Anyway, thoughts and ideas on this specific idea welcome. — I like sushi
Anyway, thoughts and ideas on this specific idea welcome. I do not really want to get into other common tropes for how the concept of God arose UNLESS you feel it dovetails into this idea in a curious way. — I like sushi
At some point someone would talk about someone with an ability to do something better than anyone else and this concept over time - tied in with storytelling - could develop either a concept of a being powerful in several areas or, with more Eastern thought, a concept of a unifying energy.
It is more or less our seeming natural propensity to imagine beyond the limits of our immediate scope and experience that I am talking about and that this is an advantageous attribute if we wish to impress others. Given that weaving a complex and compelling story in prehistory would have similar effects to evidential facts today I think there is weight to this general lien of thinking. — I like sushi
Just had a peculiar thought today regarding how ideas and concepts of God may have developed. — I like sushi
An interesting read and nice OP. However as someone said on here before, it would be logical to assume religion(s) and god(s) came about from the initial belief of animism, which likely came about due to pareidolia. — Outlander
Edit: Sorry, must've missed that last sentence. So, perhaps like two stone age military generals talking about say, how they destroyed a village. One says, he killed everything in sight and nothing was alive or unburned for miles. The other responds his endeavor was far greater and the land was so destroyed it was uninhabitable and nothing would grow even to this day, etc. To the point the tale gets passed on and the man and his endeavors (whether factual or not) become something of a folk legend on steroids to the point he's attributed to being not even human but far above? Something like that? — Outlander
The development of the specific term God is middle eastern/western. There is no primary concept of God (or religion) in the East. — I like sushi
But I would bet that they did know the concept of "smarter being" and used it to explain things that they could not. — Sir2u
↪T Clark points out that naming things seems to be an intrinsic part of human thought processes, but it seems to me that it is a learned ability. From the very beginning of their lives they are shown things and told the names of those things. — Sir2u
The development of the specific term God is middle eastern/western. There is no primary concept of God (or religion) in the East. — I like sushi
I guess my main line of thinking here is that humans are kind of new to reason. Applying reasonable explanations by assuming how we see the world is part and parcel of why I started to think like this. — I like sushi
Going back to the Middle East it is fairly apparent that cities had traditions that developed into God concepts too. This plays into the competitive concept of state versus state but in a more direct and concrete fashion. By this stage though we are probably way, way past the kind of incremental steps I am talking about that arose through some form of exaggeration for entertainments sake. — I like sushi
Given that FACTS did not exist in the sense they do today this may be even more plausible than it seems. The lack of EVIDENCE (because it did not strictly exist) would allow for the strength and depth of the narrative to take on a life of its own. — I like sushi
I have been of the mindset for a long time that modern religions arose through the use of mnemonics, and now I am starting to think that maybe, much further back, the intent to preserve information came through and due to comparisons between imagined and real stories. EVIDENCE and FACTS themselves began with imaginative interplay and incremental one-upmanship. — I like sushi
How very charitable of you, Sir. :smirk:It might just be that the word god was the name given to anything that was unexplainable and originally meant "I don't know". — Sir2u
:100: :fire:[It] would be logical to assume ... god(s) came about from the initial belief of animism¹, which likely came about due to pareidolia². — Outlander
From this vantage, in further considering the divinity ≠ nature worldview, one could potentially go from “my dad can beat up your dad” to “my deity can beat up your deity” to “there is, or else must be, a deity (i.e., a personhood) which is supreme and cannot be beaten by anything other”. A bit tongue in cheek maybe, but psychologically believable all the same, I think. This being in relative keeping with the OP. — javra
Still, this tends to overlook the diametrically opposite worldview of God wherein God = Cosmic Divinity = Nature. — javra
Still, this tends to overlook the diametrically opposite worldview of God wherein God = Cosmic Divinity = Nature. (A perspective that can be found in many non-Abrahamic worldviews as well as in Abrahamic ones, with at least certain forms of Kabbalism as example of the latter). In this worldview of God = Nature the following childhood paradox of God loses its validity, for it fully translates into: “If Nature is all-powerful, can Nature create a rock that is too heave for Nature to lift?” You’ll maybe note that in this understanding, God = Nature per se holds no personhood and cannot be personified as something that “can lift a rock” (as though the rock were something other than itself). In this latter worldview, then, the gods (again, with a small “g”) maybe could each lift their own share of rocks, but no individual god equates to the cosmic totality of being which in this worldview is pantheistic God/Nature. — javra
By this point in time, there was a flourishing diversity of schools - ones that eventually come to be thought of as "Hindu," as well as ones that are Buddhist and Jain, probably also a materialistic-sceptic school called Carvaka or Lokayata, possibly others, too. The context is one in which these schools engaged in public debate (katha), often before rulers or assmeblies, usually for reward or prestige. For two of these kinds of debates, disputation (jalpa) and refutation (vitanda) the objective was victory. For a third kind of debate called "discussion" (vada), however, the goal was truth.
(Knepper T., 2023), Philosophies of Religions: A Global and Critical Introduction, pp. 24
Why would they question things they did not understand.
This is certainly a modern analytic assumption that drives at the heart of why I found the idea fascinating — I like sushi
Simple questions that helped them to survive are analytic. — Sir2u
Evidence from psychological and cognitive science studies indicates this is not true. Language, including grammar and naming is a genetically inherited human capability. — T Clark
having a competitive streak in the realm of abstraction that led to ideas of God and other comparative ideological schemes beyond the Western concept of God? — I like sushi
Because they didn't have analytics. I am not saying people couldn't think only that certain intellectual paradigms had not been reached (such as Evidence and Reason) in any common sense we understand them today. Science is younger than the Church for instance.
Our concepts of cause and effect are modern concepts. It is foolish to assume otherwise given that even in Newtons time people thought his ability to plot out the motion of a ball to be magic. — I like sushi
No they are not. Meaning they are not simple questions they only look simple to us who know better. I imagine you might ask in the same light why would someone not clean their hands before tending to someone else's wound ... because there was no germ theory. Again, another instance of something we see as 'obvious' yet did not arise until long after the rise of the modern sciences. — I like sushi
Once again you are confusing modern ideas and principles with caveman mentality. — Sir2u
Just because they did not get all of the answers correct does ot mean that they did not try to do the best with the knowledge available. — Sir2u
purely fabricated for some small individual purpose or simple pleasure? — Fire Ologist
So I wouldn’t say you need competitiveness or exaggeration to come up with the idea of god. — Fire Ologist
Yes. But you can agree they did not have demarcated logical principles or scientific method. No Evidence, Facts or concept of Causation in the way we do. I mean, this can been shown with people today to some degree (and even seen on this forum from time to time). — I like sushi
where Evidence and Facts are absent — I like sushi
Not all scientist agree that language is innate in humans — Sir2u
I am still not sure about language being hard wired, but I am not a scientist. — Sir2u
A thought, if language was hard wired would that mean that there are some specific genes that control this function? — Sir2u
And the funny thing is that some people still insist on using human science as a bookmark for knowledge when we don't even have a complete picture of how we work? — Sir2u
Yes. It ALL sounds tongue in cheek :) It is simple yet possibly a key instrument in so many factors including the development of Reason itself perhaps? — I like sushi
And the latter are not part of the predominant Western tradition as mentioned. Hence why I stated there is no Primary equivalent in Eastern traditions (note: I use the term 'traditions' rather than 'religions'). Brahma is an especially concept that really does not fit into the Western conceptions of God.
I should perhaps have outlined the Monotheistic nature of Western/Middle Eastern traditions shifting dramatically away from pantheisms and birthing the concept of God as an amalgam of 'ideas' under the hood of a singular form. — I like sushi
This outlines the modern Eastern and Western differences. Underneath though I guess I am suggesting personification or not we are viewing the slow and steady progress of human intellect toying with higher concepts and occasionally becoming seduced by them to greater or lesser degrees, with greater or lesser focus on this or that cosmological concern (life, death, morality, harmony, justice, nature etc.,.). — I like sushi
I think this kind of encapsulates the idea of a kind of Theological Olympics. — I like sushi
Granting that I"m properly understanding this quote, I don't identify the conceptual drift toward monotheism(s) with the key instrument to the development of reason. Instead, I tend to identify monotheistic notions of God with the average human impetus, or desire, for some authority that overshadows all others. This, in turn, can either lead to authoritarianism, if not despotic yearnings and practices, which I view as bad/unethical/etc. or else toward egalitarian universals of being: with "natural laws" quickly here coming to mind as one version of this (be they found in materialisms or in monotheisms or else in spiritualities such as the Logos of the Stoics ... the latter, quite obviously, standing at a stark crossroad to most monotheistic worldviews wherein a superlative personhood as absolute authority is championed from which the logos ("the word") stems).
In short, I disagree that the development of reason is to be associated with the "ultimate personhood" issue. (Whether one to any extent agrees or disagrees with it, Buddhism is certainly entwined with a vast amount of reasoning, for example, and there is no ultimate personhood in it.) — javra
I can get this, though I find it overlooks the yet quite persisting perspective of "Nature worship" to be found in a significant quantity of Western traditions (with various forms of Neo-paganism as one blatant example). A Buddhist or Hindu, for example, does not engage in the same trains of thought as do Westerners when it comes to this, such that Buddhism and Hinduism can at best only be described as forms of Nature-worship only from the vantage of Westerner's projections. This much like they could all be declared as "pagans" by some monotheists. — javra
To this effect, having read Eliade's "Shamanism" some time ago, you'll find the notion of nature-worship quite well alighted to the concept of shamanism, for example. And shamanism, though nowadays in some cases extended to Eastern traditions - say, for one example, by addressing the original Buddha as a shaman of the East - is well enough rooted in Western practices and perspectives: shamanism historically stemmed from Siberia with enough affirming it to originate from traditions along the Caucasus Mountains, and from the latter we get the term "Caucasian" which, at least in the USA, is often used to strictly denote white people of European decent.) — javra
Again, contemplating the strictly Western notions of (non-monotheistic) Logos, as one example, is to itself be addressing "higher concepts" that concern the cosmological concerns you specify. No superlative personhood required. — javra
Not all scientist agree that language is innate in humans
— Sir2u
This is true — T Clark
Not all scientist agree that language is innate in humans — Sir2u
This is true — T Clark
Really? Who disagrees? How so? Seems a strange thing to dispute, — I like sushi
The reason why there is so much disagreement is fairly simple: no one actually knows what exactly is hard-wired in the brain, and so no one really knows just how much of language is an instinct...
...The human brain is unique in having the necessary hardware for mastering a human language – that much is uncontroversial. But the truism that we are innately equipped with what it takes to learn language doesn’t say very much beyond just that. Certainly, it does not reveal whether the specifics of grammar are already coded in the genes, or whether all that is innate is a very general ground-plan of cognition. And this is what the intense and often bitter controversy is all about...
...Uncontroversial facts are few and far between, and the claims and counter-claims are based mostly on indirect inferences and on subjective feelings of what seems a more ‘plausible’ explanation. — Guy Deutscher - The Unfolding of Language
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