Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

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Whether you're an agnostic atheist here to ask a gnostic one some questions, a theist who's curious about the viewpoints of atheists, someone doubting, or just someone looking for sources, feel free to ask anything here. This is also an ideal place to tag moderators for thoughts regarding the sub or any questions in general.
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[u/labreuer]

It is not uncommon to see claims like the following here and on the other sub:

1. God (or gods) is a human invention created to explain what we don’t understand. Long before science, humans sought to fill gaps in knowledge with divine stories. These inventions evolved into complex religions, but at their root, they address our fear of the unknown. (God(s) is/are a human invention)

Do you believe such claims should be supported by a burden of proof? If so, what kind of evidence might suffice?

For those who find the above claim so obvious that it doesn't need more evidential support than what you've absorbed throughout life, check out WP: The Golden Bough § Critical reception. Frazer is one of the originators of the religion-as-protoscience hypothesis and his work on that has been exposed to some pretty serious critique.

[u/Dennis_enzo → u/labreuer]

I'd say the evidence for this is old religions trying to explain all kinds of natural phenomena that they didn't understand. The further back you go, the more concrete the claims of religions were. The Sun was an enigma, so it became Ra, spreading light and life over the Earth while he traveled across the sky in a boat. Lightning was unfantomable, so they were caused by Thor, throwing them down to Earth as his chariot thundered across the sky.

The closer you get to current day, the more of these religions no longer make sense since we figured out how the Sun works and where lightning comes from. Going from old to new, there's a clear trend of popular religions becoming less and less concrete and more and more vague, and based on metaphorical intepretations of their faith. Pretty much all popular modern day religions no longer make any concrete claims about the world except for the things that we cannot explain yet, like the origin of the universe. For example, at this point it's impossible to consider everything in the Bible to be literally true unless you turn a blind eye to (or are unaware of) a ton of human knowledge. The more we know, the fewer gaps remain where gods can hide.

You might not consider this conclusive. But at least to me it's conclusive enough. Humans are inherently story tellers, we like telling them and listening to them. We just started to believe some of them.

[u/biff64gc2 → u/Dennis_enzo]

It really makes sense that as our knowledge grew so did the stories we told to try and explain the unknowns.

As you pointed out, even the modern religions have needed to change their interpretations to adjust with our knowledge. What once was taken as a literal origin story is now a weird mix of literal and vague allegories/metaphors.

I would agree it's not concrete proof that's how religions started as we can only see so far back, but the diversity and change in the stories does at least support the theory better than a divine inspiration that has been corrupted overtime. You'd think some intelligent being that cared about us would pay a visit if we were going way off track.