One might venture to say that most people believe in God or a god of some kind. This appears to have been the case throughout the history of human beings. But with the birth of the sciences and the growth of scientific intellect, there are many who reject these very spiritual ideas and feel the existence of God is a delusion. One such person is the author Richard Dawkins who defines the “God Hypothesis” as the existence of a super-human, super-natural intelligence that designed the universe and everything in it. He goes on to counter that belief with his own theory that any creative intelligence comes into being only as the “end product of much involved and extended process of gradual evolution”[1]. He feels that seeing and trying to understand the reason for life and man’s existence in it are what initially created the concept of the “all-powerful being” (Dawkins, 2006).
Rodney Stark, a professor of social sciences at Baylor University feels that Dawkins and his ilk (atheists) claim that religion and the belief in God are survival tactics. They feel that faith is ambiguous and obstructs man’s natural power to reason. Stark argues that it is the human’s capacity to reason that allows man to understand and appreciate more about the truth of God than was comprehended in earlier times (Stark, 2007). Harold E. Lurier and others cited the teachings of the German Philosopher, Rudolf Otto, in A History of the Religions of the World. Otto coined the term “Numinosum” in his book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy). This is loosely defined as the intense, ingrained feeling of knowing that there is something powerful that cannot be seen. And this “It” led to the varying beliefs in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent (Lurier, 2002).
[1] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006, pg 31
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