I argue that God is a result of Human desire, Human needs and Human projection and that these explain even the personal experience of God more rationally than the conclusion that God really exists. Firstly, I highlight how we know some people have false experiences. Secondly, I list some particular characters traits and causes of God experiences. I conclude that it is not necessary for a God to exist in order to explain why people believe in one.
Link:
People do indeed have experiences that are not true:
“Depending on what you believe, you will make different conclusions about the nature of what other people believe. Those who experiences Gods, Spirits and Demons will say that UFOs are demons. Those that experience UFOs however, will say that Gods are intelligent aliens who have appeared like Gods to us through their power. "Any science, sufficiently advanced, seems like magic"1.What the contradictory beliefs are saying to each other is: We believe that we have a better understanding of your experience than you do. Or rather, like all people: We are not capable of not believing in our own experiences, and since your experiences are different we think your experiences are not true ones! We think we are interpreting the things you've seen more objectively than you...
Clearly the range of Human experience gives rise to many contradictions. Not all experiences can be entirely true. We know that the evident facts are sometimes not quite so factual. We have all experienced things that actually did not happen. We have dreamt, tripped, imagined and forgotten things leading us to conclusions and sternly felt beliefs in things that are not real.”
"The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)
God
“People receive all kinds of messages from God(s). One person divines that a particular thing is wrong, whereas another is told it is correct... one person experiences an angry God, another experience an all-loving God who cannot possibly be angry. There have been many precise and detailed accounts of what God has told people... but that some of these things contradict each other leads us to the conclusion that these experiences are not all true. ”"The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)
Once we admit that we can discount some experience of God, and simply state that some people, although they have personally experienced messages from God are actually wrong in trusting their experience, then we are faced with the atheistic possibility that actually all experiences of God are false. Einstein says that primitive and unscientific minds are drawn more heavily towards the idea of a personal God7; and this is bourne out by the fact that intelligence is inversely related to religiosity. In other words, the cleverer you are, the less likely you are to beileve in God. This is especially true for successful scientists. Mass opinion in Europe and most the developed world (apart from the USA) has turned against the idea that a God exists. As we learn more about the world, we realize that experiences we previously thought must have been caused by gods and spirits, are actually results of Human psychology.
“We experienced the world as flat... so sure everyone was of this, that those who thought otherwise were declared insane! How sure we were of such a belief that we could declare other people insane for disbelieving... yet how wrong everyone was! Proof by consensus is no proof at all, a non-working proof. We do not have any consistent or absolute way of approaching what we consider true, however we are capable of telling with certainty when something is false.”"The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)
Sometimes the most obvious explanations for what appear to be plain facts are actually erroneous. I think God is more of a phantasy projection of our imaginations and wants, not an existent being. There are a lot of god-believers, and although the experience of God through the ages has changed form, style and characters (along with the experiencers of UFOs) there is some consistency in god-belief. So, what causes this consistency? What causes the belief in God, despite the lack of an actually physically present or logical basis for God?
God as a fulfilment of the role of a perfect parent, of a concept of perfect abstract love, and a fulfilment of our egotistic need to feel important:
2.1. A Parent Figure
Psychologists consider experience to be projections of our expectations on to events. So that sleep apnea is experienced by UFO believers as an attempted abduction, but by those who believe in evil spirits it is experienced as an attempted possession. According to the expectations and the subconscious wishes of the person, events will be experienced in completely different ways. So, the cause of God is partially our inner wishes.
"To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual's idea of God."Sigmund Freud2
Parent figures experienced by children, those under the age of four, is quite different than how they experience them once they develop empathy. When they start realizing that their parents do not know everything, that they can hide things from their parents, and that their parents can hide things from each other, then the father becomes 'something lesser' than what he was before. Parents, before this stage, are considered omniscient and omnipotent by children. The child feels and acts as if the parent figures can do anything, solve any problem, know the child's own thoughts and know what the child is doing. After doing something that the child thinks will elicit a response from the parents, a child will expect hir parents to act, punish and reward the child even if the parents were not actually present. This is the feeling of being continually and completely watched by an omniscient and ever present parent figures. This parent figure fades, in real life, when the child learns the reality of how its parents are limited, like the child itself, but the memory of this uber-parent still remains. And the want and wish for such a uber-parent to exist remains in the subconscious memory of the child as they mature.3
2.2. Concept of Abstract Love
“Abstract thought allows us to take things to extremes. We can feel love for people who we have never seen based on their personality and communication alone. The communication medium is irrelevant. Due to our increasing capacity for empathy, we feel that others love us in return and feel we are in touch with their emotions. This is based on the feelings we have towards them, based on our own abstract thought and these are all in turn all based on our assumptions on the relationship between what is real and what is abstract. [...]Human Beings are able to communicate in heavily abstract ways. What started out as art and realistic representation, through history, has become intensely abstract communication systems. At some point in history it became such a social advantage to be able to communicate in abstract forms... in writing... that anyone who could not do this were out evolved.
We evolved into a species that can instinctively associate symbols and abstract thought with our inner emotions. We can see death on the TV, and mourn. The pain of others, even represented in pure text, can hurt us. Through time, we have become a species whose emotions are at the control of ideas just as much (and perhaps more) than direct experience.
We are able to control and sway our emotions using the abstract ideas associated with them. We can build ourselves into an anger over text, by using logic to determine that we deserve to be angry. Our emotions and our rational thought have become intertwined. Communication has become the key way to control people's emotions and inner state. [...]
We have learned to communicate to each other's emotions via proxy, and there appears to be no limit. We can make each other sexually aroused through text alone. We can feel the full range of emotions as a result of communication. We feel hurt when a loved one scorns us across the Internet, because we "know what it means". Abstract ideas have become associated with our very emotions, the very essence of our being. [...]
Love is the strongest emotion. Our will to love others, care for them and form long term relationships with them is evolutions biggest tool in the game of securing valid offspring. The longer the dependency of the child on the parent, the more advantageous it is for that species to feel love not only from parent to child, but from parent to parent.”
"The False and Conflicting Experiences of Mankind" by Vexen Crabtree (2002)
It is possible to create an abstract personality, based on abstract thought processes, like politics and religion, but based around a concept or idea. Frequently, the conclusion we feel when we do this is that we are looking at God himself.
Our need for unconditional love, our abstract philosophical minds and the way our very emotions and world view are led by our abstract representations of what we think is real can conspire to create in our minds an abstract source of love. Something we want and need since youth, and something that can frequently be lacking. The all-loving abstract god, the all-knowing and all-powerful being that we create in our minds matches all of those abstract ideas we attribute with our parents while young.
“The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards and punishes.”
Albert Einstein6.
Loving
This parental figure that gives us pure love, that we yearn for; when we were looked after and unconditionally loved... that figure is sometimes not there in our lives, or in most people's lives, that figure quickly fades away leaving only a memory. Searching for it, we can find such a figure in philosophy. Abstract thought and ideas lead us to believe, through projection, that an all loving over-looker is there for us.
All-Knowing
Abstract thoughts brings with it the most essential element of doubt. Where we learn not to assume we know everything and that we can always learn more. We want to learn everything, to get everything right. And we presume that this is possible. We are aiming and striving to be like an omniscient being that we can only imagine exists. However... our imagination can quietly be abstracted into things we think are real.
Combined with our need for unconditional love, even in an abstract sense, an Ultimate can form in our minds. Something we want, yearn for and desire with all our emotion. Through our amazing capacity for love and empathy, both driven by our ability to think abstractly, we are able to feel such a being is there for us.
Our very emotions and feelings, our determination and emotional well being are based on our ability to associate emotions with abstract thought. Our emotions and feelings can become associated with abstract symbols of love that do not necessarily represent something that really exists. God can become a requirement in our hearts and minds, whether or not it exists.
This, it seems, is the most natural course of behaviour for species whose emotions are caught up with abstraction. For a species where love, controlling our emotions and minds, can be associated with symbols and ideas we are capable of putting our emotional stability on a concept, an idea.
2.3. A requirement of the Ego
“Our ego makes us want to feel special, wanted, watched and observed. We want to punished when we do wrong, because we like to feel that our actions count. God provides an imaginary fulfilment of the role required by our ego; the position of a being that ratifies our importance in the world. The less important we feel ourselves to be, the more this God can assert itself. In angst and powerlessness, people find comfort in a personal "realisation" that actually everything is ok, they are not worthless, because God cares for them. Our ego can only suffer so much, through societal guilt or insecurity, before we make ourselves feel important no matter the reality of the situation. So, I admit a cause of my being a Satanist is to increase the drama of my life and make people think I might be important - for good or worse. Others turn to God, into a hole created in our emotional brains by our ego wanting to fill us with self importance.”
“Persinger developed the hypothesis that people who have experienced above average numbers of complex partial epileptic-like experiences might experience a "proximal presence" during an experiment in which a weak magnetic field was applied either to their right hemisphere, or to both hemispheres [...] The subject's brain wave patterns are monitored by an EEG instrument.By 2002, he had performed the experiment on over 1,000 volunteers. 80% had some sort of supernatural experience. 2 Many say that their experiences were "so profound they would be life-changing had they not understood the mechanistic underpinnings of what they had experienced." 4 About one in every 15 subjects reports an intensely meaningful experience”
Of the experiences reported, the following were experienced:
In short, they experienced the visions and mystical experiences that we would otherwise think were real, if the subjects did not know it was artificially induced. We know that electromagnetic activity in the brain is absolutely tied up with our own self, thoughts and consciousness, and this is further evidence (aside from history, psychology, etc) that the experience of many mystical things and god has a basis in physiological cause and affect, with the cause of the affect preceding the experience. Epileptics and other experiments have also shown that temporal lobe imbalances cause imbalances in our perception of reality. People with increased temporal lobe sensitivity experience stronger and more profound events during similar experiments.
The counter argument is that these parts of the brain are actually attuned to a spiritual realm, and when activated we experience that realm, and interpret it according to our expectations, culture, etc. This is possible, but, we know at least that such experiences are nonetheless explained by science whether or not there is actually a spiritual realm.
Related essays:
Links:
Scientific American: Paranormal phenomena may be neuronal events
Notes:
By Vexen Crabtree 2002 Dec 04