CONVERSATIONS IN THE PANTHEON - The Truth about God and Religion

How the Gods Came to Be

Thomas: Last week, Mathew, you said that, because all ancient cultures intuited god's presence god must exist. But is that really true? How can you be so sure? The argument to the contrary seems much more plausible: many gods exist because humans created them. The concept that the gods self-created makes no sense to me. It's difficult enough to fathom that a single god existed before the creation of the universe, but so many! Did they have a common mother?

Mathew: You're full of good questions, Thomas. What you're saying is that if god created the universe, he must have existed prior to creation, which is a reasonable assumption. But then you say, if there were many gods prior to creation, there must be another creator that existed before them, a mother god. That's certainly a logical proposition, but one that can never be proven. I know where you're coming from. The big bang has scientific support, therefore none of the gods exist. I'm not buying.

Mary: Despite the scientific breakthroughs of this past century, the common belief, in today's world, is that divine beings, who are invisible to us, created us and everything that we see. Let's explore how this belief came to be.

It's very difficult, if not impossible, to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancient ancestors. They didn't have access to the wealth of scientific information that we now take for granted. As you know, many things in the world and the universe are invisible, for example: gravity, magnetism, electricity, dark matter, dark energy and and subatomic particles. Yet, through science we know with certainty that they exist. We know their existence from the effects that they cause, which are visible or measurable. Iron filings show us magnetic lines that are invisible to us. Gravity needs very little explanation. We can't see it but we can feel it, especially when climbing stairs. We can also see the apple falling to the ground and the tides rolling in and out. We see the effects even though we can't see the causes.

Today, we know that the earth's rotation about its axis gives us the perception that the sun is moving in the sky above us, but our ancient ancestors didn't know about the earth's rotation. They simply saw the sun moving around the earth and took it as fact. The regular daily motion of the sun in the sky led most ancient cultures to believe that the sun was a god. But to scientists, the sun is a nuclear reactor that fuses hydrogen atoms to produce helium atoms while releasing humongous amounts of energy. While this may be common knowledge now, it wasn't known even as recently as one century ago, before the nuclear age. To us, the sun is not a god. But it took us a long time to make that discovery.

It is clear that the concept of supernatural beings arose from ignorance of the forces at play in the natural world. Electricity is a concept of the modern world. Our earliest ancestors saw lightening in the sky and assumed it was a god producing it. We didn't know that it was an electrical discharge until Benjamin Franklin explained it in 1772. The same is true for earthquakes. It wasn't until 1702 that Robert Hooke explained them as movements of the earth's crust. The science behind volcano eruptions was also explained in recent times.

About two million years ago, when Homo Erectus started walking on earth, he/she didn't have the benefit of modern scientific knowledge and thus created supernatural explanations for all acts of Nature. When Homo Sapiens arrived, about one hundred thousand years ago, he/she wasn't any better equipped to explain natural phenomena. So they created gods. Scientific ignorance led to the creation of many gods.

Thomas: Interesting! When they didn't know otherwise, our ancestors saw the hand of god in almost everything – rain, thunder, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, solar and lunar eclipses, floods, droughts and on and on. Everything that happened that could not be explained by reason was attributed to the gods. Even to this day, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, for example, are referred to as 'acts of god'. Fortunately, science has found rational explanations for all those things. However, people all over the world still believe in supernatural divine beings, who inhabit the celestial sphere and keep watch over us.