Arguing The Existence Of God

Submitted By idean12
Words: 4747
Pages: 19

Arguing the Existence of God What is God? Where did God come from? While I am sure no one can know, without a trace of doubt, of how what we know as God came to be; I can, at the very least, examine what knowledge we've collectively gathered of the history of the human race and make assumptions based upon my own sense of logic. Now to begin, we shall start at the first sculpture of a “god”, the Aurignacian Lionman of the Hohlenstein Stadel, which is the oldest known zoomorphic sculpture in the world and which is believed to represent a deity. This sculpture dates back to 38,000 BCE meaning that the species of human which were showing signs of a god were neanderthals and the newly established race of the Cro-Magnons. So now we know at least of the people who were the original (to our knowledge) creators of the concept of a god; they were incredibly primitive, the concept of fishing being the major technological advance of their age. It can be assumed that these primitive human beings were not endowed with vast intellectual capabilities nor armed with the concept of the scientific method. If you can try, to place yourself in the position of a Cro-Magnon, part of a small tribe of Cro-Magnons, constantly moving from location to location in the search of food. Imagine, if you will, of how the results of your next hunt would determine whether your small tribe would starve, imagine if your day to day life was a constant struggle of survival, you could assume that you would not have a lot of time to dedicate towards understanding the natural phenomenon you would see every day. You can see that the sun rises every day and that it sets, but what is the sun? It is an intangible object that you can only see from a distance, you have no concept of what drives the sun, why it is what it is. You would begin to question the sun, to wonder why you can never catch up to it yet always see it. Once you've realized that the sun is simply out of your reach you may feel the need to ascribe a history to the sun, if only to give cause to what otherwise would be a great unknown. So you decide that perhaps the sun is owned by another Cro-Magnon, a great Cro-Magnon, one powerful enough to control the sun.
You tell your children that this great Cro-Magnon lives in the sun and moves the sun each day, and so you give reason to the natural phenomenon, so that you may answer the questions of your children when they ask of the world in which they live. Now a god has been born, or at the very least the germ of a god, the first thought that would lead to people the world over worshiping a God. This god, unlike the God our world is currently familiar with, is merely a human representation of a natural phenomenon, in this case the sun. When the thunder and the lightning first crashed overhead on primitive man they too were assigned deities, beings over which man could hold some accountability towards. Someone they could pray to, to change the course of events over which man had no control over. As humans developed, religions developed as well. The singular deities, with their natural phenomenon, began to grow in character. They began to be assigned personalities, and as they gained personalities they also gained power. Gods began to dictate how humans would function, how they would be ordered in a group. The first forms of social control sprung up around religion, for who could dare consider themselves mighty enough to challenge a god? Priesthoods of all sorts began to form, and they gained massive power in their primitive tribes, for they had the power to call upon the gods, now themselves far more powerful than any human could be. Through oral tradition the gods grew and grew in strength, with each exaggeration more firmly embedding the idea of their power into the minds of the youth of each tribe. Over thousands of years the gods eventually lessened in number, or had one or a few of their number elevated to a status above the rest. It is believed