4.8 God as metavalues

Primitive peoples make gods of the things they don’t understand. More specifically, they make gods of things they have poorly conceptualized. So, not understanding biology, even in a rudimentary sense, they make gods of the local trees. Not understanding geology, they make gods of the local rock formations. Anything unusual that sticks out and doesn’t fit into a conceptual framework gets the god-ification treatment.

By the time the Greeks come along, a rudimentary sense of a scientific, or at least naturalistic approach has been developed, so the small-time spirit-of-the-local-watering-hole is out; what are the new gods? They are gods of higher-level abstractions. Like Love. There is a dialog in Plato about love, in which all the characters rhapsodize about love, but it’s Love, with a capital L, and refers specifically to a personalized deity named Love. And, though some people seem to kind-of get that it’s more a metaphor than something literal, even Socrates bases his arguments in an essential way on the premise that Love is a real deity who lives somewhere between heaven and Earth and so forth.

So now, as we refine and define concepts like love and justice and so-on, we don’t need those gods. What’s left? Gods of even higher abstractions: metavalues (or what Rand called ‘Metaphysical Value Judgements). And isn’t that exactly how people use the Christian god?—as a stand-in for the universe as such? Even Aristotle couldn’t stand the infinite regression of the question: what caused the universe?—well, then, what caused that?—and so on. He needed an Unmoved Mover.

Have our gods been the precursor to ever greater precision higher and higher up the ladder of abstraction? Perhaps God will no longer be a problem when we have become sufficiently precise in our concepts that we simply don’t need him. Maybe the sign to look for is when the word God with a capital G is replaced with god with a small g, used simply as a metaphor, or personification for our highest-level abstractions—our metavalues.

Based on an email to Steve Clarian 2005.9