The history of the concept of ‘God’ (here I will neither prove nor disprove the notion of ‘God’ as, to be blunt, no one can and anyone who claims to be able to you should treat the a certain degree of mistrust) is something which one might find unexpected, but in the following short essay I wish to give a brief overview of what might be called the evolution of God.
The concept of higher power predominates all historical cultures, whether or not we can attribute such notions to Neanderthals and early homo sapiens is unknown as they are pre-history (in the sense of the written record) however, in the historical cultures (post-written word not to be mistaken with writing only, it can include pictorial writings) there is a definitive notion of a deity (given this I would argue that even pre-historical cultures would also ascribe to such notions, even if not in the way we envision/they were not consciously aware of it). What I would define God as is something beyond our comprehension but which provides an answer to the questions we have about life (even if the answers are not, in themselves, comprehensible!).
The reason why I argue that all of the said cultures, even prehistorical, have a notion of god is supported by the concept of the Myth. The Myth is a device which was created for one simple reason- to explain that which cannot be conceptualised. Our entire understanding of the universe comes from conceptualisation which stems from experiential knowledge (i.e. life) and if something falls without the parameters of experiential knowledge it cannot be known, the classic example would be, how do you describe the colour blue to a blind person? Without knowledge of the weather etc. early cultures would look at the world and try to find a reason why there was wind or rain etc., why crops died, why people were born and died. The natural progression from the reasons (gods) not being knowable was to conceptualise them and what is the thing which we (think) we know best? Humans. Thusly, the abstractions started to take on human characteristics. It was windy because a god was being mischievous, there was a storm as a god was angry. This was then taken further to give the gods the likeness of people. In the Judeo-Christian bible it says that the man was created in the image of God, in fact it was the opposite. The many gods were very human (even if they had animal heads) and were prone to the weaknesses of humans- love, hate, jealousy, fear, joy etc. This created a dichotomy as in, if one god was angry that was its nature and another could protect you (as with parents, ‘Our Father who art in heaven…’) from the human like tendencies of another. However, as polytheism started to become monotheism problems emerged. Now, instead of having a whole litany of gods to exhibit the various aspects of human nature, the one God had to embody the entirety of human thought and emotion. Now the one God was truly loving but grew jealous of people eating fruit and thus committed mass genocide (the first holocaust?), who tortured a man just to prove to the Devil that he was loved without question. This, inevitably, led to questions about how one infused with such terrible contradictions can be a/the true God?
The advent of science gave God a new face. Now instead of seeing God in nature, one could look down a microscope and, uh, see God in nature. The most interesting aspect of this was the notion of the impersonal God, the God of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, who created everything, putting it into ‘motion’ (think the laws of physics) but didn’t intervene on the behalf of people or smite people down for not being in the right building on Sunday etc. however, the premise was still the same, the search for something to explain the world through conceptualisation.
From this brief essay I think one can see that in the beginning was the word and the word was ‘what the heck is going on?’ and as one’s ability to conceptualise changed so changed the mask of that which we superimposed upon something and yet the word never changed and no matter how far we go, how much we develop, how many different forms of conceptualising are created, the underlying principles will remain, how can we find out what is going, if, indeed, anything is going on.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 