RE: What if God Evolved
January 13, 2009 at 11:26 am
(This post was last modified: January 13, 2009 at 11:27 am by Eilonnwy.)
God has evolved, but not in the way you think.
What we define as God has changed over time as our understanding has changed. First there was animism, Gods existed in trees, animals, the sun, basically anything natural was considered god because people didn't understand how things work.
That rudimentary religion eventually evolved into polytheism where various humanoid gods controlled the different aspects of human life and nature. You have gods of war, love, the sun, the ocean, etc... (Catholicism actually incorporates this aspect by having saints as demigods that you pray to for different things, it was originally a way of pre-empting paganism. Catholicism is a polytheistic religion masquerading as a monotheistic)
But eventually polytheism did morph into monotheism where you have the Abrahamic God emerging with myths from polytheistic religions. For example there is a type in some versions of the bible with the creation story in which god says he created man in our image. It was basically a mistranslation. Elohim is a word attributed to god, and guess what? It's plural.
God was believed to be the bastard the Old Testament portrays him as until only recently when Science has come in and demolished various things about the world that was once attributed to god. We know about Evolution, we know why it rains, we know what causes disease, etc... The meaning of god has been changed, dissolved, dissected, etc... Now God's definition has become very meaningless in todays world. God is described as "love", a "Higher power" something that is "Beyond us" as some cosmic first cause that can never be properly definied therefore it can't properly be completely disproven.
So yes, God has evolved because humans define what God is, we always have. Our definition of god has evolved, our imagination of god has evolved, our interpretations, etc... But it's evolved because of us, because our understanding of the world has changed and god has crawled into the dark corners of many people's logic where it's really hard to shine that light.
What we define as God has changed over time as our understanding has changed. First there was animism, Gods existed in trees, animals, the sun, basically anything natural was considered god because people didn't understand how things work.
That rudimentary religion eventually evolved into polytheism where various humanoid gods controlled the different aspects of human life and nature. You have gods of war, love, the sun, the ocean, etc... (Catholicism actually incorporates this aspect by having saints as demigods that you pray to for different things, it was originally a way of pre-empting paganism. Catholicism is a polytheistic religion masquerading as a monotheistic)
But eventually polytheism did morph into monotheism where you have the Abrahamic God emerging with myths from polytheistic religions. For example there is a type in some versions of the bible with the creation story in which god says he created man in our image. It was basically a mistranslation. Elohim is a word attributed to god, and guess what? It's plural.
God was believed to be the bastard the Old Testament portrays him as until only recently when Science has come in and demolished various things about the world that was once attributed to god. We know about Evolution, we know why it rains, we know what causes disease, etc... The meaning of god has been changed, dissolved, dissected, etc... Now God's definition has become very meaningless in todays world. God is described as "love", a "Higher power" something that is "Beyond us" as some cosmic first cause that can never be properly definied therefore it can't properly be completely disproven.
So yes, God has evolved because humans define what God is, we always have. Our definition of god has evolved, our imagination of god has evolved, our interpretations, etc... But it's evolved because of us, because our understanding of the world has changed and god has crawled into the dark corners of many people's logic where it's really hard to shine that light.
"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." Benjamin Franklin
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