The master designer

Easily the biggest-ticket item in all deep discussions is “Is there a God?” My answer is very simple, but very likely not what anyone that knows me would expect.

My answer is “Yes.”

In fact, there are several. Over time, there have been several thousand. That number has steadily decreased over time, and today there are only a handful. The tricky part is that none of them are actually real things. They’re just ideas and notions created and morphed by humankind as we struggled over the ages to understand the world we live in. The fact that they’re just ideas in the minds of people does not, however, reduce their power. From that perspective, God is very much a real thing possessing great power in the world we currently live in.

The idea of a God is not new (duh). It really stems from the human desire to understand the world we live in and explain things that defy our current abilities. The “God of gaps” is a common term used to describe the theistic tendency to attribute things we currently haven’t mastered to a master creator. The mental progression is simple to follow: We see a hammer and know it was designed by a person to drive nails. We see a car or an airplane or a mobile phone and know that it was designed by many exceptional people with great skill using tools also designed by people. We see a mountain, or the sky, or the ocean, or a person, and think holy crap! Whatever designed and built that is way beyond our current abilities. It must have been designed and built by God. Over time, this line has been sliding further and further back as we learn more and more about the world. We only know about things that are designed and built, thus we assume everything was designed and built by someone or something. This is a fallacy — as described in The fallacy of purpose.

The origin of the idea of a god or gods is pretty simple to understand. What is a bit more complicated to understand is the effect — be it a real thing or not — that God has on humans in the world. Many people really believe in a God. Humans behavior is governed by a large part of genetics, and a large part of environmental conditioning. Genetics (in concept) are relatively simple to understand in 2014 — you get what you get, thanks to your biological parents. Your conditioning has to do with a lot of different factors including your family upbringing, society, culture, and so on. If you pluck two identical twins (same genetics) from their birth and place them into totally different environments to grow up in — they will be extremely different people. They might look similar, but they will be quite different in behavior.

A devout Christian family will attempt to raise devout Christian children, as a devout Muslim family will attempt to raise devout Muslim children. This is true for any theistic belief culture. This belief in God becomes a fundamental part of that child -> person -> adult mindset with everything else built on top of that fundamental understanding of the world. Think of it as a Jenga tower. You’ve built a very tall tower with the bottom pieces based on the fact that a God exists. The notion of toying with these bottom bricks is a very sketchy prospect to the devout. Thus, any decision or action in later life is based on the sway of the implications of that belief system. This makes God real in the world.

Ironically, this also describes some of the fundamental bits of cult mechanics, which I’ll describe in a future writing. In short, the threat of God not existing is so severe to these folks, that very powerful defense mechanisms inherent in complex social structures have kept God safe.

So, do I believe in a real God or a master designer of the universe? Nope. I’m also certainly not offended by the notion. It makes sense for those that believe in a God or Gods to keep believing in them. No harm, no foul. The big problems arise when belief in a God gets mixed in with a group of people that leverage that bottom Jenga brick to manipulate people’s actions. I’m of course talking about religions. More on that later, however.

I personally am more concerned about the suspension of reason and logic when matters involving these concepts are challenged. The defense mechanisms are very strong, which they have to be for such a preposterous notion to have survived for so long into our modern society.

Next essay: Atheism is not a belief