The Leap of Faith- Reza 阿斯兰 on ‘God’

概要：  要么是有一个神在乎我们，要么是一个不在乎我们的动画精神，或者创造是偶然的。但是，不关心我们的动画精神与事故理论之间的差异似乎可以忽略不计。相信一个“God”可能很容易被描述为“nature’仅涉及很小的语义区别，几乎没有信念的飞跃。

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在他的书中‘God’ Reza 阿斯兰, himself a believer, asserts that religious belief necessarily requires a ‘leap of faith’. He says any believer that tells you otherwise is probably in the process of trying to convert you. Although a believer, 阿斯兰 is not evangelical.

阿斯兰 commences his book 通过 discussing theories on the origin of 宗教.

爱德华·泰勒（Edward Taylor）认为，宗教的根源在于神秘的信念，即灵魂与身体是分离的。他将这种信念归因于梦想。如果我们的原始祖先梦见一个死去的亲戚，他们会自然而然地认为，即使在身体被破坏之后，这种精神仍然存在于另一个领域。

马克斯·穆勒（Max Muller）认为宗教源于人类’ early encounters with 性质. Human beings observed the skies, oceans and forests. They knew they did not create them. So they assumed someone, or something, else must have done so.

同样，罗伯特·马雷特（Robert Marrett）辩称，人类相信他所说的话‘mana’-活在有生命和无生命的事物中的超自然力量。

阿斯兰 argues that what these theories have in common is the assumption that 宗教 arose to answer unsolvable questions. This explanation for 宗教 remains popular today. But 阿斯兰 doubts that any of these theories provide for any adaptive advantage that might help explain 宗教 in evolutionary terms. He says there is no evidence that the existence of any emotion associated with religious belief gave rise to an evolutionary adaptive advantage.

Durkheim explains 宗教 on the basis that its religious rites and rituals help a community form a collective consciousness. He thinks 宗教 arose as a kind of social adhesive. It is not difficult to see how a more cohesive community might give an evolutionary advantage. But 阿斯兰 argues that 宗教 is just as much a dividing force as a uniting one and that kinship is a stronger primal tool for social cohesion than a common religious belief.

阿斯兰 favors neurology as providing the best evolutionary explanation for 宗教. He says 宗教 is first and foremost a neurological phenomenon. He says through evolution we have developed mental processes that lead us to assign agency to inanimate objects, to endow objects with a soul or spirit and then transmit these beliefs to succeeding generations. He is convinced that the widespread belief that we 是 embodied souls is the source of religious belief and that we do not really know where our idea of a soul comes from.

But 阿斯兰 never explains why there might not be a combination of sources for religious belief or why only a source that provides an evolutionary advantage is real. We must eat to survive. But our culinary cultures 是 not determined, or completely determined, 通过 evolutionary advantages.

阿斯兰’拒绝涂尔干’关于宗教是一种社会黏合剂的理论是没有说服力的。宗教确实是分裂力量，也是统一力量。但是人类“unity’通常是基于一个特殊群体的成员身份而排除了其他人类群体。令人沮丧的是，排除其中的某些确实是呼吁的一部分，也是对其中一部分的统一力量。宗教只是其中的一个例子。部落对足球队的忠诚是同一现象的另一种更无害的体现。

阿斯兰 also fails to explain why, if religious belief is “hard wired”通过神经学在我们里面，无神论根本可以存在，即使在少数人当中也是如此。

安斯兰大部分地区’s book aims to demonstrate, which he does convincingly, that most 宗教 involves a humanized version of 神. We invent 神 in our image rather than the reverse.

“众多心理学家和认知科学家进行的研究表明，最虔诚的信徒在被迫传达他们对上帝的想法时，会以压倒性的态度对待上帝，就好像他们在谈论在街上认识的人一样…想一想信徒如何经常将上帝描述为充满爱心，残酷，嫉妒，宽恕或仁慈。这些当然是人的属性。”

阿斯兰 says 宗教 thus becomes merely a reflection of everything good or bad about us. We create a superhuman being (God) endowed with human traits but without human limitations. This explains why, throughout history, 宗教 has been a force for both good and unspeakable evil.

阿斯兰 analyses 宗教 through different epochs and civilizations to support his thesis. But it does not require such in depth analysis to conclude that 宗教 is a human construct, not a godly one. One only has to look at how the concentration of different 宗教s in different parts of the world largely corresponds to that region’的历史，尤其是征服和殖民的历史。同样，在整个历史中，宗教由于 强大的人类领袖的推动。君士坦丁’促进基督教，以统一罗马帝国在他的领导下的手段，以及伊斯兰教’军事征服也许是两个最杰出的早期例子。

阿斯兰 argues for a dehumanized version of 神.

In his own religious history he converted from Islam to Christianity, where the 神-man figure of Jesus Christ represents somewhat of a nadir for belief in a humanized 神. 阿斯兰 then converted from Christianity to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, which he claims rejects a humanized version of 神.

阿斯兰 wants human beings to stop foisting human attributes upon 神 and to adopt what he describes as a more all encompassing, peaceful, primal form of spirituality. Hope away!

阿斯兰  favors obliterating any distinction between creator and created and supports the view there is nothing else but 神. He says we should think of 神 as light passing through a prism refracting into countless colors. Things that, on the surface, seem to be separate and distinct realities, 是 in fact a single one- what we call 神. 阿斯兰 says the modern term for his kind of religious belief is ‘pantheism’.

Caution needs to be taken with the use of this word.  Pantheism can mean the belief that 神 is the universe, or the universe a manifestation of 神, which is the sense in which Aslam uses it. But its more common usage is to describe something very different- the belief in a multiplicity of 神s.

阿斯兰 acknowledges that his conception of 神 is much like that of the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was apparently one of Einstein’最喜欢的哲学家。斯宾诺莎（Spinoza）生于一个犹太家庭，他辩称只能存在“one substance”在宇宙中显示无限的属性，可以描述为‘nature’ or ‘God’.