Can God Change his Mind?

by peacefulpete 56 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  This is precisely an instinctive (inferential) thing to have done. Why did man have to see a spirit in the fire or the water? Why not leave it at "it's hot" or "it's wet"?

  Why does my dog bark at the wind? Why when the floor creaks does my wife immediately suspect someone is in the house? It's a product of mind and experience.

  When she wakens alarmed, her rational mind usually takes over...."I should have heard the door open, we live in a safe rural community, the floor sometimes creaks when the cat walks on it"...etc. IOW she applies critical thinking and suppresses her primitive inference.

  As to why fire and water and planets/sun etc. were endowed with spirits, things that move and exert force are easily thought of as animate or animated by someone animate. Combine that with the importance things like water, fire, wind, sun have to human survival, they were concerns playing on the mind all the time.

  Animate vs. inanimate are innate concepts in all but the simplest of organisms. Yet the mind of my cat seems to enjoy imagining/pretending her stuffed ball of feathers on a string as a bird.

  Believing and make believing are sisters. Religion makes no effort to separate them.
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  Halcon

  You dog and your wife infer based on what they cannot see (the wind and what made the sound of a creaking floor).

  Fire and water were both visible and could be interacted with. Yet seeing and touching fire and water were not enough.

  Further, these primitives probably made use of these elements. In other words, they were thoroughly familiar with them (unlike not knowing why a sound was made). Yet they still made gods out of them.
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  peacefulpete

  They depended upon them but they were mysterious. They could not understand how or why these things acted the way they do. The unknown inspires imagination.
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  Halcon

  This is true, the unknown inspires imagination. Thoughts are a powerful thing.
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  TonusOH

  Halcon: Suddenly these primitive people, supposedly more evolved til then to primarily just survive, don't sound so primitive after all.

  I'm not sure I understand how my statement led you to this conclusion.

  Halcon: But again, why would they go through all this to begin with?

  I don't know. Curiosity? A desire for some degree of certainty? These are traits we still carry with us today, and they likely would have been much more useful in our distant past. Our complex social structures and behaviors would have existed back then, and also been more useful to develop in that environment. I think it is inevitable that human communities would go through this, over and over. It's how our brains work.

  Halcon: The appearance of God and gods in ancient writings everywhere simply affirms how either the concept of God was instinctive in man

  I think that religion is a form of tribalism, a way to tighten the bonds in a social group by defining us/them boundaries. We see this in many mammal species, and especially in many primate species. We also see this in how humans behave today in many other areas of our lives. Is it reasonable to invest as much of ourselves into sports teams as some people do? Or actors? Or made up story worlds? Of course not. Yet, we do.

  Religion is the ultimate expression of this behavior. That primitive groups with a sharp focus on survival would develop it as they did, with gods and rituals and rules and ceremonies and deep emotional commitments, does not seem far-fetched.
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  Halcon

  Tonus -I don't know. Curiosity? A desire for some degree of certainty? These are traits we still carry with us today, and they likely would have been much more useful in our distant past.

  The lengthy and rather scientific process you theorized these primitives may have carried out to arrive at a conclusion of God seems much too laborious to just appease curiosity. Imagine a tribe of people, mostly concerned with finding food and staying alive, sitting down and determining 'we MUST invent an explanation for X". It goes against the notion that these people, the males in particular, were all about practicality and efficiency.

  Based on what we understand of these primitives, it seems it would have been more logical to attribute anything mysterious to themselves, and thereby gain an upper hand amongst themselves. To have attributed these powers to someone outside of themselves undermines the logical process you described and further, undermined man all the way to now.

  The desire for certainty in these people was supposedly seen and carried out in their actions. In their supposed daily fight for survival. We are led to believe today that these primitives MADE their future possible by virtue of their physical strength and force of will.

  But if they indeed had faith in their god or gods that they could aid them in their survival, or even utterly dictate their fortune or misfortune, then it wasn't simply an invention to appease curiosity or create certainty.
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  Anony Mous

  There are plenty of evolutionary reasons to invent religion. What we see today is a distillation of many similar ideas that eventually harken back to being afraid of the dark. Apparently the humans that could imagine something terrible in the dark lived longer than those that didn’t, which makes sense and reinforces that something terrible lives in the dark. From there it is ghost stories that develop into tribal and later communal knowledge. Not hard to imagine, every child does it.
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  peacefulpete

  There have always been two sides to the religion coin. One side is how to manipulate, flatter the spirits to ensure prosperity, like abundant animals to hunt or wheat in the field, the other how to avoid angering them to prevent having lions eat your child or rain not fall. Survival until recently was a crap shoot. Our species barely survived until our technology gave us some edge on nature. Any way to improve the odds would be embraced, logical or not. As was also said, there is a community element to cult. Your gods protect you, my gods protect me. Like was said, tribalism. This would have had some survival advantage at a time when subsistence farming or nomadic lifestyle were the norm. It also has an element of group kinship bonds. There is no need to imagine someone planned this all out and decided to invent spirits and religion. As was also said, useful ideas stick around if they offer some survival advantage. Memetic evolution.
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  Halcon

  Anony-What we see today is a distillation of many similar ideas that eventually harken back to being afraid of the dark.

  There were plenty of familiar and tangible things to be afraid of in the dark, presumably predators to start off. Insects, rodents, smaller animals that could still slash and bite, other humans , etc...

  None of these things remotely resembled God or gods. Yet, these people began to worship something higher than themselves.
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  TonusOH

  Halcon: The lengthy and rather scientific process you theorized

  Oh, I don't think it was scientific at all. Which is one reason why it would take so long to develop. I am not talking about a group of nomads hashing out the cause of lightning over a few evenings and coming up with a long explanation. Even today, we have a tendency to jump to conclusions on insufficient evidence in order to deal with things we may not understand. This trait would likely have been dialed up in a time when every bush might harbor a nasty surprise and getting a small cut might be catastrophic. I'm talking about ideas that probably took generations to begin to take shape, and in decidely non-scientific ways.

  Again, if there was a god who interacted with these people and guided them at some point, the development of religion would have begun along a single and clear track. With the certainty of god as a starting point, the answers would not have been made up or random. And, presumably, those humans would have had answers to questions about lightining and infections that would have stood the test of time. Their approach was not scientific or methodical. It was reactionary and driven by fear and a need to have an answer immediately, even if the answer wasn't accurate.