God is our psychological holy grail
Why should we believe in god? Should a thinking mind believe in god? This is a fallacy of the majority. In the worldwide belief in god, two fallacies play a vital role: The Fallacy of Majority and Fallacy of Duration. Our belief in god stems from the majoritarian belief, which is as old as human civilisation. Anthropologically, god came into being as primitive humans’ survival necessity.
The human mind has a proclivity to be drawn to abstractions. God is a clever abstraction for which believers don’t have to offer ‘concrete’ and irrefutable evidence. It’s because of this abstract attribute that god has so many forms. There’s no palpable concreteness in the origin and existence of god. Calling god beyond the cycle of birth and death is a weak explanation for its supposed perennial presence. As rational beings, we should not be content with soothing lullabies but rather strive for a deeper understanding of the world in order to navigate it with intellect and curiosity.
Believing in an amorphous phenomenon called god, without questioning, is not a sign of an evolved mind. Ernest Hemingway aptly said that every thinking person is an atheist. The human brain is very complex. It creates a defence mechanism in the form of an imaginary divine or supernatural power called god. It does this for survival. We invest our three instincts in the fabrication of god. These three instincts are survival, existential, and psychological. According to well supported theories, we are perpetually in search of a Holy Grail, and god is that psychological and eschatological Holy Grail, helping us meet death anxiety, comforting us when our relationships are in doldrums and tuning our minds for pattern recognition.
The human brain eventually starts believing in lies that it concocts.
God is mankind’s evolutionary bias, which started appearing like a reality. Now belief in god has assumed the form of an axiom. For most of us, god is an axiomatic truth. We must understand and accept that evolution is not random, because individual life forms make choices that enable them to survive and thrive. And collectively, when this happens for aeons, plans, patterns, and purposes emerge. No gods are necessary for this to unfold.
There’s no past life, nor is there a future life. You’ve this life, which you must use and utilise sans god. Moreover, we’ve been fighting in the name of god since time immemorial. If god does exist, why doesn’t it intervene and stop bloodshed?
Faithlessness and godlessness are mankind’s evolutionary developments and ascensions. Let us accept them gleefully.
The article is a response to Hasmukh Adhia’s write-up, ‘Why should we not believe in God’ (July 14)
Views expressed are personal
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
