Do you believe in God?
This article is an excerpt from Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (2019) where Richard Dawkins explores the foundations of religious belief, particularly focusing on whether religion is necessary for morality and understanding the world.
Do you believe in God?
Which god?
Thousands of gods have been worshipped throughout the world, throughout history. Polytheists believe in lots of gods all at the same time (theos is Greek for ‘god’ and poly is Greek for ‘many’). Wotan (or Odin) was the chief god of the Vikings. Other Viking gods were Baldr (god of beauty), Thor (the thunder god with his mighty hammer) and his daughter Throd. There were goddesses like Snotra (goddess of wisdom), Frigg (goddess of motherhood) and Ran (goddess of the sea).
The ancient Greeks and Romans were also polytheistic. Their gods, like the Viking ones, were very human-like, with powerful human lusts and emotions. The twelve Greek gods and goddesses are often paired with Roman equivalents who were thought to do the same jobs, such as Zeus (Roman Jupiter), king of the gods, with his thunderbolts; Hera, his wife (Juno); Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea; Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of love; Hermes (Mercury), messenger of the gods, who wore winged sandals; Dionysos (Bacchus), god of wine. Of the major religions that survive today, Hinduism is also polytheistic, with thousands of gods.
Countless Greeks and Romans thought their gods were real – prayed to them, sacrificed animals to them, thanked them for good fortune and blamed them when things went wrong. How do we know those ancient people weren’t right? Why does nobody believe in Zeus any more? We can’t know for sure, but most of us are confident enough to say we are ‘atheists’ with respect to those old gods (a ‘theist’ is somebody who believes in god(s) and an ‘atheist’ a-theist, the ‘a’ meaning ‘not’ –is someone who doesn’t). Romans at one time said the early Christians were atheists because they didn’t believe in Jupiter or Neptune or any of that crowd.
Nowadays we use the word for people who don’t believe in any gods at all. Like you I expect, I don’t believe in Jupiter or Poseidon or Thor or Venus or Cupid or Snotra or Mars or Odin or Apollo. I don’t believe in ancient Egyptian gods like Osiris, Thoth, Nut, Anubis or Horus his brother who, like Jesus and many other gods from around the world, was said to have been born to a virgin. I don’t believe in Hadad or Enlil or Anu or Dagon or Marduk or any of the ancient Babylonian gods. I don’t believe in Anyanwu, Mawu, Ngai or any of the sun gods of Africa. Nor do I believe in Bila, Gnowee, Wala, Wuriupranili or Karraur or any of the sun goddesses of Australian aboriginal tribes.
I don’t believe in any of the many Celtic gods and goddesses, such as Edain the Irish sun goddess or Elatha the moon god. I don’t believe in Mazu the Chinese water goddess or Dakuwaqa the Fijian shark god, or Illuyanka the Hittite dragon of the ocean. I don’t believe in any of the hundreds and hundreds of sky gods, river gods, sea gods, sun gods, star gods, moon gods, weather gods, fire gods, forest gods . . . so many gods to not believe in. And I don’t believe in Yahweh, the god of the Jews. But it’s quite likely you do, if you were brought up a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim. The Jewish god was adopted by the Christians and (under the Arabic name, Allah) the Muslims. Christianity and Islam are offshoots of the ancient Jewish religion.
The first part of the Christian Bible is purely Jewish, and the Muslim holy book, the Quran, is partly derived from Jewish scriptures. Those three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are often grouped together as the ‘Abrahamic’ religions, because all three trace back to the mythical patriarch Abraham, who is also revered as the founder of the Jewish people. We’ll meet Abraham again in a later chapter. All those three religions are called monotheistic because their members claim to believe in only one god.
I say ‘claim to’ for various reasons. Yahweh, today’s dominant god (whom I’ll therefore spell with a capital G, God) started out in a small way as the tribal god of the ancient Israelites who, they believed, looked after them as his ‘chosen people’. (It’s a historical accident – the recognition of Christianity within the Roman Empire after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in ad 312 that led to Yahweh’s being worshipped around the world today.) Neighbouring tribes had their own gods who, they believed, gave them special protection.
And although the Israelites worshipped their own tribal god Yahweh, they didn’t necessarily disbelieve in the gods of rival tribes, such as Baal, the fertility god of the Canaanites; they just thought Yahweh was more powerful – and also extremely jealous (as we shall see later on): woe betide you if he caught you flirting with any of the other gods.The monotheism of modern Christians and Muslims is also rather dubious. For example, they believe in an evil ‘devil’ called Satan (Christianity) or Shaytan (Islam).
He goes under a variety of other names too, such as Beelzebub, Old Nick, the Evil One, the Adversary, Belial, Lucifer. They wouldn’t call him a god, but they regard him as having god-like powers and he is seen, with his forces of evil, as waging a titanic war against the good forces of God. Religions often inherit ideas from older religions. The notion of a cosmic war of good versus evil probably comes from Zoroastrianism, an early religion founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, which influenced the Abrahamic religions. Zoroastrianism was a two-gods religion, the good god (Ahura Mazda) battling it out with the evil god (Angra Mainyu).
There are still a few Zoroastrians about, especially in India. That’s yet another religion I don’t believe in and probably you don’t either. One of the weirder accusations levelled at atheists, especially in America and Islamic countries, is that they worship Satan. Of course, atheists don’t believe in evil gods any more than they believe in good ones. They don’t believe in anything supernatural. Only religious people believe in Satan.
How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church.
The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first.
A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.
Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.
https://a.co/d/1jxypWr
Richard, as a biologist you are no doubt familiar with how many large scale patterns are comprised of small scale patterns. You have the large scale 🐸 frog, who is composed of systems like the immune system and the nervous system, which are autonomous systems in their space of differentiation. But each of those are comprised of functional units that map to organs, and those organs are, amazingly, comprised of cells, which are autopoietic little machines, living in their evolutionary milieu.
As above, so below, my friend. We are part of larger structures, including lineages, economies, biospheres, etc. Just as in the animal body, we may be a part of different structures on different scales, some orthogonal to one another. This interplay of factors, JUST IS THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. It is far from supernatural. It's the most natural thing in the world, considering that our universe possesses this amazing ability to admit of interlocking autonomous systems at increasing scales (a very underappreciated feature of our universe).
The specific stories, rituals and symbolism may vary from culture to culture, and religion itself has been used as a vehicle of cultural stability and sometimes tyrannical control, but the mythologies are an expression of an attempt to know these patterns that interfere in our lives in ways that can't be immediately sensed. To that end, a religious frameworks can be better or worse than one another. But it's not the only dimension along which religion can be judged. Also its "stickiness". A couple thousand years of persistence is impressive.