What if, just what if, this whole God thing was just a creation of our minds? Assume for the moment that God doesn’t exist and never existed. Dispel for the moment all the arguments that you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. Start from the premise that God never did exist and this whole notion of God is just made up by humans. How does this idea square with what we know of religion today?
Many evolutionists are on the side of the idea that in our early days on the savanna in Africa, we came to believe in outside agents because we really didn’t understand how the world worked. The rustle in the grass may just be the wind or it may be a lion that might eat you if you thought it was just the wind. Those that thought it was the wind survived and stayed behind, reproduced, overall, more that those who ended up as lunch for the lion herd. So evolution allowed the idea of believing in outside agents, whether real or not, to propagate through our species. Storms came at good times and bad. They were good if they provided the rain that allowed plants that we could eat to grow and flourish. Others times storms were bad when they caused floods and or the winds that destroyed things. We tried to make a connection between the good stuff and the bad stuff that happened by assigning those things to outside agents. We wanted the good rains so we imagined some agent that was on our side that made it happen. We didn’t know it was just the weather and circumstance.
Fast forward thousands of years. We’ve learned more about the world but these beliefs in outside agents got more entrenched in our minds and the associated beliefs got more complex. Soon many outside agents, now we called gods, were involved in all kinds of things. There again these beliefs evolved and over time it was pared down to just one god, with a capital G. Thus evolved our religions of today.
So the belief in God is part of who we are but it doesn’t go away just because we are smarter about how the world works. We, in this technologically advanced age, are still trying to make sense of our God notion. You see apologists and others go to great lengths to convince others that God does in fact exists. But more and more, especially among the young, people are not buying it. They know more about the workings of the world (we hope!) and other pressing issues like wars, jobs, the economy and the environment are, to them, more important than believing in a guy in the sky or that you, or some part of you, will experience torture for eternity if you don’t buy into the God thing. In addition they see the hypocrisy of religions that preach love at the same time condemn those that aren’t in sync with their particular religion. Every time a Pat Robertson spouts stupidity, he digs the hole in which religion will be buried a little deeper.
I feel that the more religion screams and hollers about gay marriage, abortion, the environment, sex, etc., the more they push the younger generation away. Religion no longer has a monopoly on information about these things. All it takes is a quick Google search to find out the real skinny. As much as it seems that the younger generation is disconnected from the real world, all one has to do is search for “atheism” or “atheist” on YouTube and you’ll find young people speaking out and writing their feelings. The God meme is entrenched with the older folks but the youngsters are learning pretty quickly what bullshit religion really is.