Zurf wrote:Another way of looking at that Arkady is to recognize that throughout man's history, he appears to have had a spiritual nature, which can also be expressed by saying he has a need for worship. What are the possible explanations for that, and what evidence or tests can we use to either eliminate consideration of some of those explanations or conversely to support and give cause to further consider other of those possibilities?
The evidence we see, and the explanations we give must coincide. To me, I don't think there is any evidence to show that man created God when the need for worship seems to be near universal across history, pre-history, and cultures. That need derives from somewhere. Is that evidence for God? Perhaps or perhaps not. One explanation could be that if God created man as creatures that worship, the explanation would surely fit. There are other possible explanations too. However, to say that man created God in the same paragraph as recognizing that worship has been almost universal, we must have some explanation to fit the observation (universality of worship) to declaration (man created God).
The universality of worship has not necessarily been universal, but early in man's evolution, once our brains developed the reasoning skills necessary for survival, that large brain must have been working on the solutions the questions of life, death and the whys, while developing tools and survival strategies.
One of those survival strategies, for humans, was to band together for mutual protection. These bands lived mostly in isolation from other bands of humans, which meant that outsiders from other bands were often avoided, another survival technique. The unkown was dangerous.
With the questions that arose from the expansion of human capacity for reasoning, it would have been quite natural for humans to explain the unexplainable with the concept of a god, or gods.
Early "religions" were naturalistic, ie, nature itself was god, and humans attributed nature with supernatural existence, because the processes of nature were not understood, in the sense that science, as we know it today, was non-existent. Life was too harsh and dangerous to spend time with science.
Today, in isolated regions, like the rain forests of New Guinea or Amazonia, this is exactly what we find, particularly where population growth is fairly static.
Once humanity expanded its populations, and larger communities developed, humans had more time to devote to the metaphysical. Evidence for this is in the emergence of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and the Meso-American cultures. Each had unique religions and gods, developed in isolation from each other, with distinct moral codes and beliefs.
These larger communities, though, maintained their "tribal" nature, based on their cultural, agricultural and economic development, still in isolation from each other.
As populations grew, cultures merged and absorbed earlier "religions", until the present day, where there are very few non-monotheistic culturres left. Some, like Bhuddists, don't even require a god, per se.
As man evolved, so did religion and religious beliefs and customs, as they are still evolving today. A Christian from the 1600's, transplanted to today, would barely recognize the religion practiced today, if at all.
In a sense, man did come up with the concept of god, in order to explain that for which, at that time, was not readily explainable, and the placation of capricious nature gods required some form of worship or sacrifice or ritual, and this, I think, is the universal "worship" to which you refer.
Hank's prosepctive gutiar player said: "Mr Williams, I'm not sure I can play for you, the onliest chords I know are C D & G"
Hank repleis, after a short pause: "Well, what else is there?"
