–“Is belief in the truth fundamentally predicated upon God?”– @Whatifalthist
THE CORRECT ANSWER:
1) The term ‘truth’ refers to testimony – it can only refer to testimony. And testimony sufficient for the provision of decidability. And as such, decidability sufficient for the marginal difference in the production of desired outcomes and the reduction of failure or harms in the context in question. Ideal truth refers to that testimony we would give if possessed of perfect and complete knowledge of the context in question. (All truth and therefore decidability consist of a competition between supply of information vs demand to avoid risk).
2) All people need a means of disambiguating, categorizing, and evaluating the universe sufficient for successful understanding, prediction, choice, and action – and that demand increases as the population, division of labor, class structure emerges, and diversity from travel and trade increase – because they require commensurable systems of conceptual measurement in order to suppress neuroticism (insecurity, fear), cooperate, and cooperate in networks of increasing complexity, without causing retaliation and retaliation cycles, which inhibit that cooperation at best and at worst cause conflict and war.
3) Given the hierarchy of accessible systems of measurement from the imitative to the anthropomorphic to the theological, to philosophical, to empirical, to scientific, to operational, the lowest common denominator available to all humans independent of their varying capacity for reason, is anthropomorphism. Conversely, the less intuitive and the more rational, the less available to humans.
4) In addition, the less trust a people have of one another, and the more diverse and alienating the population for those within it, the greater the difficulty in converting the submission to authority necessary for suppression of self interest and deferring gratification and contribution to the commons from parent to elders, to headmen, or their abstractions in institutions.
5) As such between (a) the need for a framework of understanding sufficient for action, among others in populations at scale, (b) the necessity of suppressing neuroticism (c) facilitating the development of trust necessary for cooperation (d) the spectrum of ability ad competency where the anthropomorphic is the most simplistic (e) and utility of the abstraction to an ideal anthropomorphic entity to overcome local absence of trust in one another. (f) then it is logical we should develop religions (disciplines of intuition) with more anthropomorphism among lower trust peoples, and less anthropomorphism among higher trust peoples. (g) And the resistance to surpassing the use of abstract deities (god, gods) and restoring say, natural religion of hero, ancestor, and nature ‘debt recognition and appreciation’ (worship, submission to the pack response), or graduating to say, stoicism-epicureanism, or graduating further to say, natural law and man as gods in the making, is persistent as long as the distribution of ability-inability, agency-submission, and empathizing-systematizing, division is below a threshold where a majority can naturally form norms traditions values, rituals, narratives, and institutions that favor higher trust methods of achieving mindfulness, standards of measure, and the trust and cooperation that results.
6) As such, in lieu of aggressive eugenics, the production of an intuition in a population within a normal distribution requires greater investment and training as we attempt to evolve from the easily intuitionistic and anthropomorphic to the necessity of understanding that which requires accumulation of knowledge of others, the world, and the universe. (hence why stoicism-epicureanism failed to propagate to the lower classes leaving room for christianity (a religion of women, slaves, and the lower classes)).
7) As such, to answer the question provoking this response, god as a proxy (substitute) for decidability is necessary as long as: (a) our population is only sufficiently competent for such a paradigm of measurement and decidability (b) our population lacks the trust necessary for greater directness of debt recognition’ (worship), and (c) our knowledge of the universe is sufficient to provide decidability on the one hand and the suppression of false alternatives (marxism-to-woke) on the other.
This is the most complete and correct answer you will find. And your response to this answer will tell you more about your trust in others than what is possible for the production of the intuition of trust and cooperation in a population. 😉
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation
Reply addressees: @whatifalthist