Anthropomorphization of God

I’m not really very opposed to a belief in something or somethings that created the Universe as much as I am opposed to the typical Christian view of God. While intuitive, the argument that the world is too complex or unlikely to have come about without a design is an argument that relies on the fact that we just don’t know enough yet.

2,000 years ago, the idea that there could be natural, undirected processes that allowed for the Universe to come to its current state was unfathomable, and understandably so. Throughout history humans have attributed entirely natural phenomena, such as the location of stars in the sky or the explosion of volcanoes, to supernatural things like ghosts and various gods, only to have those things explained later on when humans had the ability to explain them. This is still happening today with the argument that God must have made humans and the Universe, but, as I just stated, this argument relies on the fact that we just don’t know enough yet. However, science has come a long way in explaining how the Universe and everything in it has come to its present state without appealing to the supernatural to “explain” those phenomena or observations that we do not, as of yet, fully understand. But back on topic.

Something that really frustrates me is how Christians anthropomorphize their god, i.e., they give their god human qualities. No, the creator of the Universe does not want to have a “personal relationship” with a vastly inferior intellect for absolutely no reason nor does it honestly care what the sex is of two people who choose to act upon their desire to reproduce. That is human stupidity at its finest. You have to ask yourself, “Why do people like to have relationships with each other?” Simply, it’s because humans are social for the most part. There is no objective reason for humans to be social other than the fact that it allows for cooperation, which would have, from an evolutionary perspective, helped our ancestors to cooperate and thereby increase their chances of surviving and reproducing. Aside from that, there are few, if any, good reasons as to why humans would be social. Humans from thousands of years ago, without any sort of explanation as to why humans want to have relationships with each other, would have presumed there is some sort of mysterious objective reason for this desire and thus attributed it to everything from objects like rocks to the creator of the Universe to even the Universe itself (anthropomorphization).

There is a strong tendency in humans to try to attribute their emotions, feelings, and intentions to things that just simply aren’t human. I should know: I have that tendency just as much as anyone, if not more so. Perhaps this is because it makes it easier for humans to understand why things happen the way they do or maybe it’s because humans have a tendency towards believing there is some sort of objective justification for feeling the way they do. Either way, it’s absurd to think that an intellect vastly superior to our own, especially one with the intellect necessary to create the Universe, would have those sorts of emotions and tendencies, much more so than it is to believe your homework hates you or a rock that is by itself in a field is lonely.

Update, 2008-02-20: I thought I should add this excerpt from P.Z. Myers’ Pharyngula blog post “Doomed from the start” that I just read:

There are human universals. We are curious or concerned about the world around us; we look for causal explanations for events; we like explanatory narratives that link sequences of events together; we tend to anthropomorphize and project our motivations and our expectation of agency on objects in our environment. That’s human nature, and religion isn’t at all intrinsic to it. Far from being the default, religion is a pathologic parasite that rides along on those human desires by promoting the illusion of agency as an all-encompassing explanation for everything, and by providing a framework for story-telling. Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue. Religion is like badly written fan fiction (in the case of the Abrahamic religions, in the fantasy/horror genre), and is no more an intrinsic component of human nature than is Star Trek slash, although it certainly is a warped reflection of human tendencies.