James McGrath points out that in ancient times people attributed forces of nature to the actions of gods. Lightening, floods, droughts, and earthquakes seem capricious in how indiscriminately they deal destruction and death, and so the gods were seen as capricious, violent, and angry too. Then McGrath brings us into the modern world were we know the lawful, orderly physics behind these forces of nature and can view them as destructive but not a sign of some god being willfully malicious.
For some, the move away from anthropomorphizing the forces of nature is a move away from any sort of notion of the divine. But for others, it is a move towards a deeper appreciation of true transcendence, as we understand that the ultimate Reality that encompasses all we have come to see, detect, and comprehend is even greater and more different than us than most of our ancient predecessors envisaged.
via Beware of God.
Let’s imagine that an ancient village is struck by a flood, destroying its crops, drowning its livestock, and resulting in the threat of starvation for its people. Those people may attribute the flood to the action of a capricious god venting his anger, but they don’t then respond “Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it.” Instead they would take this suspicion that the gods are angry about something and try to appease those gods. They were already attempting to control their environment by growing food and domesticating animals, so this suspicion that God was smashing their stuff would cause them to try controlling God’s reactions too. That would lead to religious speculations about why God does what God does, and also lead to religious practices to keep God favorably disposed toward their village.
If this is an accurate summary — that ancient religions began in part as an attempt to control the outcomes of our interactions with God — then what’s left as a basis for relating to God once we start to explain natural disasters in terms of meteorology, hydrology, and geology and no longer in terms of God’s mood?
If storms aren’t the result of God’s anger but are instead an unavoidable side effect of having a dense, breathable atmosphere, then what reason do we have to suspect that God exists at all? The old thinking went: lightening equals anger; anger equals person; therefor God. What is the new conclusion when lightening equals electrons and electrons are mindless and impersonal? Does this leave any room for a modern child to experience lightening and decide that someone in the sky must be angry? Wouldn’t that be similar to skinning your knee on the sidewalk and reasoning that someone in the concrete must be angry?
And if, as modern people, we are still convinced that God exists because we have the less dramatic experience of a “still, quiet voice” then what guides us in determining how to relate to that voice?
I’m not arguing that God doesn’t exist or that religion is necessarily a poorly reasoned attempt to comforting our fear of the unknown. I’m asking. I’m struggling. I’m honestly struggling.