Posted by Jason on: 03.02.2009 /
Over the last few month I’ve provided some of the common reasons why many people fail to believe in gods or God. I’ve talked about different kinds of atheism, about how evidence and how it does not lead to God, about how God isn’t necessary to living, about how some of the common argument for God are not convincing for me, the Problem of Evil, science as a better way of explaining things and about the lack of meaning in the term “God”. Last week I looked briefly at God belief as a function of the mind. This week I look at God belief as a function of society.
Human beings are social animals. We have evolved to function well in groups and have created ideas to reinforce social cohesion. Religion and belief in a god who watches us and judges our actions is a way to fulfil these functions in society. The actual non-existence or existence of a god are secondary to the social function that religion has.
In the 19th century Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher, suggested that God was ”In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object” or that God was merely a way for human beings to express the concept of infinity onto a supernatural being. We conjure the anthropological form of God to explain that which eludes our explanation.
Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also expressed the idea that religion was a product of human society. Religion has many useful social functions. Group cohesion is maintained through shared worship and shared moral ideas. Religious ritual draws a group together in performing a social function and allows for individual members of the group to experience a mental state similar to other members. This, in turn, creates a feedback loop where the good feelings in shared religious worship are self promoting and helpful to maintaining the group structure and integrity.
What Durkheim claimed though is that there is nothing more to religious expression than the reinforcement of group beliefs and the collective conscience. His claim was that the supernatural simply did not exist and any religious experience arising from the ritualisation of the belief was simply the result of a heightened state of mental arousal.
Durkheim condensed religion into four major functions:
Supernatural agents were not required. “God is society, writ large”
Karl Marx considered the supernatural including God as illusory and religion to be a force that held human society back. As a social institution the prevailing faith reflected the society that the dominant order in the society seeks to maintain. The ruling classes make use of the faith of the masses to maintain their elevated position and curtail social movement and rebellion. The majority working classes are therefore oppressed by the enforcement of a shared delusionary belief system. The illusion that religion offers: joys to come after death; stoicism in the face of adversity; righteousness in oppression. These are distractions that keep the workers from forcing social upheaval to make their lives better.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
- Karl Marx
He didn’t stop there though. Marx considered the positive aspects of religion to be a theft from the common man. Charity, honesty, beauty, self sacrifice, bravery, these positive traits and more were granted to a supernatural agency as the noblest of ideals. In doing so humanity was robbed of all that made it good and forced to rely upon an outside force rather than upon ourselves. We cannot achieve greatness or reach our potential while we defer our best qualities to thing apart from our own humanity.
Furthermore, by providing an illusion of happiness through religion the will to combat the social and economic oppression of the workers was denied. He argued that only by rejecting religion could the genuine happiness of the masses be achieved. Social wrongs were allowed to continue unopposed because the religion allowed them to occur and made these slights bearable.
I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as Marx in his assessment. Nor do I believe that religion is a conscious tool of the ruling classes. I can certainly see it as something that can and does prevent some people from living as fulfilling a life as they can. Religion is also a powerful force in any society and it doesn’t take an atheist to express the view that this isn’t always a positive force.
Comment by: Stephan
1I see this as circular in both camps. Atheists will insist that our perceived internal need to God is a useful evolutionary trait. Theists will say that God created us with an internal need to seek Him. Both arguments are internally consistent, and neither of them are convincing to the other side.
Comment by: Mike O
2I was just thinking the same sort of thing, only a little different. I was thinking that this sounds like Christians do when we want people to understand how there could be a god even though we can’t prove it. This argument is similar, only to the other side. It tries to explain, even quantify, the absence of God.
Looking at this argument from the oustide (as an atheist looks at religious arguments from the outside), it’s not very convincing. I mean, it’s possible, sure. But not convincing. I suspect that’s the same feeling Jason gets when we try to explain the existence of God.
In fact, one could call atheism - the lack of a god - the opium of the masses. no worries, mate - she’ll be right. Just live a good life and don’t worry about it. That philosophy would has a sort of opiating (is that a word?) effect in it’s own right, doesn’t it?
Comment by: Stephan
3Indeed, if there really is a God, then living life as an atheist is the ultimate delusion. There’s you opiate right there - dulls your senses and keeps your mind from dealing with those difficult issues of life.
Comment by: Mike O
4So who’s opiated depends on whether or not there is a god … that’s actually kind of insightful.
Comment by: Chris C
5Stephen’s point that the argument cuts both ways effectively eliminates this as a reason for failing to believe in God.
Just to develop a response from the Judeo-Christian perspective. The sense of a God-calling being in built (however God put it there) is scriptural (Ecclesiastes3:11; Isaiah26:9). The ‘religion as a social construct/aid to social development idea’ works to some extent in ritualistic religion but it applies poorly, if at all, to Christianity. For the first 300 years the early Church had some major social disadvantages. Born after the death of it’s leader, spread by those without political or military power, a dangerous philosophy of enemy loving and turning the other cheek etc and with almost no repetitive ceremonies, rituals or laws to encourage cultural groupings. The only thing which is able to account for the growth of the early Church is the promised presence of the Holy Spirit which empowered it. Not a social construct in any way.
Comment by: Mike O
6while I do agree with you, I think the problem christians have today is that much of what non-C’s see from us is the ritual - the going to church, the praying, the bible-reading, etc.
Your historical argument is good, though, I think.
Comment by: Chris C
7Sadly you’re correct Mike: sigh. Many Christians are happy to congregate round the form and fabric of Church life: priest, robes, buildings, archaic ceremonies and rituals, none of which Jesus called us to do, nor can they be found in the New Testament. Until we get the world out of the Church and the Church into the world; until we stop sitting in our congregations and start standing for something; until churchgoers are prepared to allow Jesus to be their Lord and not just their saviour, then this is what most people will continue to see. Hopefully things are starting to change a little in the UK as the number of notional Christians decline. However, I believe prayer and a high regard for scripture will be important in this process.
Comment by: Eliza
8Noone here will stop the presses upon hearing me say that I side more with Jason on this, though I’d focus on “religion” or “the Christian God” as being functions of society, rather than “God” per se (though that may also be the case).
Stephan, great observation about non-intersecting internally consistent circles here. I’m in the other one, with Jason ;-)
Thoughts:
Christianity has benefited greatly from two features: (1) the belief that believers will experience great things in the hereafter (particularly important in the early years, when believers thought the end was very near), and (2) the urging/teaching to convert others. These factors (and others) have made Christianity a very successful meme. (It’s a meme regardless of its validity, or lack thereof.)
Most Christians grew up in Christian families, just as most Moslems grew up in Moslem families, most Jews grew up in Jewish families, most Hindus grew up in Hindu families, and so on. This widespread passage of religious belief within families reflects socialization within the child’s early environment. The influence of the parents/family/like-minded culture group is more than just early education in one religion instead another. It also includes the interweaving of rituals, beliefs, & core values with early education, all introduced by the people the child is closest to & most dependent on.
Has any person since the time of Jesus discovered Jesus or Christianity without having heard about him/it from other people? Even Paul knew about Jesus and Christians before his experience on the road to Damascus. I’d submit that every Christian alive today heard about Christianity from someone else - most often from their parents, sometimes from someone who provided them with a Bible or otherwise was responsible for making one available for them, or someone who otherwise evangelized in their general direction. These are all examples of social passage of the Christian belief.
What would the the meaning of “religion” be, if a person had no contact with other people? (This is a new thought for me, but tracks closely with a long-term assessment I’ve had that “rights” only have meaning within a societal or social context. A person alone has no “rights” - for example, if facing a threat from the natural world. If there’s no other person there, or no society/government there, to grant or withhold rights, there is no such thing as rights. IMO.)
I’m not going to claim that “God” (some deity not tied to the Bible, or any earthly appearance) is a social construct (though that’s not impossible). I’d instead refer interested readers back to Jason’s prior post, about God-belief & the mind…
Comment by: Chris C
9Sure Christianity is a meme, in the sense of an idea, the real questions are was it God’s idea and is it empowered by His Spirit? Who first had the idea? Well Jesus, who claimed to be an expression of God on earth and to be carrying God’s authority and ideas (the theory, popular in the mid 20th cent, that Paul started the basic tenants of Christian belief is now rapidly falling out of favour in academic circles). So the claim from the beginning of Christianity is that it was God’s meme, given directly to humankind. The first witnesses were then commissioned to spread it from person to person (the Great Commission, described in all 4 Gospels with it’s outworking started in Acts). So from the basics of the faith you would not expect others to get the idea without having some contact with Christianity, as every one we are likely to hear about today will have. So reports of those of other faiths, especially Muslims, becoming Christians after having experiences, dreams and visions of Jesus are excluded, although some claim to know very little about Him before the experience. In the past there have been stories of missionaries discovering people who seemed to know about a Jesus figure who were waiting for someone to come and tell them more about Him. I don’t have the references, but even if I found some, I guess Eliza, you would again try and find alternative explanations to the idea that ‘God did it’. After all that’s what you try and do with my experience and even your own, so why should some remote person receiving input from God impress you. I suppose I’m saying, why do you ask the question?
Is the meme God powered? Well all the evidence is that it is. Your reasons for the success of Christianity, Eliza, fall down on two counts. First, other 1st cent Mediterranean religions proselytised, some by force (worship of Caesar as a God) and also had the concept of life after death for believers, but where are they now? Further, the early Church didn’t use force and didn’t focus on the hereafter; there emphasis was on accepting Jesus’ following His call on their lives and spreading the word (see Acts and Paul’s letters) and yet still the converts poured in (see the preach in Acts 2:14-47: not a mention of the promise of the life to come, but plenty about the power of the Holy Spirit, what they should do now and what they did).
Comment by: Eliza
10Chris C wrote:
Major problem here is that we don’t accept the same things as evidence. At least, I don’t find the reports in the gospels and in Acts (and Paul’s letters) reliable as “evidence” for this, nor the reports of Christians’ experiences with what feels like the Holy Spirit. What I see, in the present time and in history, is a whole lot of human energy & resources directed toward the Great Commission (evangelism, missionary work). Religious organizations (including churches) are apparently, as a group, the largest recipient of charitable donations in the United States. This looks to me like it’s people-powered, & I can’t determine from the evidence that any nontheist (NOT just me) would accept that there is anything other than that powering it.
‘Course, that would be hard to determine in an experiment. But, say, if Christians managed to accomplish change which would be impossible if attempted by humans alone…that could be compelling.
Comment by: Seren
11Eliza:
It certainly had a curious effect on my Christian identity/faith to learn that the best indicator of what a person’s faith will be is that of their parents. If both parents identify with the same faith, you can almost certainly tell what an individual believes without having to ask them. Statistically speaking.
Comment by: Eliza
12I wonder what that statistic is among atheists. It’s probably still true that most come from religious families (& were themselves religious up to some point), but there’s a slowly growing number of atheist parents, so someday most atheists may come from atheist families.
Comment by: Eliza
13Regarding knowledge, belief, proof -
I suspect almost everyone reading this can agree on the following 4 items, things that can be demonstrated:
- The Bible exists.
- Churches exist.
- Religion exists.
- Beliefs exist.
I suspect most people reading this could agree on the following 4 items, things that we know exist because they are personal experiences some have had and others have heard attested to:
- Faith in God exists.
- Belief in God exists.
- The experience of contact with God exists.
- People’s lives have been changed by what they experience as contact with God.
The bugaboo comes in the assumption that these experiences mean that the thing experienced has an existence outside of the mind:
- People may feel certain that God exists.
- People may have been told (taught) that God exists.
- People may not be able to envision the possibility that God does not exist.
But none of this requires, implies, or proves that God does exist.
An analogy (which has limits, as do all analogies):
- The “placebo effect” exists.
- It’s been demonstrated, time and time again, in a huge number of research studies.
- But that doesn’t mean that any placebo is actually effective treatment - only that the belief that there could be an effect itself can have an effect.
Comment by: Chris C
14Eliza said
You mean like the spread of the Church in it’s first 300years, as I mentioned above as evidence for the meme being God powered.
The placebo effect doesn’t account for the God experience. Two reasons. Paul of Tarsus, I and many Christians in between had no prior belief that we were taking anything that would have an effect, so no self induction. Most placebo responses are trivial and transient when compared with effective treatments: the God experience treatment is very effective.
So your listing above, Eliza, simply finishes with no explanation for the God experience other than God did it.
Comment by: Eliza
15Chris C, to clarify, are you saying that non-Christians couldn’t have spread Christianity so broadly in 300 yrs as Christians did (I’ll accept that right away as a given; why would they even try? and, they would be very bad at it if they did!). Or, are you saying that non-Christians couldn’t have spread any idea (meme) as widely in 300 yrs as early Christians spread Christianity?? While Christianity has been a very successful meme, its spread has not had any of the trappings of supernatural assistance - just lots of time & energy expended by humans, for a meme that turns out to include some of the key features of a successful human meme.
Regarding placebo effect: as I said, I mentioned it as an analogy (”which has limits, as do all analogies”). I didn’t claim that Christian belief is a placebo effect. Besides, it’s a fallacy to assume that a lasting, deep, effect could not be the result of a placebo, just because the placebo effects we’ve heard of don’t have such a significant effect. Certainly, therapists spend their working lives helping people re-frame deeply-held (negative) beliefs about themselves and others, which those people are typically initially unaware they hold, & unaware of the extent of the effect on them and their actions. (Another analogy. I’m not saying Christians need therapy!)
So your counterexamples above, Chris C, simply don’t convince any nontheist that there is no explanation for the God experience other than God did it.
Comment by: Chris C
16Eliza, I’m saying that in it’s first 300 years Christians accomplished change in terms of the spread of the faith for which researchers have, as yet, been able to find any satisfactory explanation other than that it was powered by God. From very humble beginnings, after the death of it’s leader, without a shred of political, economic or military clout, with a counter intuitive message of enemy loving and sacrificial care, sometimes unto death, and in the teeth of intense persecution the church grew (and, if you read the early chapters of Acts, at first without a lot of time and effort being expended either). Nothing like it has been seen before or since. It provides an example of something compelling that you asked for.
On the subject of Christian experience. We agree it isn’t a placebo effect and I assure you that therapists reframing deeply held beliefs certainly isn’t an explanation for it either, nor are these deeply held beliefs themselves, which have often been put there by some actual event. So you are still left completely without any evidenced based explanation for it other than God did it.
This statement shows how unevidential and faith reliant you’re prepared to go in order to find a counter to a theist position, which, ironically, you say lacks evidence.
Comment by: Eliza
17Chris C, I suspect you are immersed in Christian culture and more in touch with that than with the “real world”. (That’s somewhat more polite than my saying “this statement is total BS”.)
Your argument is this:
A. Christianity spread amazingly fast in its first 300 years.
B. Such fast spreading could only have occurred through assistance from God.
C. Therefore, God exists.
Unfortunately, statement B is your belief, rather than being supported by objective data, and therefore the step from B to C is illogical. (Please supply links to objective data, if you disagree.)
This is a religion which didn’t just explain thunder and illness - it promised that the end-times were coming soon and that remarkable things awaited believers, in Heaven. It required that believers spread the word to others. It apparently came to promise believers that they shared a loving relationship with a personal God, who cared about them. It had/has a number of features which make it, in human terms, a successful meme.
You won’t like any of the analogies I propose, and again they are just analogies (thus have limitations), but Starbucks spread amazingly fast in a much shorter time. Coca-Cola has spread across the world in a fairly rapid fashion. Use of automotives and airplanes has spread really quite fast around the world. The ideas of the using fire and using the wheel probably spread really fast, once they had been discovered. And none of these things promise 1/10th of what Christianity does.
Well, maybe Starbucks does, or did… ;-)
Comment by: Chris C
18Eliza summarised me as saying
No, I said that no plausible alternatives have yet been found to the claim that God did it, and that’s true, not just a belief as you imply. Your suggested alternatives are implausible for the following reasons. The early church’s preaching didn’t focus on promises of an afterlife (see Acts) to secure its converts and, in any case, other religions contemporaneous with 1st cent. Christianity promised existence beyond death: where are they now? Yes, a loving relationship with the Father is central and unique to Christianity, but if that was just an idea, if it didn’t materialise in a tangible way, it was just an empty promise: no meme survives long on that. That’s why your successful consumerist comparisons (Coca Cola, cars, planes) are good ones. They fit well because they are not just empty ideas/memes, they are real, they work, they deliver something tangible, something that is true, that’s why they are successful: just like Christianity.
Comment by: Jason
19The meme of the Hebrew god had things that the gods of the surrounding nations failed to have that make the idea more attractive.
God is more powerful than other gods. He is able to create the universe from nothing but a word while surrounding creation myths have gods building the world from existing parts, finding a pre-existing world or just ignoring creation entirely. God is superior because the myth has it that nothing existed before God made it.
God is interested in human beings and in individual human beings. The gods of surrounding nations were a vile lot. They used and abused humanity for their own amusement, sending storms and other disasters for fun or because they were offended. God is not like that. In fact the two creation myths in Genesis appeal to the two parts of society that were most common at the time: the ruling and mercantile classes have a myth that explains stewardship and command over the world and; the shepherds and classes that deal with land use have a myth of a garden and husbanding of the land. Both very appealing.
If god belief is part of the human social and physical structure as I believe then it becomes a struggle of memes to find the most attractive one for followers. A powerful, caring and socially appealing god is a better meme than a weaker, arrogant, fickle god.
Comment by: Mike O
20This has been an interesting discussion to watch. As Christians go, though, you have to give Chris credit that whether you think he is right or wrong, at least his beliefs are based on logic in addition to his faith, and not just empty beliefs carried forward from who-knows-where.
This kind of goes back to the “proof” versus “evidence” discussion a few weeks back. No Christian can ever offer “proof” that God exists, barring some sort of physical manifestation. But even then the atheistic argument of “just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean God did it” would still hold. The “god of the gaps” thinking that we Christians sometimes use (too heavily, I’m sure!) I’ve learned, is not an effective argument to some atheists … which is interesting to me because if the gaps aren’t evidence that there may be a God, then what possibly could be?
Then again, the converse is also true. A non-god of the non-gaps (there is no gap, therefore there is no god) would be quite ineffective on faithful, believing Christians.
So where does that leave us? I would hope that even though we may never accept the other side of the argument, at least we can understand it. I am convinced that Christianity is right, and can’t imagine any argument that could break me away from that. But as a Christian, I am throroughly enjoying this line of topics. It helps me understand how the atheistic mind works. Thanks, Jason.
And thanks Eliza and Chris for an engaging discussion.
Comment by: Chris C
21Jason, I agree with most of what you said in your last post about the Hebrew God. The problem with your argument is that the Jews hadn’t exactly been able to conquere the world with the Yahweh meme in spite of, as you say, the positive contrast between the attributes of Yahweh compared with the other gods of the Greco-Roman world. It took Jesus, without changing the characteristics of Yahweh, to bring a new covenant with God, one with power in it. Yes, it was the same God, but now an empowering close relationship, as promised in the Hebrew Scriptures, was to be available to all who would accept and follow. Through Jesus the meme becomes embodied and comes amongst us, as a person. Through The Holy Spirit He stays with us as a transforming reality. It is the muscle of that promised spiritual power becoming available, which provides the only satisfactory explanation for why the Christian faith did so well in the teeth of major opposition and with a number of major survival disadvantages.
Comment by: Jason
22Chris, that might well be true but Christianity didn’t really take a leap forward in terms of numbers until the Roman Empire adopted it as the official faith. It was a small, relatively successful cult until then. After the fall of Rome the religion remained a power but stood independent of any particular government.
Comment by: Chris C
23Yes, it’s that growth from about 100 to 6 million, before it’s adoption by the Roman state (very much against what would have been expected in natural terms) which is remarkable. After Rome took it on Christendom grew very quickly through law and edict and power structures. I’m not sure that has much to do with Christianity.