Aude Calloch

“What is God?” is a very good question. “Why is God?” is an even better one. Why does God exist? How come? Where does God come from? How come that, no matter where we go, God exists there too? What does this say about us? That’s a lot of questions indeed. And although they slightly differ from the common questions we tend to hear about God, a lot of people have asked themselves the above. Most people in fact tend to wonder why God created man, or how God created man. But what if all along, it was man who created God?

There is a lot that we as human beings ignore about ourselves. “Why did I just do that?” “Why am I the way I am?” “What’s wrong with me?” are common questions that frequently go through the mind of a lot of us. Likewise, understanding our own beliefs can be an enigma, since understanding who we are is far from being an easy task. Nevertheless, when analyzing the human mind and its mechanisms, we can identify certain patterns, like our inborn need for attachment, for belonging and protection for instance. In that context, is it possible that God came from our need for the divine?

It is said that throughout history, there has been between eight and twelve thousands deities or gods worshipped worldwide. That means thousands of ways to name God, thousands of ways to pray, thousands of ways to analyze the world through a divine lens, thousands of ways to sin, thousands of ways to “do God’s work”, thousands of ways to think… With this in mind, one could ask themselves whether this myriad of ways to experience the divine could perhaps be the expression of a need for God from us human beings. The same way most people (overtly or covertly) need and appreciate their governance by a political body, a lot of people need a divine presence in their life to cope. As humans, we enter the world with various needs: the need to be nurtured, assisted, helped, protected, taught, shown and told what to do. As adults, a lot of us remain comfortable with the idea that if something goes sour, something or someone has our back. The same way a child (unconsciously or consciously) knows that their parents can provide a support net in case they fall, we as adult keep hoping that if things go south, someone or something will prevent us from free-fall. This attitude which a lot of us share is called wishful thinking and is typical of our species.

By hoping that a divine presence cares for us, we let God serve as surrogate for the parents we no longer have. In their Los Angeles Times article “Science and religion: God didn’t make man; man made gods”, J. Anderson Thomson, psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and Clare Aukofer, author and medical writer, explain that we as humans are born with a strong necessity for attachment, which psychiatrist John Bowlby identified back in the 1940’s, and that psychologist Mary Ainsworth later expanded. Our instinct for individual survival was enhanced by the people who protected us, beginning with our mother. We can further read that “attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it”. This inborn need can in fact be expanded to the need for an authority figure of any type, which could take the form of a religious leader and, more saliently, that of a god. Thomson and Aukofer further explain that God thus becomes a “super parent” who can protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems have disappeared, through death or through distance.

Now if God is man-made, how can we explain “miracles”? How can we explain the sensation of a divine presence? Is that man-made too? Thomson and Aukofer in fact explore this side of religion and write that “beyond psychological adaptations and mechanisms, scientists have discovered neurological explanations for what many interpret as evidence of divine existence”. For instance, Michael Persinger, American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University, developed what he calls a “god helmet” which blocks sight and sound but stimulates the brain’s temporal lobe. The latter notes that many of his helmeted research subjects reported feeling the presence of “another.” This sensation is then interpreted as either a supernatural or religious figure, depending on the subject’s personal and cultural history. Thomson and Aukofer thus invite us to rethink biblical myths: “It is conceivable that St. Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus was, in reality, a seizure caused by temporal lobe epilepsy.” Such findings, which a lot might find outrageous, nay sinful even, shed light on a reality which very few of us considered. Hypothesizing that God is man-made is not brazen or impudent. It is simply an attempt to analyze and understand a reality which we constructed for ourselves.

If there’s no real God, and that he or she will not come and save us, then does that mean we have no morals left? Quite far from that in fact. Although religion can help people stick to more ethical life choices, it is important to remember that morality does not find its roots in religion, and that religion does not guarantee peace – as a matter of fact, quite the opposite. Paul Bloom, Canadian American psychologist and professor at Yale explains that it is in fact often beneficial for humans to work together, meaning that it would have been adaptive to “evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals“. Bloom and his team found through research that young children in their first years of life can express and show awareness of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, and even what is fair and what isn’t. Thomson and Aukofer write: “When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.” Likewise, Michael Tomasello, American developmental and comparative psychologist and co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also conducted research on the notion of morality amongst very young children. The latter, together with his team, have produced great research material proving children’s capacities for altruism. Tomasello indeed argues that humans are born altruists, who then have to learn strategic self-interest.

In parallel, if we consider the good sides of religion, we need to consider the bad ones too. If a Top-10 of the causes behind all wars was to be made, religion would rank high on the list. Indeed, if there’s one thing we as living creatures have been up to for at least two millennia, it is killing each other in the name of “God”. The emergence of Christianity and the appropriation Europe made of it remains one of the main reasons behind the deaths of entire populations, oftentimes paralleled with factors like race and gender. As a matter of fact, religion oftentimes acts as an enabler for our bad behaviors. If we take the example of the Witch Hunt, which took place in Europe and later in America from the mid-fifteenth century up until the nineteenth century, and of which a great majority of the victims were women, the real cause of those females’ deaths was not veritably the practice of sorcery but rather extreme misogyny rooted in Judeo-Christian beliefs. In this case, the Church’s mission was not merely to cleanse Europe of pagan practices but rather to use religion in order to condone sexist and genocidal acts. This phenomenon can be linked to rationalization, a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical way, in the absence of a valid explanation, and are made consciously tolerable, sometimes even admirable and superior.

For example, Hitler’s visceral hatred for Jews has often been a mystery to which many have tried to find the answer. The most frequently brought hypothesis was that he was ashamed of his partly Jewish ancestry. Another explanation links his hatred for Jews to trauma from a poison gas attack which occurred during World War I. Another one suggest that Hitler had contracted an STD from a Jewish prostitute. There however remains no factual evidence to support these theories. Regardless of the real reason behind his hatred for Jews, Hitler hid his truth with a completely fabricated ideology, attempting to prove the superiority of one race above another with pseudoscience and farfetched explanations. He rationalized a hatred which he unconsciously knew was irrational and wrong, because facing the truth was too scary. The end result was even scarier, and only added more deaths to the ongoing toll of God’s collateral damages. Such events thus serve as proof that the presence of religion on our planet is not always for the better. Oftentimes, religion causes more ill than good. The number-one reason for that, is that regardless of our respective religious orientation, we as human beings have the incorrigible tendency of wanting to be right. When placed in an argument, we want to win, and prove the opponent that they’re wrong. This oftentimes goes to the point of using violence and going against our own religious beliefs, although the world’s three major monotheistic religions also encourage that same behavior in some of their holy scriptures (Bible – 1 Samuel 15:3, Quran – 9:73, Torah (and Bible) – Book of Numbers 21:1-3).

So what does that mean? Should we get rid of religion as a concept? Is there no God? Well, at the present moment, we don’t have all the answers to our questions. It is possible that a God exists. It is also possible that there is no such thing. It is possible that it’s just us and the universe. Now as to getting rid of religion, I believe it would be like getting rid of social media. Should we get rid of social media? The question is frankly the same. Religion and social media, although being completely different and serving completely different purposes, are both man-made. Worshipping the divine is one thing. Constructing a set of rules and dogmas to regulate worshipping practices is another. Indeed, one needs to understand the dissociation of God and religion. God is, technically, a concept. God is an idea. God is impalpable, invisible. God is a question mark. Religion however is very precise. It has rules, it has scriptures which men wrote for men to read and put into practice. Religion is to God what practice is to theory. We apply in our lives the behaviors we suppose God would want us to apply. Since God is supposedly moral, we humans try and be moral too, only the concept of morality changes from one person to another. Morality can change when mixed with bias. It can become twisted, unfair, wrong even. So instead of worrying about what God would want us to do, why don’t we simply wonder about what’s the right thing to do?