As a self professed agnostic, I often have friendly debates with my “thiest” friends where I posit that humans have an intrinsic need to answer the unknown that drives religion.
Among the many specific arguments I often predict to my friends, one in particular is that hundreds or thousands of years from now as more “unknowns” are “known” today’s religions will be looked at in the same way that we today look at the Greek and Roman Gods…
You see lightning, there must be a God on a cloud throwing bolts, typhoons and hurricanes devastate a coastal town, a trident wielding God under the sea must be angry.
Did the Vikings really believe that Odin died on the World Tree (Yggdrasil) for our sins and become resurrected (sure sounds like a familiar story that predate’s Jesus…).
But did the ancient peoples of that time REALLY believe in those Gods or were they merely symbolic? Is there any evidence either way?
We don’t really know much about what the Vikings believed or didn’t believe. Practically everything we have about them was passed down to us by Christian writers. Similar for the Druids… all we really know about them was written either by their enemies or by people who’d never met a Druid.
People and valuable property were sacrificed to those gods, so I’d say that yeah, the people actually believed in them.
Although it’s not a perfect analogy, but the ancient Greek / Roman religion seems to me a lot like Hinduism with multiple gods, some devoted to specific purposes, and various myths and legends.
My feeling is that people REALLY believe in the Hindu pantheon today, and I’d bet people REALLY believed in Zeus and Diana and so on back in the day.
But the existence of atheists implies the existence of theists. Exactly how many of each at any one time is unknown; after all, they didn’t have the Pew Research Center to conduct polls on the issue.
I think part of that answer is will by solving problems have overall fewer or solving problems leads to more problems to solve. For instance is some forms of homeopathic solutions related to entanglement, and does quantum theory (schrodinger’s cat) represent free will, power of faith.
I recall reading of an ancient letter from a church to an artist who was making icons for the church, which closed “God will reward you, or we will make an arrangement.” I figured there was always a more pious side and also a more practical side to what people really thought.
As far as I know, the first written document talking about Norse religious beliefs was the 13th century Prose Edda. I’m not sure what there is in the way of archaeological material before that point.
So, yeah, before the Viking era the Germanic/Norse people undoubtedly believed in something, but we don’t really know what (at least, not to the level of ‘Odin was hung on a tree and became resurrected’ which I suspect is a significant over-reading even of the documents we DO have)
It seems fairly likely that the Norse Mythology that we have was written to directly compete with encroaching Christianity, so it was spiced up a bit to be able to do so. Ragnarok, for example, I believe was either not part of the original religion or a very minor part, whereas in the Norse Mythology that we have it’s a fairly large component. They needed something to compete with Christianity’s ideas of Heaven, Hell, and the Apocalypse.
But Norse Mythology seems to be fairly closely tied to Slavic and Mongolian shamanism, in its beliefs and while those do have great leaders with one eye that has a bird as an ally, a secondary god of thunder with a hammer, and a world tree, they’re both missing the warrior paradise and the end of the world. (Granted, there isn’t great information about them on the Internet.)
Origin yes, but other than a couple of runic references, like asking Thor to give his blessing, and a few muddled and contradictory references about the Germans from Romas writers, there is nothing solid. It is more likely that the "Odin died on the World Tree (Yggdrasil) for our sins and become resurrected’ was copying Christianity, since of course it was Christian monks who wrote it down.
People seem to have an inherent need for explanations. If natural explanations are not available, they will turn to supernatural ones. The less there is that cannot be explained naturally, the fewer believers there will be. That is why, IMHO, the fight over evolution. Before Darwin, there was no plausible explanation for all the creatures on earth. Now there is only one missing link: abiogenesis. And a billion years is a long time for it to happen.
Yep, and you know there are Churches, like the Modern Catholic one, that says the the Deity indeed did that first spark of life and then just guided natural processes along as needed.
And abiogenesis is a bit of stretch, so much so than many scientist think it was panspermia. Which actually isnt a answer at all, if you think about it:
