God has emotions but that a lot of them aren't very nice.
IF GOD WERE A DOG-OR A HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
—John Burroughs
Almost two hundred years ago, a young European Christian, trained in theology, set off on a voyage around the world. When he left England, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible, and in fact during the trip he quoted the word of God as a moral authority. But he returned with questions and spent the next twenty years assembling the vast array of detailed observations that he had made as the ship's naturalist into a scientific theory that rocked the world—and his own Anglican orthodoxy. In the end, Charles Darwin had many things to say, some with no small regret; among them:
I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice. 31
Lately Richard Dawkins put the point more forcefully: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” 32
Dawkins's statement feels harsh, even to me, and yet the claim he makes is modest. The universe we observe has the properties we would expect based simply on the natural processes we are able to identify. He makes no claims about what, if anything, lies beyond the realm of our observations. Careful, repeated observation of the natural world, however meticulous, will never allow us to say whether there is another realm beyond the reach of our senses and our ability to process information. But they do allow us to understand the intricacies of the natural order, ourselves included. And they allow us to examine our god-concepts in light of what we know about ourselves.
What would we expect god concepts to be like if they were simply a product of evolved human minds? Rather like the ones we have. Pascal Boyer's book Religion Explained outlines many ways in which our minds are not blank slates. All kinds of efficiencies are built in—in the form of default assumptions and ontological categories that function, in some ways, like prelabeled filing systems. We force our life experiences into the categories available to us, and one way we do this is to interpret the world in humanoid terms.
Humans are social information specialists. Most of the knowledge we need to survive and thrive in this world comes from other humans. It is collective cultural evolution rather than biological evolution that has let us live long and prosper, outsmart nature's balance, and populate a whole planet. Our minds reflect this niche—specialized systems in the brain are fine-tuned for processing information about other humans. We see the world through a social lens.
Children assign names, identities, and—yes—emotions, to objects that are clearly objectively inanimate. 33 It helps if the object is stuffed with spun polyester and covered in synthetic fur, but really almost anything will do. When my daughters were young, we traveled to visit a friend in eastern Europe. The girls were utterly disinterested in long adult conversations over beer and well-boiled cabbage with beef. At any restaurant, they simply would sit down and pick up their forks and spoons (which had been assigned names and identities) and continue a game in which these stainless steel characters inhabited a world peopled by empty bottles, cups, and pepper shakers. The game lasted only as long as the trip, but a shabby stuffed whale comforted one
IF GOD WERE A DOG-OR A HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
—John Burroughs
Almost two hundred years ago, a young European Christian, trained in theology, set off on a voyage around the world. When he left England, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible, and in fact during the trip he quoted the word of God as a moral authority. But he returned with questions and spent the next twenty years assembling the vast array of detailed observations that he had made as the ship's naturalist into a scientific theory that rocked the world—and his own Anglican orthodoxy. In the end, Charles Darwin had many things to say, some with no small regret; among them:
I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice. 31
Lately Richard Dawkins put the point more forcefully: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” 32
Dawkins's statement feels harsh, even to me, and yet the claim he makes is modest. The universe we observe has the properties we would expect based simply on the natural processes we are able to identify. He makes no claims about what, if anything, lies beyond the realm of our observations. Careful, repeated observation of the natural world, however meticulous, will never allow us to say whether there is another realm beyond the reach of our senses and our ability to process information. But they do allow us to understand the intricacies of the natural order, ourselves included. And they allow us to examine our god-concepts in light of what we know about ourselves.
What would we expect god concepts to be like if they were simply a product of evolved human minds? Rather like the ones we have. Pascal Boyer's book Religion Explained outlines many ways in which our minds are not blank slates. All kinds of efficiencies are built in—in the form of default assumptions and ontological categories that function, in some ways, like prelabeled filing systems. We force our life experiences into the categories available to us, and one way we do this is to interpret the world in humanoid terms.
Humans are social information specialists. Most of the knowledge we need to survive and thrive in this world comes from other humans. It is collective cultural evolution rather than biological evolution that has let us live long and prosper, outsmart nature's balance, and populate a whole planet. Our minds reflect this niche—specialized systems in the brain are fine-tuned for processing information about other humans. We see the world through a social lens.
Children assign names, identities, and—yes—emotions, to objects that are clearly objectively inanimate. 33 It helps if the object is stuffed with spun polyester and covered in synthetic fur, but really almost anything will do. When my daughters were young, we traveled to visit a friend in eastern Europe. The girls were utterly disinterested in long adult conversations over beer and well-boiled cabbage with beef. At any restaurant, they simply would sit down and pick up their forks and spoons (which had been assigned names and identities) and continue a game in which these stainless steel characters inhabited a world peopled by empty bottles, cups, and pepper shakers. The game lasted only as long as the trip, but a shabby stuffed whale comforted one
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