Whereas there is evidence of Creation there is NO evidence of a creator . . . but! There IS evidence of OUR creation of a Creator.
Religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms.
- Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behavior. He is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Oxford and the Co-director of the British Academy Centenary Research Project.
The religious mind is one consequence of a brain that is large enough to formulate religious and philosophical ideas. During human evolution, the hominid brain tripled in size, peaking 500,000 years ago. Much of the brain's expansion took place in the neocortex. This part of the brain is involved in processing higher order cognitive functions that are necessary for human religiosity.
The relative neocortex size of any species correlates with the level of social complexity of the particular species. The neocortex size correlates with a number of social variables that include social group size and complexity of mating behaviors. In chimpanzees the neocortex occupies 50% of the brain, whereas in modern humans it occupies 80% of the brain.
The evolution of the neocortex took place at the speciation of archaic homo sapiens about 500 thousand years ago. His study indicates that only after the speciation event is the neocortex sufficiently large enough to process complex social phenomena such as language and religion.
Great minds throughout history agreed there is no Creator:
- Charles Darwin affirmed, recognized the purely naturalistic explanation that over time, things had designed themselves there is no and was no God, or creator who did the designing.
- Karl Marx stated that God and religion was an expression of distress caused by the poor social conditions in which people lived.The real source of alienation for Marx is found in the class structures within society, however, distressed people use God and religion as a means for comfort.For Marx it is society itself that alienates people and gives rise to the need for religion. God and religion, he added, is only a problem insofar as it distracts people from the root of their alienation.
- Sigmund Freud refuted that religion, and belief in God is a projection, an objection or an externalization of subconscious desires. Once this desire is objectified into God it is assumed to have an autonomous existence independent of its human creators. Religion or belief in God, is therefore a way in which human beings declassify their desires. God-believers, said Freud, have desires for example to be happy and religion offers them happiness if not in this world, then in the next. Religion, therefore, is born of wish fulfillment. It is desire, fulfilled.
He goes to conclude that religion is the defense mechanism of the religious person to the experience of living in a hostile world. Furthermore, religion is a form of wish fulfillment in that God is the ideal projection of what a perfect father should be; namely, loving, powerful, secure and comforting. That is to say that the personal God is psychologically nothing other than a magnified father.
Interestingly and to what I subscribe to is Carl Jung's take on what this Creator thing is. He argues that God is not a fully conscious being, but rather the unconscious force behind nature. Jung believes Revelation's visions stem from the collective unconscious of humans, a racial memory of primordial events that all humans sometimes glimpse.[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]
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