"How God got started", how god belief + basic reason + writing -> modern humans?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Old men telling lies around a camel-dung campfire. This is not complicated.

[Simon Moon]

On a personal note, I really do not understand this obsession with showing that faith and reason are not compatible. Nevertheless, Whateverist, if there is some particular point within the article you find interesting, I would be happy to drill down on it.

Because faith can be used as a justification to believe any claim, including all the religions that you don't believe. 1.5 billion Muslims and 1 billion Hindus believe their religions on faith, yet, according to you, they are wrong.

It is obvious that faith is not a reliable path to truth, if it can lead to mutually exclusive beliefs.

Reason, however, can be used as a pathway to truth. Reason incorporates valid and sound logic, critical thinking, and demonstrable evidence.

[Whateverist]

On a personal note, I really do not understand this obsession with showing that faith and reason are not compatible. Nevertheless, Whateverist, if there is some particular point within the article you find interesting, I would be happy to drill down on it.

I didn't read this closely enough.  

I don't think the article argues that they are not compatible.  The author argues that everyone utilizes reason just as dolphins utilize echo location.  But reason can be put in the service of any purpose and always operates on the premises we select.  Reason can be put in the service of faith as easily as anything else, as you, Aquinas and others have shown. 

The motivation for using reason to that end has always been there, but there had been no need so long as everyone was polytheistic and harbored no expectation that everyone else would perceive the same gods they did or perform the same rituals in the same way.  But in the face of a growing acceptance of secular reason, I suppose those philosophers with a high regard for the gods would have been motivated to deduce (notice I don't say fabricate) a place for gods outside the natural world.  For them, the gods are givens/premises and so we get the supernatural and the rest.  What this author and I are after is a natural account of how the emergence of secular reasoning may have pushed polytheism to monotheism.

[Succubus]

Well..... I will be dipped in shit.  Here it is.

http://www.dnzt.org/images/BOOKS-PHOTOS/...yBoyce.pdf

Well shit in my mouth and call me bad breath! So it is. Saved to to Kindle.

[Minimalist]

[Whateverist]

Truer words were never writ.  What is not amongst the premises we start with and cannot be reasoned to from those premises is what we call fiction.  Those of us who do not start with an unseen, unmoved mover will never find one in our reality.  No gods in secular reality. But everyone's reality is participatory.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Those of us who do not start with an unseen, unmoved mover will never find one in our reality.  

I've never seen a quark either but I've been told that we can deduce their existence from what can be seen.

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What this author and I are after is a natural account of how the emergence of secular reasoning may have pushed polytheism to monotheism.

I do not have a problem with the notion that new intellectual tools could have changed how people relate with the world, including the Divine. To me that is not a challenge to theism. Philosophical reasoning just opens up another way of approaching the Divine.

Otherwise, I think the article is a train-wreck, jumping from thought to thought without any clear line of reasoning.

[Brian37]

200,000 years ago in the early days of our species, WE DIDN'T KNOW SHIT.

The world was frightening to us. But Dawkins in "The God Delusion" explains how life evolved to gap fill.

In a very literal and real context, evolution drove life to seek patterns, but because humans didn't evolve with our modern knowledge we made very bad guesses.

The analogy he used was "The moth mistaking the light bulb for the natural moonlight it guide's itself by".

The other analogy would be akin to a antelope on the African plain seeing tall grass sway, but not know if it is just mere wind or a lion stalking it. Fight or flight takes over in life and our brains evolved to gap fill, even if our success in surviving is based on a very false perception.

It is no different than convincing a kid a at a nighttime Halloween party in a dark kitchen that the covered bowl of olives they stick their hands in are eyeballs. No different than when a cat or dog looks in the mirror and confuses it's reflection for a separate life. It is ultimately a comic book reflection of ourselves. Our own flaws, desires and insecurities.

It is anthropomorphism. Attributing human qualities to non existent things.

[The Grand Nudger]

If god were anything like a quark, Neo, we'd have long ago given up apologism.

[Simon Moon]

I've never seen a quark either but I've been told that we can deduce their existence from what can be seen.

Show us the evidence for a god that is anywhere near what is available for quarks.

The quark model explained existing evidence and makes testable predictions.

The first omega event that proved the existence of quarks: