HISTORY OF GOD

Did God create us or did we create God? Is He the product of man’s creative imagination?

Karen Armstrong, in the introduction to her well written book “The History of God” asks: Is God the projection of human needs and drives? According to her, God was and is still a product of the creative imagination, like poetry and music. Karen Armstrong was born a Catholic, joined a religious order and became a dedicated nun but was unable to glimpse ‘the God described by the prophets and mystics’. So she left the convent and became a commentator of religious affairs.

In her book, Armstrong traces the historic development of the concept of God. She talks about the Christian God, the God of Islam, the God of Philosophers, the God of reformers, the Jewish concept of Yahweh and discusses the death of God and the rise of Atheism. The human idea of God has a history since its meaning is different to different groups of people. For her, the statement, ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning; it only means something in context. Each generation has to create a concept of God that works for it. She concludes with a provocative question: ‘Does God have a future?’

So how old is the concept of God?

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” - Voltaire

“If triangles had a God, He’d have three sides.” - Old Yiddish Proverb.

Much of the following information is found in the book “Ideas: A history from Fire to Freud” by Peter Watson. This is an extremely interesting, readable and informative book, especially for those looking for origin of ideas and concepts.

Some anthropologists are of the opinion that ‘God-concept’ originated in man’s dilemma of mortality. Aided by the tool of rationality, unlike animals which live by instinct, humans came to the realization that one day they are going to die. What made death all the more terrifying was that it could befall us any time. To overcome the chronic anxiety of death at any instant, humans developed animism as a coping mechanism. In this belief system a soul/spirit exists in every object including inanimate things. The spirit was therefore thought to be universal and it came to signify God. So there was not One God, but everything was God. This was a kind of formless God. With the development of agriculture, fertility (both in humans and crops) was of paramount importance. So there developed the concept of Mother Goddess in the shape of a naked and pregnant woman, since woman was the source of life. She is flanked by her male partner the Bull. The Bull symbolizes the male principle as well as the fact that the forces of nature are not easy to control. God’s transformation from female to male came later.

In nomadic pastoral civilizations, God was found not on Earth, but up above in the Sky. This was a Male God whose voice was thunder and whose anger was expressed through lightning. He was the Sky God who made rain for grass to grow for the cattle. The main sky gods were the sun and the moon. It is interesting to note that although very many different types of religions existed in ancient times, they can all be reduced to possess some distinctive core elements: a belief in the Great Goddess, the Bull, the Sky Gods, the need for sacrifices, in an afterlife, and in a soul that survives death and goes either to a place of suffering or to a place of joy depending on how one lived life here on earth.

The situation changed during the period 750 – 350 BC. According to Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher, most of world’s great faiths came into being during this period. Many leading philosophers and prophets appeared at this time: Confucius, Lao-tse, Buddha, Zarathustra, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Homer, Parmenides, Heraclites, Plato, Archimedes etc. Philosophical possibilities like skepticism, materialism, nihilism, sophism were developed. Religious treaties such as the Upanishads also appeared.