Is there a large sinkhole in your future?
Let's talk about God today. The concept of God, speaking to the atheist hidden away in all of us, is a historical fact. In other words, large masses of people have professed to believe in an unseen higher power of some sort ever since recorded history began.
Even the most ardent atheist has to admit of this as historical fact.
A sincere atheist would examine this fact and have some account for its existence. There are several explanations. To my mind, the most interesting and certainly one of the most explicitly explored was Ayn Rand's view that was outlined in her philosophical works and novels. Rand sincerely wanted to refute the altruistic and mystical aspects of deism, and specifically Christianity.
For my part, having spoken with thousands of individuals about their belief in God or lack of it, what I see is that this personal decision is usually made on emotional grounds rooted in personal experiences. Once the decision is made, only then is it intellectually justified, if ever.
So, I take this as another fact: the decision to believe or not believe in a God is, for the majority of people, an emotional one.
Given these two facts, we find that a great many people in the world are making an emotional decision to believe in a God. This points to the possibility that humans have a strong emotional need to believe in a God. I think this is more than a possibility, I think it is an obvious truth.
I think the emotional basis of that decision is what makes it so much a source of strong interaction between people on both sides of the decision.
But what is even more interesting, if less fundamental, is the way humans take the simple belief or non-belief in a God, and abstract it into complex world-views. Thus we find a multitude of widely different religious systems as well as varying degrees of non-belief, which also have been incorporated into systems.
You can always tell when the decision on belief or disbelief in God is at the core of a world-view. The speaker allows emotion into their argument. This is most evident in scientific and political debate, where name calling and invective often pop up into conversation. I think this is because we emotionally sense that scientific method and unemotional scientific discourse are system-limited to discussion about subjects which are factually provable or disprovable, at least in theory. In other words, they are limited to subjects about which we can observe and verify findings, if not now, then in the foreseeble future.
The further away we get from observable verification, the more that a belief system gains relevance, and the more likely that emotionally based world-views will creep into our discourse. After all, man is a creature that inhabits a body teeming with chemical reactions and complexity. We are wired to have emotions. Which brings me to my final point.
Why are we wired to have emotions? What objective purpose might they serve? On a basic level, they are the source of our physical attraction to the opposite sex which serves to perpetuate our species. We have this in common with most other vertebrates, and can sense and find emotion in the behaviour of our pets, wild animals, etc.
I think that in the more developed species, emotion, or may we say chemical and hormonal processes, are the primary means by which an organism functions and makes life decisions. In fact, a point that was once taken as a universal truth was that the intellectual processing that the human brain accomplishes is a recent addition to our arsenal of life-defending tools.
If we can agree to this, we can perhaps agree that the thinking portion of our brain exists to help us survive in very special situations where our emotional apparatus is deficient. This is a very tricky statement to agree to. It implies that our emotional functioning still serves a useful purpose, which implies that our intellectual functioning is not a complete answer to our ultimate survival, but only an additional refinement to aid in survival.
It seems to me that any capable scientist could explore the above paragraph and devise verifiable experiments to determine more precisely how much our human function depends upon a combination of emotional and intellectual factors, or even if the two have any meaning apart from each other.
Thanks to the internet, we can easily find out if such experiments have been completed or are in process. I leave that to you and me, on our own time.
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