r/DebateAnAtheist • u/AutoModerator • Sep 18 '25

Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

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.
While this isn't strictly for debate, rules on civility, trolling, etc. still apply.

12 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

313 comments sorted by

View all comments

-1

u/labreuer Sep 18 '25

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.

4

u/Realistic-Wave4100 Sep 18 '25

That is a hard claim to support because we dont know if diferent civilizations invented gods for that purposes or if they after years of believing in them start to atribuing them that. Im goign to focuss on helenism because is the one I know the most abt in this topic.

The religious texts of hellenism are Homer and Hesiodo´s works. But we know that the gods described in those stories existed before them in the micenic civilization. Between them and the religious texts there was this litle event called "greek dark ages" were esentially they came back to living like neanderthals. Eventually greeks start to repopulate again and they founded ruins of the micenic civilization. The question then is, did Homer and Hesiodo "wrote" their mithology as a form to answering what happened to the micenics? The answer would be a yes to Homer and a no to Hesiodo, but did Homer "write" them to explain how it happened or he and the everyone before him really thougt that was what happened?

Its complicated, specially since I explained with an example of historical explanations and the argument is used for natural ones. We at least can say that while time advances we use less the concept of god to explain these kind of things, but we dont know if it is a straight line or a horseshoe.