Getting Comfortable With An Artificial God

I am increasingly convinced of the existence of an Artificial God.  This God is created by our brains as we grow up, I suspect, because we really need someone to talk to while we're exercising our language centers, and because he's the quickest and most sensible explanation for why we're here and what we're doing.  And I'm coming to believe that, even though he may be artificial, he is no less real.

When man disappears, of course, God disappears too.  This doesn't mean there's not other gods manifesting in other corners of the universe as collections of molecules accrue in increasingly complicated ways and start clawing their way towards sentience.  It does seem that intelligent life needs God, whether we actively believe in him or not.

And I'm increasingly okay with that, too.  After a lifetime of resisting religious patterns of thought, it's almost a relief to shrug and say, "I yam what I yam," and sit down to a big can of spinach.

Richard Dawkins will be ashamed of me, of course.  The man has been a hero of mine since I was a teenager and I really hate to let him down.  But if evolution gave us these patterns of thinking, how do we end up saddled with the moral obligation to fight them?

Well, I suppose there are the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and those endless centuries of superstition-driven witch burnings to atone for.  Such crimes seem a pretty high price to pay for the psychological convenience of using faith in a deity to hold our personal narratives together. 

So where to put the compromise?  With the Unitarian Universalists, getting together and practicing a different faith's rituals every week in an exhausting effort to say, "Meh, we're probably all right in our own way?"  Or maybe through the founding of a new church, call it the Church of the Human Farce?  Perhaps we can jump on the raft with the Pastafarians, giving sarcastic thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  At least that gives us a designation to write on our census forms.

No, I think our Artificial God deserves more respect than that.  He's still God.  He's so deep-rooted in our psyche that it took all of human history up to Douglas Adams until we could work out that he was artificial.  He drives us to band together in tribes and form communities and at least pay lip service to getting together once a week so that we have a reason to listen to some stories and then talk to neighbors who we might otherwise never see.  (No, I haven't started going to church.  But the thought of dressing up and going to an afternoon party every week to see if your neighbors are all right really doesn't seem like that bad an idea once you start to think about it.)

So now, is belief in an Artificial God enough to let me into the Freemasons without perjuring myself?

Comments

[Chili]

You and I are having parallel spiritual journeys. If you believe in a Supreme Being then you've got all the other bases covered.