Origin of God? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Saturday, April 16, 2016, 09:26 (3142 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You are asking me to tell you the origin of religion, which of course I can't do. ....However, as I said at the beginning, the origin may have been simply that there is such a thing as God/gods. Voltaire summed it all up:
“If God did not exist, we would have to invent him.”
So does he exist, or did we invent him? - DAVID: Great answer. In s[h]ort humans accept cause and effect and want to believe in a first cause. - In short, humans want to know the answers to unsolved mysteries, and want hope and reassurance. “Want to believe”, however, would be an atheistic explanation of why people “invented” God. (First cause does not have to be your God.) As an agnostic, I must naturally point out that belief in a God or gods may be founded on the existence of such a being/beings! I need to add a rider to this, though. The OT teaches us that God need not be the object of hope and reassurance. He can also be the object of fear, which applies whether he exists or not. He serves as a means for well-meaning humans to instil discipline into their society, or for less well-meaning humans to exploit the weakness and gullibility of their fellow humans. Like so many things in this wonderful world, the concept of God is open to different interpretations, whether he exists or not.