Why, God? Why?!

[Angrboda]

I think Khemikal has the right of it.

When we look at things like wants and desires, the things we value and the things we don't, there exists a material explanation in our origin as biological beings. We evolved to have wants and desires and goals and values. We hunger for food when it is necessary that we eat because if we didn't eat, we would die. Evolution only preserves those solutions which are self-justifying. Those animals that didn't get hungry and eat, they died, leaving the world to those that did. Our wants and desires exist in us and other animals because if they didn't, those animals would be replaced in the gene pool by those that did. So evolution provides a material explanation for both why we have wants, generally, and also why we have the specific wants and values that we do. What explains why God has these specific wants, desires, goals, and values?

It's important to take a closer look at how our biology influences our psychology to underscore just how strange it is that an immaterial spirit would have a similar psychology. For example, as a species, we depend upon one another for the success of the group. We prosper as a species because we depend upon, and support, each others effort to live, succeed and breed. We are a social species. We live in groups, not as solitary individuals. That has implications for our psychology. We will have wants that prod us to engage in social behaviors. We interact with one another because doing so is the ecological niche that we occupy as a species. Why is God a social being? It's not clear.

We are a sexual species, in that we are divided into male and female, and the interaction of the two is necessary for our species survival. One might dismiss it as a mere artifact, but God has always been described as sexed. He is a he, not a she. A father, rather than a mother. And Jesus certainly was no eunuch. As theology and apologetics evolve, Christians have tended to distance themselves from such ideas, but they are the history. In the original time in which these ideas were developed, it was a part of our culture that the male of the species was the head, the leader, the source of authority and power. This just naturally gravitated to their ideas about God.

A key aspect of our biology is that we have a parent child relationship, and humans tend to engage in long term bonding. This makes sense because as an animal, we have few offspring, with larger brains, and we invest in that solution to the question of survival by having a prolonged period in which the child is dependent upon the parents. We didn't have to be this way. It is our biology which determines that we are. We could be like the oak tree, that cares not where it's nuts may plant themselves and mature into adult oak trees. Bacteria reproduce and depart from one another, never to be seen together again. Many micro-organisms are similar. The guppy doesn't care for her multitude of young after they are born. Why is God more like us than like the guppy or the oak tree? God wants a parent-child relationship with us. Why? What is the explanation? Our biology explains why we are like this. What is the explanation for God?

What about goals, plans, and values? Basically these are tools for managing the complexity of our behavioral responses. They are psychological crutches which help us complete long term actions. If we want to become an engineer, we become college students and commit to a goal of completing an education. If we want to live in a house, we develop a plan for sustained effort over time, either to earn enough money or to simply build a house. Why does God have goals, and more specifically, why does he have the goals he does have? Why did God choose these particular goals over some others? Is it just a brute fact of his existence? That he just "happened" to have these goals and plans and values? Why?

It's also worth noting how much the definition of God mirrors the assumptions of the era of the men and women who developed our stories and conceptions of him. I already noted the sexist bias of the original stories and concepts, but there's also the historical concepts of nation states, magic, and divine kingship. God is described as "our Lord" and Jesus is called the king of the Jews. This mirrors the political structures of the time, in which ultimate authority and power descended from a king or ruler. Except in Greece, there was little thought of distributing power equally among members of a society, such as in a democracy. God is not an egalitarian; he inhabits a specific power structure. That was also a time when the existence of empires and nations, and the commonplace acceptance of magic -- causing an effect by merely willing it to happen -- were readily accepted. Thus we have a God who establishes a church and who does impressive feats of magic. We no longer accept magic as commonplace. Perhaps if God were re-imagined today, he would be an all encompassing machine.

And the details in which the God of such people as those who wrote the bible extend down to the question of values. We value life, individual autonomy, family, sex, food, shelter, authority, adulation, loyalty -- many things, all of which can be traced back to our biological nature. God appears to value many of the same things, which makes sense, as we are made in his image, but it doesn't explain why he values those things in the first place? Could God have had different values and still be God? I don't see why not. If that's the case, then God having the values he does, and mandating them to us, seems rather arbitrary. God essentially says my way or the highway, despite the fact that there doesn't seem to be any meaningful reason which answers the question of why God's way is in any sense privileged and right. God's values just seem to have "just happened." He is the way he is for no particular good reason; he "just is."

Now one can imagine that there might be multiple explanations for why these facts apply. One obvious explanation is that God is nothing more than a projection of the minds of mortal men, working in an ignorant age. They attributed our wants and desires and behaviors to our personhood, to our spirit or soul. For them, to imagine the ultimate person, God, was simply to take the human template and blow it up to larger proportions. God becomes everything that a man is, only bigger. He has all the things that a rational, loving man has, and more. He's not only powerful, he's uber powerful! He not only knows stuff, he knows everything! They were drawing from their imaginations the qualities that they thought exemplified the existence of a perfect soul. But in this they erred. They didn't know that many of our psychological traits can be attributed to our material existence as biological beings. How could they know? Evolutionary theory and neuroscience were centuries ahead of them in the future. They imagined a God based upon their assumption of what made a thinking man -- a Logos in the vernacular -- what he was, and simply extrapolated from those errant assumptions.

Now, I'm not saying this is the only possible explanation for why your God has the peculiar psychology that he does have, but the mystery remains. I don't have an explanation that fits better than the one above, but I'm no longer a theist. Perhaps I'm overlooking an obvious explanation for why God is the way he is, and I leave it up to you to provide that explanation. Failing a suitable explanation, God's nature just becomes a brute fact; he isn't the way he is for any particular reason, he could have been different, he "just is" the way he is, as a random and arbitrary fact of existence. So theists, what's your explanation?

I will also share with you that my concern is not solely motivated by LadyForCamus' question, the subject of God's values has been on my mind for some time. The typical explanation for why God has the moral values he does is that there exists a right set of moral values, and a wrong set, and it's just a brute fact that God has only the right set of moral values (what these moral values are right with respect to, or in relation to, is never fully explained). But fine. It's an article of faith that God is good, and no deviation from that mantra will be tolerated. Fine, fair enough. But then we come to the question of God's values. Surely he has some, any being without values must be forced to depend upon reflex actions to motivate them to do anything, but then God isn't a biological being, so the concept of reflexes doesn't apply. So there are two questions here. Why does God have values at all, as they seem to be an artifact of a biological nature, and not something an immaterial spirit would have? And secondly, if God's specific values are simply a brute fact of his existence, they "just are," doesn't that make them essentially arbitrary and therefore meaningless? Unlike moral values, there does not appear to be a right and a wrong set of normal values. Their "rightness" is a consequence of the context, namely what processes and behaviors they facilitate, and in our case, a consequence of evolution that we have them. So, again; why?

This has prompted me to reformulate the Euthyphro dilemma into a form which seems to target a lacuna in Christian theology. Namely, what is the foundation of God's values, their explanation, so to speak. This leads to a new and different dilemma:

"Does God value certain thing because those things are valuable of their own accord, or are certain things valuable because God values them?"

Ultimately, I see this as related to the questions of meaning and purpose. Our values are the building blocks out of which we create meaning and purpose in our life. We value having a loving, nurturing relationship with another human being, so we find having and raising children meaningful. If God's values likewise are the foundation of the meaning and purpose he provides for people's lives, it is essential that we provide some foundation for those values, otherwise they are arbitrary, vacuous, and meaningless. How can a set of values that are themselves just brute, arbitrary facts of his existence ever serve as the building blocks for truly meaningful lives? To my view, unless an explanation for God's values is given, it's impossible to derive any meaning based simply on "what he wants and values." Maybe I've overlooked something, but it appears to me that life under God is as essentially meaningless and without purpose as the supposed lives of non-believers.