Religion Is God an Emotion?

I was arguing on another forum that the fact that the existence of god cannot be proved is a good reason not to believe in it. Someone asked if I needed proof that love exists to believe in it, and if it could be proved that love exists. My answer is that love does not exist in any concrete sense - it is not an entity existing outside of human experience, but an emotion that only exists in human consciousness.

Can we say the same about god? Rather than being an entity with its own independent existence, is god nothing more (or less) than a capacity of the human brain? Neuroscientists (e.g Dr Andrew Newberg) have shown that something special happens in the brain during spiritual experiences. Similarly, certain areas of the brain become active when we experience different emotions.

So, is god an emotion?

I wouldn't say an emotion, more a catalyst for other emotions. You see people at mass gatherings of the faithful and invaribly crying with joy or happy or in their own little comfort zone that the idea of God brings to them. The same can be said for the negative emotions. Make fun of Allah and the idea can cause grief, violence and anger. Others will turn their backs on their faith because of the idea of God and how can it let X happen. So it seems to me that the idea can cause people to feel what they need to be closer or further away from God

What is an emotion? A feeling- a reaction? A chemical response? Could God be a programed chemical response in the brain? If so what would be the purpose of such a response... why would it evolve? What about emotions such as awe and wonder and fascination? Hmmmm....

Paintball today with a dozen teenagers and it is raining. (There better be a God.)

sabro said:

Could God be a programed chemical response in the brain? If so what would be the purpose of such a response... why would it evolve?

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Related article:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html

Basically, it seems a belief in God is an attempt to provide reasons and answers we can't otherwise obtain through direct sensory contact to our "reality map", thus serving as a tool to our own survival. I wouldn't call that an "emotion"...

Good article kumo. I absolutely agree with this:

As far as our brain is concerned, there is absolutely no need for data and belief to agree. They have each evolved to augment and supplement one another by contacting different sections of the world. They are designed to be able to disagree. This is why scientists can believe in God and people who are generally quite reasonable and rational can believe in things for which there is no credible data such as flying saucers, telepathy, and psychokinesis.

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And this:

First, skeptics must not expect beliefs to change simply as the result of data or assuming that people are stupid because their beliefs don't change. They must avoid becoming critical or demeaning in response to the resilience of beliefs. People are not necessarily idiots just because their beliefs don't yield to new information. Data is always necessary, but it is rarely sufficient.

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It supports an observation I have made about the religion and philosophy posts on this forum by a number of atheists: It seems some atheists feel the inherent emotional need to "debunk" the beliefs of others and failing to find or provide any rational reasoning or data to back up their claims, they degenerate into statements that consist mainly of ridicule and demeaning. Furthermore their driving beliefs tend to lend themselves to express certainty with a sense of intellectual superiority, as if all people who would believe in a god are not only inferior, but stupid.

Add: Your post reminded me of another JREF forum: The James Randi Educational Foundation. Magician James Randi (currently hospitalized with bypass surgery) presents a column that is good healthy skepticism at its best. There is also the aforementioned forum. www.randi.org

The God is original " movement of force " from "nothing" in " the shown condition "... Emotions is of priorities of "chaos"...

Just a quick one here, for now. I wouldn't tend to think of it as just a 'god spot' in the brain being the source of an emotion, and that by extension that emotion would be 'god' as opposed to some external, real entity. I think that 'god spot' thing is not just related to religious emotion, but to others too. I have read some things about that research, but must read up on it again. I do know that some research on how the brain spots work in situations of applying altruism lit up areas that may well overlap with that.

Perhaps there would be a reason for a god shaped hole in our psyche.

On a side note: Paintball for four hours down in Corona...Not a drop of rain until we left. That is proof of God.

The reason why "God/s" or higher beings/forces are such a commonly held notion/beliefs in so many countrys and intelligent cultures across the world, i think stems from our community hunter gatherer nature- the notion of a god simply replaces the idea of a leader in society, some one or something that is above everyone else who helps control and bring people together in a civilised mannor and incourage ideas of what is morally right or wrong or help answer big questions about our world like how it was created etc...
Peace/harmony and being united is important in human civilised society for it to work easier, you can always argue with another human but you cannot argue with a god- all you can do is have faith in varying degrees.
I dont believe that the concept or idea of god is an emotion, neither an instinct, but rather notion or necessity that many feel the need to entertain/have for them to full fill somthing in their day to day lives or society. Religeon becomes more important the bigger the society/group of people or the closer the quarters they live in together, as being united in the same beliefs helps us exist together more easily. Having everyone believe in the same concepts when it comes to religeon can be a very powerful thing, its consequences in the long run can somtimes be good, or somtimes bad. Gods and religeon go hand in hand, i do not think you can have one without the other as they help each others existance in the human mind. Human emotion drives the meaning of god and religeon, without human emotion its unlikely that God and Religeon would have much of a place in our societys.

The other question, is how much the notion of god and religeon is actually true, and wether theres an afterlife and all that, but for now im relatively satisfied with a little better understanding of why we have these ideas in the first place, and willing to learn more too- what do you think?

The god generally really exists... There is no " a way of his knowledge "...
But I shall agree that presence of knowledge of existence of "God" constrains people to...
" The world dead " too exists.

Perhaps when God created us, he left this "hole" to be filled-- a need only He could answer. Perhaps the ultimate proof of a diety is a makers mark he left on all of us.

sabro said:

Perhaps when God created us, he left this "hole" to be filled-- a need only He could answer. Perhaps the untimate proof of a diety is a makers mark he left on all of us.

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That's not how it works, Sabro...
You need to look at the evidence and then reach a conclusion, not the other way around....
Anyway, I wouldn't really call that a "hole". I think this "hole" is more likely just one of our brain's abilities - abstract thinking- which can be used for many things, believing in some sort of God being just one of them. There's no such thing as a specific "God area" in our brain.

Wow, kumo, you are to a degree correct, but I wouldn't be so quick to rush into that... it depends on whether you are using inductive or deductive reasoning. Are we going from the specific to the general or the opposite? As in forensic reconstruction, the best test of a hypothesis is to begin at the end and work backwards. According to my brief and somewhat shoddy research-- we can easily trace backwards the existence of God through the structure meant for that in the brain...(Okay, so it is not easy and not very clear)-- but it is also not irrational. Reverse engineering the functions of the brain to determine a beginning point or principle is not outlandish nor unheard of. In the field of psychology function is often used to determine form- and thusly the conclusion preceeds the evidence.

?gThe most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger . . . is as good as dead.?h --Albert Einstein

Here are some interesting articles on the "God Spot" in the brain:

http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/images/new_page_2.htm
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web3/Farrenkopf.html
http://flockofangels.org/godandthebrain.htm

If God did create humanity for a purpose, wouldn't one expect to find such a region and function in the brain?

Sabro, for centuries hundreds of philosophers have tried to create a logic system where inductive reasoning was allowed-- they have all failed miserably.
It's pretty much an abandoned idea by now.
And I can't see how reverse engineering is related to inductive reasoning... of course reverse engineering is valid, but then I can't see how it could be applied to the God/Brain research without using inductive reasoning (which would automatically make it invalid, and also turn it into a bizarre circular reasoning fallacy)...

No argument-- only simplicity: Confirmational/perceptional Bias on my end. I see exactly what I would expect to see. Where this bias blind spot exists in science and among atheists is the point that must pre-suppose that there is in fact no god and that all information which could suggest such an impossibility be disgarded.

sabro said:

No argument-- only simplicity: Confirmational/perceptional Bias on my end. I see exactly what I would expect to see. Where this bias blind spot exists in science and among atheists is the point that must pre-suppose that there is in fact no god and that all information which could suggest such an impossibility be disgarded.

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Not really. It's more like "since there's no evidence of any God, it's both illogical, because it would require inductive reasoning (and a baseless assumption), and useless, because there's no material to work with, to study it". No assumptions made at all.

It is a question of heuristics: Theists will see plenty of evidence of God and Atheists would have to disregard or redefine it. This would constitute evidence of God to a "believer" but a piece of non evidence to a non-believer. Any evidence of God to a non believer would have to be due to the heuristics reduced or re-examined. It is the filtering system spoken of in the article you cited and parsed above. Certainly confirmational/conceptual bias works both ways and it is not only people of faith who suffer from such human limitations but also people of non-faith.

Of course you could consider both ways of thinking equally valid, but when you compare how many lives were saved by medical science, which is based on "sceptical biased" evidence, and how many people were cured by prayer, based on "faith biased" evidence, it's easy to see which "bias" has a better foundation on reality.
Let's just say that if scientists "admitted" faith evidence we wouldn't be debating right now-- there would be no computers...

If I may kind of butt in here; not to de-track the good discussion going on, though.

I have been giving some more thought to the original post, and what that might mean for the theme of this thread. I have to give a little more mental power to that, and then can say something more worthwhile, I hope, at least.

One thing to think of might be that I think we could put our money on the observation's being true that identifications and descriptions of god by the greater majority of peoples today, did not exist 10,000 years ago--whereas we can say with a great deal of certainty that humankind did.

Just a little something to throw around within the boundries of this thread's theme, I think.

I might add on reflection that although induction may not work in philosophy, but it is the major method that our perceptive reality is constructed through our emprical experiences. You don't need to burn your hand in a flame too many times, to throw a ball in the air, or to taste chocolate to construct a heuristic that will determine you permanent perception of these experiences. The question becomes the pertainent determiner: are you asking about belief, experience or proof?

Again, back to the article you cited: The existence of God and the non-existence of God are equally logical, equally useful, and equally based upon a person's heuristic construct. Evidence is everywhere to be seen or nowhere depending on a person's perceptual bias. Certainly from a purely materialistic point of view, God must not exist for he cannot be found or measured and there is no evidence at all, and from the opposite point of view, God must exist because he is constantly found in every moment of life. confirmed constantly by mounting evidence.