I don't remember if I have blogged about this before or not. Since most people probably only skim read my posts anyways, I suppose it doesn't really matter.
I was re-reading The Everlasting Man today and also arguing sort of with someone on facebook. Which, interestingly enough, Chesterton proved to have an answer to one of the person's objections. I haven't brought it up yet on facebook.
The person objects to the idea of God on a few different levels one of which is that the idea of God was forumulated out of mankind's ignorance of the natural causes of Thunder and science in general. That man needed an explanation and God seemed to be reasonable at the time. That the idea of a all-powerful God takes away some of our stress and worry. We don't have to fear death because of heaven.
The basic idea behind this is in part true. Man hungers for something. I don't think that it is as simple as just wanting an explanation. Have you ever read a fairy tale and wished it were true? Even though you know that it would be ridiculous. We want there to be magic and fairies and ghosts. They might not explain anything really, but that doesn't mean that we don't want them to be true. We aren't satisfied with a purely natural world. We have a need in us for it to be supernatural. That need doesn't mean that we made up God. If anything it means God exists. We hunger for food and we thirst for human relationships, in fact there aren't many things that we have a "need" for that don't exist. I don't think that there has ever been any recorded race of people that didn't believe in the supernatural at one point or another. Peoples who had no contact with each other at all had this idea, this need.
Chesterton describes pre-christian paganism as the hunger and Christianity as the food. They are similar in the way that a picture is similar to a real face.
On a side note it is interesting to see that inventing God never really gave us the things that atheists claim we invented him for. We all still fear death, and most of the time get stressed out about stuff too. I don't believe in God because I am stressed by exams and need a job. Those things still stress me because I know that God isn't going to study for me and fill out my applications. I trust that over all things are going to turn out well, but I highly doubt that they will be easy and stress free. That isn't what God promised, in fact he said that things are going to be hard and we will have to bear crosses. Life will absolutely suck sometimes. There is a struggle inside sometimes to just fight through stuff and not take the easy way out. Often times I end up doing the harder more stressful thing because of God. It is a lot less stressful to cheat on an exam or on your taxes ( if you know that you aren't going to get caught). If anything not believing in God seems to easier sometimes.
