Debate: God Exists

[Mister Agenda]

A better question to refine with is, since god is a religiously constructed concept:

Why do religions exist?

How about that?

Hm. I suppose religion started with animism, the belief that animals, plants, objects, and natural phenomena have spirits that do things for reasons. I'd include belief in ghosts and ancestor spirits.

Where the idea came from isn't hard to imagine: dreams and hallucinations. We didn't know what dreams were, we only knew that in our dreams (and sometimes in our fevers or mental illness or psychoactive substances) we might wind up talking to a mountain or our departed grandparents.

Since everything or most everything had a spirit, it only made sense that we could influence them if we could figure out what they wanted. As long as the price wasn't too high, a band of hunter gatherers could take a chance on the person who said they figured out how to get the favor of the spirits, even if all that was really figured out was that people count the hits and forget about the misses, especially if ad hoc explanations for failure worked fine (the people up the river gave more to the spirits than we did!). Such a person didn't have to be dishonest (though knowing what you're doing would probably make you more effective), just fantasy-prone. Being the local shaman could be a matter of survival if you want the band to keep you around even when you're blind or having seizures, or lame, or (especially) hearing voices.

So the shaman sold hope that the hunt would be successful, that the famine would end, that there were reasons that bad and good things happened. The more hand-to-mouth your existence is, the more important it is to have reasons to hope. Bands that thought they had agency over the outcome of events that they couldn't possibly influence through natural means could well have been more successful than bands that didn't.

So the shaman became a fixture of communities (and the rabbi, priest, imam, and preacher). Religion became a way to unify the community, lend authority to laws (the sun god commands it!), and motivate the population (the members of the next village over with the weak defenses are all blasphemers, attack!).

When we developed into nation-states, wars became bloodier and economy-wrecking. It's not like grabbing their cattle and women would make up for the costs, so war became something that you just couldn't afford having in the hands of the priesthood, who might really take it into their heads that war is necessary to crush heretics. In most places, and in the whole developed world, the reigns of power have been pulled from the ranks of the priesthood, as a matter of necessity.

Now, in the majority of the world's countries, religions have to compete with each other and other ideas without (much) special protection from government, in a world where we increasingly understand natural phenomena, the nature of dreams and hallucinations, and have practical ways to influence the natural world that would have seemed god-like to our distant ancestors. Where technology is most developed and government is most neutral on religious matters, religion is in decline. In developed countries we aren't desperate for hope, because the vast majority of us have access to enough food and don't worry about not having enough children live to support us in our old age (of 40 or so). The conditions under which religion grew and flourished have changed. Now the only sense it can be said to be growing is in less-developed countries with high rates of population growth. Almost all the global population growth in the next 40 years will be happening in Africa and South America; and the countries there tend to be highly religious, so the percentage of Christians and Muslims will likely go up on those continents even as they go down in Europe and Australia and North America and Asia.

The best friend of religion is poverty.