Posted 18 December 2023
At long last God and The Human Brain is done
The almost perpetual battle with procrastination and distraction has been won.
The war is another matter, but that’s not today’s concern.
Not Very Intelligent Design 3 : God and the Human Brain
An excerpt –
God. Which God? There have been so many.
This part of the book was going to be introduced with a list of Gods, but that’s not so easy to do. There are far too many to name. Even counting them isn’t straight forward. When you ask Google how many Gods there are, or have been, the results are anything but definitive. Throughout history every culture, every tribe, every locale, has had its own Gods. There have been anywhere from many thousands to a few million Gods and almost the same number of religions to go with them. The absolute minimum sensible answer to the number of gods seems to be a few thousand.
In earlier times most people were polytheists, worshiping multiple gods, but as a result of the conquests of the armed forces of the Abrahamic religions, monotheists are more common today. Monotheists believe that all of the thousands of gods are the creation of the human mind except for the one they believe in, which is real. Atheists agree with that but without that single exception, not even for the god their parents told them was the real one.
It’s interesting to think that believers, people of faith, know that all those thousands of gods that they don’t believe in were created by human minds. That they were imagined into existence, like James Bond or Harry Potter. Believers know that. What else could they think? It’s the only explanation for a god that’s not real. Someone made it up. Yet despite the striking similarity of the one they believe is real to the many they know for certain are fictional, they still think their one is real. How faith survives the overwhelming obviousness of the fictional nature of gods is a mystery to those of us looking in from outside the cult, whichever one it may be.
Small diversion – I use the word cult deliberately because the only real difference between a cult and a religion is the number of followers. Imagine if the Catholic Church had never existed. Now imagine a group of a hundred or so people who gather at some kind of movie ranch in California with a small church building in which they hold services where the priest is dressed in long, flamboyant robes and wears a tall golden hat, and boys, dressed in flowing white dresses, swing smoking metal spheres from chains and then everyone is given a morsel representing the flesh of a sort of dead but not dead god, who’s part of a triple god, and a sip of wine that magically turns into the actual blood of the sort of not really dead part of the triple god. Would you call that a church or a cult? Probably a death cult given the statue of the bleeding god-zombie on a cross that they bow down before.
The fact that there are at least a few thousand fictional Gods is pretty close to enough information to conclude that all Gods are indeed the creation of mankind. What’s more likely? There a few thousand imaginary Gods for whom there is no verifiable evidence, or there are a few thousand imaginary Gods and one real God, who is indistinguishable from all the imaginary ones (except for his believers) and for whom there is also no verifiable evidence?
What’s more likely? There’s a herd of a few thousand wildebeest none of whom can speak English, or there’s a herd of a few thousand wildebeest one of whom can speak English, but the evidence for that is only hearsay? And that English speaking wildebeest lived a thousand years ago. On the moon.
