Religion or Reality

I AM: God

"A man who follows someone else not only doesn't not find anything, he's not even looking."

- Seneca, Letters From a Stoic

How do you convince other people to think or behave in a certain way? A simple demand might work, but not if they already have their own particular style of doing things. In such instances, your best bet would be to present them with information that illustrates the reasons they should think or behave differently. Humans are rational creatures, after all, and they are likely to listen to logic if it's presented in a clear and easy to understand format. That is, of course, unless they are familiar with you, in which case they probably won't believe in your words. At this point, the only option is to appeal to the words of a more authoritative person in order to convey your message in order to promote the change.

I run into this problem all of the time with my mother. If I have an idea for what, in my opinion, would be a better way of doing things, my words are brushed off as if they are unreliable. Yet if and when my mother hears the same advice from a so-called expert, she welcomes their words with both open arms and an open mind. So what makes an expert?

At its core, being an expert means possessing knowledge that can be trusted, usually after devoting an appropriate amount of time studying the topic at hand. This knowledge is usually accompanied by evidence from a third party who confirms that the person indeed knows what they claim to know with either some sort of certificate or license. These are called credentials, and although they are not necessary to the expert, they certainly help. But I think there is a better way to explain it: experts are merely strangers with good credentials who sound like they know what they are talking about. 

For some reason, people have a difficult time trusting the words of someone who is familiar to them, yet they can easily accepts the words of a stranger who has good credentials. Perhaps this happens because it's hard to believe that those who you are familiar with could learn something that you didn't know. After all, those who you are familiar with are usually similar to you, so if you don't know what you are talking about, why should they? Strangers overcome this obstacle by having the privilege of being unknown to you. Their past as well as their thoughts are, for the most part, a mystery, and the mysterious is both fascinating and scary. If the stranger is likable, then they fascinate you, making you more likely to believe them, but if they are offensive, then they scare you, reducing their reliability. 

What does any of this have to to do with using God as an answer for the 'why' of life?

The idea of qualifying an expert as a stranger is a possible path for the invention of a human-like creator. 

Our distant ancestors, the first humans, lived at a time when it was kill or be killed. I can't imagine such an existence, and I'm sure that once they were able to think about it, they wondered why they lived with such an existence as well. Like I said in the last chapter, perhaps they came up with multiple solutions to answer their questions, but one solution stuck out from the rest. There was a man, let's say his name was John... Never mind, that doesn't sound good enough. Let's call him Adam. Yeah, that sounds better. There was a man named Adam who felt like he had the answers to the questions of his fellow humans. The answers to the why's that plagued them. The only problem was that everybody knew Adam, and in their minds, there was no way that boring old Adam would have the answers. Rather than accepting this, Adam decided to appeal to the words of someone who was reliable. This wasn't easy. Adam's contemporaries were no smarter than him. Adam needed an expert. He needed a stranger with good credentials, so he made one up.

Enter God, the creator of everything. 

God is the ultimate expert. God is a stranger because nobody has ever met God, and obviously being the creator of everything qualifies as good credentials. Thus, all Adam had to do say was that the answers came not from him, but from the almighty creator, God. As long as Adam had God, he could direct the thoughts and behavior of his people. And since God was invisible, there was no way that any of his peers could prove Adam wrong.