanation for why gods are used to fill in the gaps - it leaves is feeling satisfied that we understand the universe and how it works.

Gods were a good fit not just because they explained nature, but because they did so in a very simple way: by saying somebody was responsible. Today it seems simpler to imagine for instance the weather to be the product of a lot of variables that work like clockwork to give us what we see. But to primitive man, it's a much simpler explanation to say "some guy did it." The ability to read, perceive, and predict how people around them behave, is strong, and you can imagine the evolutionary reasons for this. It should not seem strange that people were tempted to use this ability on things that aren't people. And when people do so, they do see the pattern they expect from actual people; it's a natural bias to do so. Why is it raining? because some goddess is crying. Why is it thundering, because some god is angry. Why are we blessed with good harvest? because the god of the town is pleased. Why do I have good luck at cards? because lady luck is smiling on me.

 

[Birdjaguar]

(Racism, Nazism, gayism, murderism, etc. All is total crap - we are what WE choose to be, not what was "programmed". Social wise, that is.)

You have probably never been a parent and seen what genetics can do to how people behave. What you see as freedom to choose is mostly an illusion. Rational choice does not play a particularly large role in what we do.

God, religion and secular humanism are cultural manifestations of how individuals make sense of things. Their specifics are time and space dependent. I think the fundamental human tension is our individual desire to satisfy personal needs and wants versus a very basic drive/desire to belong.

To belong: be part of something larger than ourselves, a couple, a family, a clan, a group, a church, a sports fan club, a nation etc. To feel unity and wholeness by merging ourselves with those "larger" entities.

So those with like minded views about how to make sense of things join similar groups that reinforce those opinions and satisfy their innate desire to belong. God and religion are just some of the ways we find to balance our individuality with the need to find solace in something larger than ourselves.

The various cultural tags that we hang on all of these are just time and space differentiated manifestations of the same basic universal human drives.

 

[kochman]

I have always found it interesting how a large percentage (over 50%) of liberals are not religious... and almost seem to make government/society their religion...
There are exceptions (winner being one)... but it is a pretty common trend.

So, there seems to still be a communal trend, as you mention Bird Jaguar (BJ?)

Just popped into my head.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There is no necessary pattern in how people satisfy their individual struggle to maintain their individuality and satisfy their desire to merge into a larger group. I am sure that there are pro choice, nudist, catholic groups out there somewhere.

EDIT: some group allegiance exclude specific other groups and some do not. It's tough to be a Tea party progressive or a Duke and UNC fan (possible by tough)

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

I have always found it interesting how a large percentage (over 50%) of liberals are not religious... and almost seem to make government/society their religion...
There are exceptions (winner being one)... but it is a pretty common trend.

So, there seems to still be a communal trend, as you mention Bird Jaguar (BJ?)

Just popped into my head.

You're absolutely right. I can't go a single Sunday without getting down on my knees and shouting emphatic praises at the concept of social democracy. Praise be to the prophet Eduard Bernstein.

 

[kochman]

Also interesting how catholics, who tend to be more communal in general (their own schools, etc) tend to be liberal, while protestants (individualists) tend to be conservative

 

[Berzerker]

god and religion helps people deal with suffering and death, if a set of genes evolved to keep us healthy then why not a set of genes for our mental health?

 

[Birdjaguar]

I have always found it interesting how a large percentage (over 50%) of liberals are not religious... and almost seem to make government/society their religion...

They don't make it their religion. You cannot equate all large group affiliations to religion, but you can say that religions are a large group affiliation even though they serve similar purposes.

 

[kochman]

god and religion helps people deal with suffering and death, if a set of genes evolved to keep us healthy then why not a set of genes for our mental health?

A "god" gene?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

We need not seek complicated explanations for religion. Man is programmed for a belief in the divine because man has many anxieties which will never be satisfied by known information. These anxieties include, but aren't limited to, a fear of death, fear of disgrace, fear of failure, fear of the unknown future, and so on. Few have the courage to acknowledge that we may never know some things, and few have the confidence to accept that ignorance on some matters will not lead to ruin. When all reasonable sources of information are exhausted, most turn to magic as a comfort.

I have no doubt that religion will never cease. If religions of today are dying, they are only to be replaced by others. It has already happened, 2000 or so years ago, that one religious paradigm was replaced with another. There's no reason why that can't happen again. The prevalent religions of today ring increasingly like ancient fables, and their parables barely relate to today's modern world. As fewer people believe them, they will inevitably turn to more believable, to them, fables.

 

[Kyriakos]

It was not without significance that i placed the term god in quotations. As stated already in the very first sentence of the OP i am claiming that it is not a god by itself, or a reality of a god, but the very IDEA of a god that might be innate in humans.
That said maybe it is not. Maybe it goes back to animist days, but stops there, and before them there was nothing of the sort. Who knows what vast changes took place in the progression of man from a mostly silent, inward being, to a being with a complicated language and an urge to communicate?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I think it's more that man sees how complicated the universe is and knows that it can't have been an accident.

I would so love to hear a reasoning behind this assumption.

How do you 'know' the universe could not have been formed by 'accident'? "It's too complicated" is not reasoning, it's a statement. I want the reasoning behind the use of the word "too". At what point does something become 'too' complicated as to have emerged by accident?

Is a watermolecule's position on Earth an accident? How it got there over the course of it's life is incredibly complex. Does this mean this watermolecule was guided by divine intervention, or is this not complex enough. Has the complexity of this watermolecule's position not reached the threshold where man sees how complicated it is and 'reasons' it can't be an accident.

As I said, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

 

[civ2]

I have an interesting question to those that claim that "gods" were needed until there was no "scientific" explanation how nature works.
Why the ONLY person (who later turned into a nation), that came up with the idea of One G-d, was Abraham?
I mean, there were thousands upon thousands people living before and around him - yet ALL of them were deifying separate nature components without even thinking of the possibility of One "Boss".
Not to mention, that Abraham realized that the Boss is NOT the "Nature" itself, but rather Someone above it all.
IF you claim that the only reason to "invent gods" was to explain how lightning strikes and famine comes - why Abraham (living in a society of 100% "Nature-worshipers") wasn't satisfied with such an "easy" explanation, yet he sought for something BEYOND what the eye can see???
As the story (the Midrash, story-type commentaries that reveal the hidden context and meaning of the Torah) tells us, Abraham simply understood that the world is too complex to attribute events to separate powers, therefore there must be some single Boss.
Question - but why did he seek for the solution OUTSIDE the system, not just saying "oh, so it's Nature the Boss"?
(Well, that's what modern scientists do - they call the Nature to be the "Boss". Yet, Abraham immediately looked for something beyond it.)

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_first_monotheistic_religion

 

[T-mun]

Hmm... Civ2, what makes you think Abraham really existed ? What makes you think God exists ? The discussion is biased if you start it with such prerequisites... most of what is written in the Torah, the Bible, and of course in the Coran, comes from older texts from Sumer, Babylone, etc. Studying older texts brings up an amazing amount of "déja vu" feeling. If what's written is true, then God is a giant with a bull-head and a solar disc between is horns.