| When I went to school our religion teacher
was a Greek priest. With his black cloak and long beard he was a fiery
preacher of orthodox Christianity. He was always open to the questions
of the unbelieving youth and prepared to discuss any argument we
16-year-olds came up with. Nevertheless, we never managed to push him
into an atheistic corner. He always managed to finish the argument in
favour of his religion. One of the points he made was that every human
being is born with the necessity and the desire to believe in god.
There was no way of contradicting this statement, so we let it stay at
that. If we consider the six billion human beings that populate the earth today, we have to conclude that our school teacher was right. Obviously everybody believes in some god, Allah of the Islam, the Christian Holy Trinity, the ancestors of the Chinese or the totem of some African tribes. The only question to be answered is, if this is a hereditary trait, we have by birth, or is this experience children acquire from their environment and the society they grow into. We live in a deterministic world governed by the law of cause and effect. All events we observe in our environment are a sequence of effects determined by a certain cause. In fact life, the way we know it on earth, could not exist in a nondeterministic universe. We fill milk in a cup, lift it to our mouth, tip the cup and gravity lets the milk flow down our throat. We can rely on this sequence of events. If next time the milk flowed upward and into the blue of the sky or turned into acid after we pored it into the cup we would certainly not survive. Evolution has taken account of the effects of gravity and invented the peristaltic of the esophagus to help us swallow without its assistance. We can probably eat solid food while making a hand stand but we cannot drink a fluid. From this excursion in the deterministic sequence of events we have to reason that we can search and find a cause for any event we experience. Aristotle comments on this observation as follows (Metaphysics book A, Part 2, 983a 13-16).
Consequently we can follow this sequence backward into infinity. Unfortunately, there is one obstacle which we shall never be able to overcome. Somewhere along the line we shall not be able to identify the cause. Either due to lack of information or because we do not understand the particular physical laws that control a specific cause and effect. However, our experience insists that there must be a cause. At this point human beings select the simplest solution. They define a powerful Higher Being as being the unknown cause. Primitive man probably believed a thunderbolt to be a god. The Greeks attributed the thunderbolt to Zeus and the Germanic people to Thor as the instrument with which they could express their anger to man, threaten and punish wrongdoers. Today we know all the physics involved in a thunderbolt and accept it as a natural phenomenon. These considerations are not a very novel idea. Aristotle went through them two and half thousand years ago with the introduction of his categories, the first causes (Metaphysics book A, Part 3, 983a 26-36).
He introduced a "First Mover" to initiate the sequence of events that created the world we live in today. He even went beyond this and considered the future. He arrived at a "Last Effect" to end the world. Aristotle did not identify his "First Mover" as a deity, otherwise he might well have introduced monotheism in the Greek world. His reasoning is given in his Metaphysics book α, Part 2, 994a 1-9 & 994b 6-10.
Actually the analysis of Aristotle contains all the ingredients of an Almighty Creator as well as the End of Time. We have now identified a mechanism which can be the origin of the belief in something higher which men call God. We still need to consider some aspects of this mechanism. Obviously no single human being can be familiar with all knowledge available to mankind. Therefore we are not always able to determine the cause of every effect we may be experiencing. This is actually continuously the case because the natural world we live in is extremely complex. Most people are not familiar with the laws and interactions involved in chemistry, electronics or nuclear physics. Nevertheless, at least in the industrialised countries, nobody attributes the generation of electricity in a nuclear power plant directly to some god. We accept the fact that the plant has been designed and build by human beings. We solve the problem of not understanding what and how power is generated by accepting the fact of atoms and the authority of the nuclear physicist as the mediator between nature and ourselves. He knows how it works and he can control it. This principle is also applied to the ultimate, the initial cause, Aristotle's "First Mover". The individual does not reinvent God for himself. In the social environment children grow, they accept the fact of His existence and that priesthood is the mediator between Him and ourselves. Priests are the sole persons authorised to interpret the Word in revelation religions. Priesthood is the institution that facilitates the communication with the Higher Being and ensures that His laws are obeyed (how human !). To achieve this the priesthood needs to create a social structure with traditions, rites, a code of behaviour and an hierarchy. These constitute a religion. |
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| Christian
Tapp Vernunft und Glaube Die größten Rätsel der Philosophie - Spektrum der Wissenschaft Highlights 1/15, S. 74/81 Wie beweisen, daß Gott existiert ? Aristoteles
argumentierte etwa so: Es gibt Veränderungen in der Welt, und jede
hat eine Ursache. Eine Kette von Ursachen kann jedoch nicht ins
unednliche reichen, also hat sie ein erstes Element, den "unbewegten
Beweger".
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