Whether god
¹

exists as a cosmic entity (as most religions would have you believe), or as a concept that humans have created (either real or fictional), is open to debate. This article details the arguments that have been made to suggest that god is a creation of mankind².

This is not an article written to show the origins of religion (i.e. religion as a tool for social control) but to show different ways it is argued that we have actually caused god to exist, either as a definite being or in a non-realistic sense³.

God as a linguistic technique

As a description of perfect ethics

This belief holds that god is not external to man as most theists believe. The non-realist argument is that god is a word to describe the perfect ethical and moral ideal, and therefore commitment to a religion really means commitment to a set of ethics. The Bible is no more than a book of myths and legends, some with basis in historical fact, containing ethical messages. This leads to a belief that neither Heaven nor Hell exist, except as our own state of mind, heaven being the positive emotion feelt after doing good.

What distinguishes these ‘religious’ ethics from others is the nature of how they determine and define what a moral action is. Religious ethics are based on fundamental, unbreakable laws; some actions are always moral, whereas some are never moral. It is these ‘rules’ which are summed up in the concept of god. This differs from non-religious ethics, many of which (but not necessarily all) concentrate on the consequences of an action, as opposed to the action itself (an important exception being the ethics of Immanuel Kant).

As a description of the best of all things⁴

This theory is largely based on St Anselm’s (1033-1109) description of god as

"that being than which nothing greater can be conceived".

"God (that is, a Being supremely perfect) to whom existence is lacking (that is to say, to whom a certain perfection is lacking)"

The argument is that god is our definition of the most perfect thing, yet something without existence is not perfect, therefore by man’s own definition of god, he/she/it must exist, i.e. we have defined god into existence.

God as a false interpretation of reality

This definition of god is based on the belief that we can never be sure of the nature of the world outside of our own minds. We acquire all of the knowledge of the outside world through our five (or twenty-one)⁵ senses; however there are many examples of where our senses deceive us; for example:

• We see the lightning a couple of seconds before we hear the thunder, although both the light and sound are emitted only fractionally apart.
• The light from different stars (at different distances) reaches us at the same time, and so we are misinformed by the night sky of the layout of the stars (either current or at any specific time in the past)
• The same colour appears to be different shades under different colours and intensities of light.

All of these have scientific explanationsand are not neccesserily due to faulty senses. Yet because of the way we interpret this information, and this sensory information is all that we have, this leads us to form inaccurate mental models of the external world.

And these are only examples of deceptions we know about. If our senses are incorrect in these areas, how do we know they are not incorrect in other situations? I cannot be sure that I am sit ting at a desk in front of a computer as this could be another instance of my senses deceiving me.

Interpreting and Representing the Outside World

It is not possible to get an accurate understanding of reality through our senses. There are many theories of how we think. A common one, supported in different forms by John Locke (1632-1704), who argued that an objects Secondary Qualities are dependant on qualia⁶ and so different for everybody,



Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)whose views on the nature of reality can be found at this article on 'The Metaphysics of Kant',

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a famous Phenomenalist, who believed that 'objects' arn't material but compositions of stimuli and possible stimuli,

and Bertrand Russel who argued our memory is at least as fallible as our senses, so we can be even less certain of how the external world used to be (if it existed in the past at all) than we can be of how it is in the present,

is that the outside world (everything outside our own minds) provides stimuli for the senses, For example, sound-waves stimulate our hearing, chemical compositions our taste, light our sight etc., but instead of actually hearing/tasting/seeing these stimuli trigger representative models in our brain. Therefore we never hear/taste/see the actual world, we just experience our own representations of it.

The accuracy of this model can never be checked, as all we can experience is other models and never reality itself. In this way it can be seen that god ,as we experience the concept, is really only our own model, and so as far as we can ever experience god it is only within our own minds, and only with our personal (possibly inaccurate) model of him.

To put it another way; God (if he/she/it exists externally at all) is a part of ‘reality’ (everything that exists in any form). However we can never experience reality. Reality stimulates our minds which then creates a mental version of reality (not necessarily accurate).

Therefore, any gods existing in reality is probably different to our mental model of them, and so is not necessarily omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcendent, imminent in the world, benevolent etc., in other words, what we know as god.

A Step Further

To take this a step further, some believe it isn’t the external world that provides the stimuli for their senses, as the external world doesn’t exist to them – all that exists is their mind. Descartes gave the example that all that exists is our mind and that we cannot even trust our senses that our bodies exist, it may all be a part of our imagination (in his second Meditation on First Philosophy, On the Nature of the Human Mind). Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, is all we can know for certain, the only thing we are sure of is our own thoughts. We can be sure of our own thought, our own idea of god, which again makes god our own creation and only actually exists as a part of our mind. If there is no reality, just stimuli, god doesn’t exist and is also just stimuli. Such a belief may be reduced still further to a belief in Solipsism.

God may, or may not, exist in reality. However, god as we understand him (omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcendent, imminent, benevolent, all-good etc.), is the creation of our minds.

Conclusion

These arguments all follow the same basic idea. We think of god. If we know god as a thought in the mind, and Descartes was right in saying “I think therefore I am”, then we have created god. The debate of who created whom is like the debate of if the chicken came before the egg, we can never reach a final answer, many religions will always argue that god came first, those who aren't religious that man did. However, the arguments above are different in that many have been created or developed by theists, St Anselm, Descartes, Bishop Berkley all believed in god.