Did Man Invent God?

I like to consider myself a thinking Christian. A lot of times Christians are thought of as people of blind faith that believe what they believe for no apparent reason other than that they've been told to believe it.

I like to think I'm a little more interested in the truth than that. Maybe a little too interested. I'd like you to take a moment to gaze into the face of this image on the left. This is what I found when I Google image searched for "God".

I suppose this is what man thinks God would look like. Coming down from the clouds with a beard, a flowing gown, rays beaming from him. Always old. Every time. God is depicted as the old man in the sky.



Now, don't get me wrong. I do believe that Jesus is one day going to come in similar fashion, though I can't say exactly what it will look like, but what I'm taking aim at is man's concept of God. Where exactly are we getting these ideas? These images?

Is God something that we've created in our own minds?

Now when you ask this question, you have to look at its reverse first to fully grasp what we are really asking.

Did man make God?

or

Did GOD make man?

The hidden question here is about life's basic origin. It really always comes back to this creation vs. evolution thing. (insert crazy conspiracy theory here).


The argument that man made God in his image goes something like this:

Somewhere down the line of our evolutionary process, man hit a brick wall. The world was too scary, too inexplicable. Early man, with his sad state of being and generally gullible nature, thought that maybe there was some type of unseen person controlling all of this. 

However, I want you to right now imagine that you are a caveman. Living in your cave, about to eat your dinner. You've never even once thought of this "God" idea. You hear thunder. How do you even get the construct for the idea of an invisible, all powerful, unseen deity? Wouldn't they be more likely to think it was a large mammoth, or something else they had already seen? According to evolutionary theory, the ideas and traits that help early man survive are what is passed down to his descendants and ultimately what make up the way we think today. Life was hard for early man. He was lonely and needed a friend. He needed protection. He needed a father's love. He needed love in general.

Thus the argument that man made God- goes.

Let's review.

Man made God, because man needed God.

If we are going to believe that man made God, we are going to have to find someone or some other process to create our man in the first place. The only option left, once God has been removed, is evolution.

And here.. we are.. again.

Did evolution happen? Are we all just a product of time + chance + extreme luck? Or do we have a purposeful design implemented on our lives by the one who made us?

So really if you're asking the question, "did man make God?", your answer is going to come from if you answer the reverse, "did God make man?" If one is true, the other is false. By starting at the bottom, where did man come from, we can get the answer to whether or not man made God.

So it comes back to evolution. The theory that has been posited to explain where we come from. To get us off of God's line and free us from any accountability we would have had we really been made in his image.

Yeah that might have been nice and all, but it's not true. 

The problem with evolutionary theory is that it isn't proven. Scientists that are in search of natural causes for everything may think that it's their best guess at explaining life from a purely materialistic angle, but that doesn't mean it's the truth.

And what if it's not the truth?

What if we really were created for a purpose?

It would definitely explain why we yearn for so much of what God provides if we were really created for him.

If you accept the evolutionary view that we came from no one and for no purpose, ultimately, who you are as a person will be changed. Whether you realize it or not. We all need purpose. We need meaning in our lives.

I'm not sure how exactly the need for meaning and purpose was passed down according to evolution. Untold numbers of people kill themselves everyday from a lack of purpose and meaning in their lives. The need for meaning doesn't make us stronger, it doesn't help us pass on our genes, it makes us weaker. Makes us off ourselves. Makes us dependent on .. something. And we all have it. Evolution needs to do a better job selecting more favorable traits, because somehow, it fails to free us from the grip of meaning.

When evolutionary thinking takes over as truth we all lose. We lose the foundations. There becomes no such thing as truth, right and wrong, good and evil. We lose our souls. We are told we are nothing more than the collection of chemicals bumping into each other.

But surely, surely, we must be more than that. We know we are more than that no matter what any theory says.

So to answer the question, did man create God, you must seriously look into the evidence of where man came from in the first place. Study him. His body. His world. His heart. His organs and their functions. See the complexity and design and ask if it looks like it's there because of chance, or because it was put there by someone.

Man needs God. We can try to deny it, but either way you look at it, from an evolutionary angle or from the angle of a believer- it is undeniable. The concept, the person. HE is needed in our lives. So, does it make sense that we created this thing that we need so much? Or that we need him because we were created to need him?