Just develop a sophisticated analysis tool (program) capable of constructing individual mental/emotional vector maps. Study a large number of people and adjust the code until it can reliably identify major or debilitating vector deviations for any given person. If the results are consistent from Palau to Petrograd to Peoria to Pretoria, one could argue that the program is sufficiently impartial that it could tell you whether the god vector is worth being seriously concerned about.
The question assumes that the biases which predispose human cultures to create gods are not genetic at the level that any intelligent observer must also have them. This seems like an unwarranted assumption.
Only if your stance is that a belief in “God” or any supreme being is a learned behavior as opposed to perhaps something instinctual or hardwired into our very DNA.
Huh? That makes no sense; if there are aliens, we won’t share any genes with them including any genes that make people tend religious.
Unless we’re all descended from Xenu, of course.
We don’t have to be descended. Thetans can cross species barriers.
That’s basically what I dropped in to say. If their consciousness arose with a miniscule understanding of the universe, like ours did, they likely invented religion, too, to fill in the gaps. If they don’t have religion anymore, they would understand the motivation for it.
Why assume that? With a slightly different psychology, they might have just said “we don’t know” and left it at that instead of making things up. Or they might have made up gods and spirits like we did, but abandoned them immediately when better ideas came along instead of clinging to them with faith. And there’s no reason to assume they’d even come up with the concept of “worship”, much less practice it. Religion is exactly the sort of thing that’s so dependent on the existence of a specific set of psychological quirks that I wouldn’t expect another species to have it.
Belief in beyondy-things does not itself appear to be hardwired into us, but there is some compelling evidence that clinging is. Just look at the ways that avid leftists and right-wingers stand by their dogma even when it is shown to be faulty or wrong. This mechanism, I think, is far more important than the mere ability to suspend disbelief.
if an Alien Anthropologist discovered an Abandoned Earth, they would probably conclude that Star Wars, Star Trek, and Barbie figures represented the Pantheon of Gods & Goddesses We Worshipped…
That’s an awful lot for one impartial observer to observe! Unless the observer was… godlike.
rich, I have to take a slight issue with your premise. It assumes an “outside observer” would have no previous knowledge of God or gods.
My idea around God exists as part of the human condition. The question is whether God exists outside of it.
Or had a really good surveillance system.
It’s more that your stance seems to entail supposing as fact that God does not exist, and that any objective, impartial alien must also be perfectly well aware that God does not exist. That makes your standpoint something like “Assume I’m right, and that any intelligent unbiased third party also knows that I am right. What is he going to think of the idiots who disagree with me?”. :dubious:
It concerns me that the hypothetical aliens may arrive and promptly have us all executed for blasphemy because we don’t bang the drums at sunrise or whatever they have conceived as being the proper way to worship.
Well, according to what we know of the universe that’s true. “God” isn’t a concept derived from science; it’s one derived from a subset of human mythology. Where would an alien even get the idea from?
I can think of multiple possibilities, either under the assumption that God does not exist or that God does.
There’s been SF written in which aliens have a concept of God. Ever read the Robert J. Sawyer novel Calculating God, for example?
Yes. Although in reality I think that few humans would consider that to be “God”, as it was neither supernatural nor resembled the Abrahamic god in any way. It was in the end just an extrauniversal alien responsible for the creation of this universe. Although it would get extra points for saving humanity from annihilation no doubt.
I disagree. I think that many humans would regard proof of the existence of an entity with even a small portion of God-like attributes to be proof of the existence of God.
Are you are aware of the phrase Omega Point? At least in some interpretations, God is in the future rather than timeless. Is this Orthodox Christianity? No. But a God who was “neither supernatural nor resembled the Abrahamic god in any way” would to most believers still be a God (just as He wouldn’t be a God to atheists).
Some theologies stress the supernatural, some do not.
The only way I can conceive for the objective outside observer to be objective is to have a far more firmly grounded understanding of ultimate origin of our universe and it’s physical laws than we do. Based on that, the outside observer might decide that we were all pretty far off in our understanding of reality, while in other ways both atheists and theists had sensed some of it.
Or the objective observer might be God.
I think that most people are less willing or interested in stretching the definition of “God” than all that.