GOD

Did God create us, or did we create God? Is He the 

product of man’s creative imagination?

“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.

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 man’s 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 historical 

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 must 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?

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 the origin of ideas and concepts.

Some anthropologists are of the opinion that ‘God-

the 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 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 a 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 the 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, Heraclitus, Plato, Archimedes etc. Philosophical views like skepticism, materialism, nihilism, sophism were developed. Religious treaties such as the Upanishads also appeared.

Let us briefly examine the God/gods of the different 

religions at this time. 

Judaism ‘evolved’ the idea of a monotheistic God, Yahweh. This happened after long periods of worshipping three types of gods: worship of the family gods (teraphim), worship of the sacred stones and worship of the great gods, some native, others foreign (Baal, Molech etc). Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The God Delusion’ describes Yahweh's character as follows: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.”

The above description, I am certain, is the result of a 

careful reading of the Old Testament. This bears witness to Karen Armstrong’s assertion that God is a creation of man’s fertile imagination, an imagination fed by the cultural, social and intellectual milieu of the time.

Zoroastrianism introduced gods as abstract concepts.  Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil. He is said to have received a direct revelation from the one true god Ahura Mazda. Soul, life after death, resurrection, judgment, paradise, hell, and the devil were all Zoroastrian ideas first, later borrowed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Buddhism may be thought more as a way of life than as a religion in its narrow sense. It developed as a reaction to the greed and materialism of the newly emerging merchant class at the time of Siddhartha Gautama who left the comforts of a life of luxury as well as his family and wandered the world as a mendicant in search of enlightenment.  One night he put himself in a trance and when he awoke, he became the Buddha, the enlightened one. He believed in the gods of the time but for him, the ultimate reality was beyond the gods. All life, for him, was suffering; only dharma, the truth about right living brought one to nirvana (the ultimate reality, freedom from pain). The state of nirvana has nothing to do with the gods; in fact, it is beyond them. By living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and correctly and by refraining from drugs and intoxicants that cloud the mind, one can attain nirvana. The same universal secular message is given by Jesus as a response to the question by the Pharisees about the greatest commandment: love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mathew 22:34-40). Perhaps the rumor that Jesus traveled to India could be true, as he seemed to have imbibed some Buddhist principles.

Hinduism has many parallels to Greek religious practices. Both are steeped in myths with numerous gods and goddesses who have many human characteristics. However, traditional Hinduism is a way of living than a way of thinking.

 Islam has borrowed heavily from both Judaism and Christianity. Mohammed, considered God’s prophet by the faithful, was resting in a cave outside Mecca, called Hira, in 620 C.E. when he heard voices which he wrote down and collected into the book Qur’an. The message was clear: God is one and there is no other. There is a Judgment day with eternal paradise for the good and everlasting hell for those who go against His will.

We will soon talk about the God of Christianity.