Symbols of an Early Age - III

Believing in God (in the way human beings would come to as civlization approached its classical apex) is not a product of the primitive mind. It is a product solely of the conceptual mind, the mind that uniquely developed in the most modern form of humankind. To be fair, atheism - or atavistic conceptions like reincarnation - are also products of the conceptual mind.

The reasoning that - perhaps not too consciously - lead human beings to believe in God are Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God in Summa Theologicae. He didn't so much discover them as become the first person to put them succinctly. Using St. Paul's words from the Book of Acts, "The invisible things of God are understood by the things that are made", Aquinas goes on to tell us that the things that we can see do have the ability to help us formulate an idea about the things we can't.

He writes:

We find that some things can either exist or not exist, for we find them springing up and then disappearing, thus sometimes existing and sometimes not. It is impossible, however, that everything should be such, for what can possibly not exist does not do so at some time. If it is possible for every particular thing not to exist, there must have been a time when nothing at all existed. If this were true, however, then nothing would exist now, for something that does not exist can begin to do so only through something that already exists. If, therefore, there had been a time when nothing existed, then nothing could ever have begun to exist, and thus there would be nothing now, which is clearly false. Therefore all beings cannot be merely possible. There must be one being which is necessary. Any necessary being, however, either has or does not have something else as the cause of its necessity. If the former, then there cannot be an infinite series of such causes, any more than there can be an infinite series of efficient causes, as we have seen. Thus we must to posit the existence of something which is necessary and owes its necessity to no cause outside itself. That is what everyone calls "God."

This is the basic reason people began to believe in God (or in gods, or other divine concepts) although he is the first person to put it as eloquently. People reasoned at some point that, because things exist, utter non-existence can never have been the case. Since the world shows signs of aging - rocks that crumble, mountains that round instead of peak - the world is not eternal. How could it have been made, then, in the scope of that which is eternal? Just like the anthropic principles, God is an attempt to solve this problem. Theology is not strictly reason of course; but nor is it strictly the product of irrationality either.

Symmetry - another characteristic of the symbolic mind - is perhaps the distinguishing facet of the theological sciences.... but I guess I'll get into that next post....