The God Hypothesis: God as society’s mirror

2020 will go down in history as a world of unprecedented firsts. It wasn’t Covid-19 which brought novelty, for pandemics have always been with the human species. Rather it was that for the first time, science fought back with policy designed to reduce infectivity and morbidity as well as the development of several vaccines.

It was no fault of science that either policy was ignored or politics overstepped its moral boundaries and abandoned scientific recommendations.

The question is though, where was God during the pandemic?

‘Working in mysterious ways’ aside, the nearest one got to God that I could see, was the occasional plea for prayers on social media.

Unfortunately these prayers seemed to do nothing for the god-awful statistics that plagued the world. With people struggling to breathe from hospital beds, to loved ones dying alone due to essential covid-19 precautions, it was hard to see the elegant and paternal hand of God playing a part.

This brings us to a point which I think needs some serious thought, more so by those who claim to see the wondrous acts of God on a daily basis.

No matter how much Paley’s modern day advocates protest the wonder of the clockwork universe, science has now made the hypothesis null and void. However the hypothesis never needed science to accomplish this self-defeating in the first place. There existed two possibilities, either God existed and was hiding or he did not exist.

If God has always existed then he has chosen for reasons known only to him, to remain hidden and thus has no direct impact on human life.

And if God doesn’t exist, then again, human beings will carry on doing what human beings do. It was only the introduction of crude theologies that breathed life into the notion of God, for the hypothesis alone was inconsequential to the progress of human enterprise.

From the ‘prime mover’ to the ‘evidence from creation’ arguments, all have been dealt with several times over and yet there is no surrendering from the opposition. But the abstract notion of God is not what believers want you to contemplate. The true design however flawed, is the grotesque and surreptitious endeavour to introduce theology into the education system. It is not God as philosophical notion, believers want, it is instead conversion, expansion and a final triumph of the zero sum game that all religions are still playing.

The idea of God probably would have died out a long time ago, were it not for the fanatics and zealots. At best God would have been left to a ‘wait and see’ approach. But thanks to charlatanism, delusions and gullibility, God became more than an idea. He became that which mirrored the desires, wants and flaws of the society of the day. And so God has been dragged, flogged and carried right up to the present day.

To most religious moderates, God accepts all and everyone. Although up until very recently God was still making up his mind about homosexuality, and thus the Catholic Church had to patiently wait for the memo until they could pass it on. This is easily explained when one considers the precarius balance between the retarded thinking the Church suffers from, and the desire to stay sociologically relevant.

God is nothing more than a mirror of what the human species feels at any given time. If we need hope beyond death then we project a vision for an immortal future. If we want to judge the sexual acts of another, we can invoke God and condemn them for immorality.

In our image we created God and thus he (has to be the pronoun ‘he’ right?) is whatever we need him to be at that given time.

That is why those rare moments of conscience among believers cannot be used as evidence for the truth of God. Once there were enough believers who grew tired of torturing a group of people for fun, then they once again invoked God and stated that murder was wrong. However for those who still require blood, God stands ready to be used.

God is the perfect mirror and we see what we want to see. There is no evidence for God’s existence. But when we look at the world and ignore all that is flawed and unsavoury, God stands once again ready to be used to explain the wondrous.

The idea is persistent, once you interpret the actions of God as nothing more than what is required by a given tribe, clan or people at any given time, it is easily seen that the mercurial nature of God is explained by what sort of society that people wants to create.

Thus even now, when a homosexual is condemned by a believer, this is not because some God has determined that homosexuality is wrong. Rather it represents the prejudices of the believer. Organised religion suffers schisms because the whole is divided by believers at war with each other. There is after all only one mirror, to go around, only one God for monotheists. If we dispense with God then we dispense with one more reason to destroy each other.

We no longer need God to decide what sort of society it is that we want to create. We no longer need the justification of God to explain away good or evil. The only thing that the human species is an honesty that is not conducive to belief. If a policy is made and it goes bad, we don’t need denial and the invocation of God, or we need is honesty enough to pursue a different course.

What we do in error or right as a species is ours alone, and this is a liberating thought.