1. This idea that religion was invented to explain the physical facts of life on this planet that we now understand by science is just a lot of hot air. I just heard him say this for the umpteenth time in that flat dogmatic way he has of pronouncing such things he can't possibly know but can only conjure out of thin air, how they didn't know earthquakes were caused by the cooling crust of the earth, that diseases were caused by germs and so on, so they made up the actions of gods to explain them.
But, Mr. Hitchens, we all know those things now and even knowing those things now some of us STILL come to believe in God AFTER knowing those things and I for one have no trouble at all reconciling the scientific explanations with God's control over all of it (I mean the TRUE scientific explanations of course, NOT evolutionism which is bogus). This connection is in fact a very exciting discovery to make after living 45 years as I did under the Scientific Explanation for Absolutely Everything. There is a magnificent and mysterious interaction between the goings-on in the material world and the goings-on in the spiritual world.
Prescientific man had enough sense to intuit this connection but unfortunately he too often put his trust in the demon gods instead of the one true God. Still, the demons may have some power over some physical events too, allowed by the one true God of course. This reminds me of the Lewis and Clark expedition which witnessed an Indian buffalo dance during their first hard winter, and sure enough the buffalo showed up a few days later although there was no rational reason to expect them to. God's mercy I assume. The Indians and the white men took down quite a few of them, the Indians taking by far the most as I recall, and the buffalo fed them all that winter, both tribes.
All the noise and hocus pocus in the buffalo dance is probably irrelevant to the result, though there are no doubt some demonic influences in all that, but the overall effect may be like an intense prayer to the Great Spirit that God hears in His mercy. The Indians had learned to trust in such appeals to the spiritual world -- from the empirical evidence that they got results! As for science, what explanation can science give for the buffalo showing up in a territory they'd left earlier in the season to roam elsewhere, arriving within a few days after the buffalo dance? Many natural explanations might be reasonably enough guessed at, even correctly, but none would be sufficient.
Normally no natural laws are violated in the spiritual-material interaction at all, things just sort of work out one way or another according to the spiritual forces at work -- there are so many possible scenarios that could occur in the natural scheme of things the actual one that does occur startles nobody out of their scientific assumptions. Those who have prayed for it will recognize in the event answer to that prayer though the natural mentality will remain unconvinced. But miracles are also possible, though they occur only very rarely, meaning events that defy all natural explanations.
HOWEVER, this is not likely THE REASON people believed in God or gods in the early days, or at any time.
2.
Post under construction.
Seeking God again
7 years ago
