Quote:
Originally posted by rickholio
The argument is fallacious. There's any number of conditions inherent to the fragility of the human brain what could cause a person to desire the impossible, improbable or just plain wierd. Read through the case studies of paranoid delusionals sometime.
... however, lets just start with one simple concept that puts this 'desire for god' into perspective:
Immortality.
Throughout time, man has sought it, desired it, engaged in wars and quests about it, generated massive mythologies surrounding it.
It doesn't exist.
Why does a desire for immortality exist, then? I would suggest that people want immortality because they fear the unknown instinctively, and noone has come back to tell people what it's like (aside from some random people who were either 'dead' for PR reasons, or had an enormous post-mortal mythos built up). The assertion is, therefore, a logical fallacy.
"God" isn't the reason why religion exists. Religion exists to provide answers to things which, at the moment, are unanswerable by means of deduction. Back in the old days those questions were "what are those shining dots in the sky at night? why does water fall on my head?", nowadays its limited pretty much to the time-honoured questions of 'where are we from, why are we here, what happens when we die'. Rational thought has come up with better, more verifiable answers to the other questions.
God isn't the source of the desire. God is the temporary answer, until we can find something better. It's the "tastes like chicken" solution in the face of insufficient information to supplant it.
Mind you, even imperfect abstractions can be highly effective. Crystal spheres sorta did the job until Copernicus, Kepler, Brae and Newton came along. Classical mechanics was plenty useful until Einstein. Saying that God would strike down those who ate pig was still an effective means of keeping people from dying from eating undercooked pork, even though we know today that there's a better reason why it happened.
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I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.
Helen Keller
You claim, emphatically, that immortality does not exist, that the idea of God is only a place holder for a time when science will be able to come up with a better answer. How do you KNOW that science will ever come up with an answer (Evolution isn't it, BTW), and if it does, how do you KNOW that the answer will NOT involve God?
The explanation you give for 'why we believe in God' is the most common one cited by those attempting to argue against the very idea. It also happens to be true. We do CREATE explanations for things that we fear or do not understand, and we clearly fear death. But it is a mistake to say that this automatically means that God MUST be a creation of man.
Man has created many myths over the years in his attempt to come to grips with the certainty of death, and many of these explanations involve gods. The key word here is GODS (PLURAL). Man tends towards polytheism. When he 'creates' gods, he creates many of them. The only KNOWN true monotheistic system is the Judeo-Christian one, the one system that man did NOT create.