If the Bible and every other holy book were never written, would people still believe in a God?

I think that scripture primarily serves as a means to transmit the information. I don’t think that religion can flourish without somehow immortalizing itself on paper (or in stone). This doesn’t need to be a formal “bible,” but Greek epic poems, cave drawings, and songs of worship all deal with a “holy” subject.

So, I would answer two ways:
1. Can a religion exist without a handbook? Yes.
2. Can a religion exist without being passed down in a semi-permanent way? Maybe, but it’s not likely.

Also, shout out to my morning Fluther crew!

Yes. Many people need something to believe in. Were there no holy books, there would be an oral tradition of religion. I’m sure at some point the some holy works were considered too precious to befoul by writing, and thus were only in the spoken tongue and we’ve lost them. But people, I think, would still need something to believe in.

Yes. When people need explanations for things they don’t understand, they often turn to the paranormal. That’s why superstition still prevails in a society where all logical evidence points to statistics and science.

Don’t walk under that ladder or I want to thank God for this Superbowl win

We all need explanations and most people are not good about taking personal responsibility. “This situation is the fault of something outside of me. It can’t possibly be my fault.”

I’m also an atheist when it comes to leprechauns but someone somewhere believes they’re real.

Even probability is a force outside yourself (that’s what I believe in). The difference between probability and God is that probability doesn’t have the ability to care about you.

It’s natural for people to be curious about their origins. The moment that the question “why am I here?” was first asked the concept of God was invented. As long as this curiosity is sustained people will believe in God. Faith does not rely on the instructions from a holy text. Religion, however, is a different question.

Wasn’t most of African mythology passed through story-telling anyway? I think that religion doesn’t necessarily need a book, but having one helps to cement the idea.

Most holy books were written due to the influence of a prophet. Before the prophets, there were other ideas about God. If we are talking about the prophets not appearing and thus the books were never written, then we would not have the conception of God that many people hold today.

If the prophets had appeared and the messages were spread orally rather than through writing then we would probably hold similar conceptions, but would spend much more time talking about them socially rather than getting caught up in our own personal interpretations.

the answer yes, religion itself existed before the Bible was written or any of the book inside of it were.

Adam had Religion, he spoke with God.

Abraham had religion, was a choosen prophet, he didnt have the record of Christ yet.

Moses was a Prophet of God before he was given the 10 Commandments.

The Books are what help teach us and instruct us. They are a road-map to follow. God will always reveal his word.

The best reason religion will always exist. Revelation.

Archeologists and anthropologists have never discovered an atheistic culture, whether they could write or not.

@steelmarket great point

It was also never proven that they couldn’t fly around like superman.

@steelmarket: Well it goes to back to Occam’s razor, doesn’t it? “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” Otherworldly explanations are easier to believe than scientific ones in a pre-science world. I mean, the grain got a weird fungus so we were all on LSD might be the RIGHT answer, but “she’s a witch!” probably makes a lot more sense.

After all, I saw her start to fly around. Then my feet turned into claws!

Oh boy! I love what-if questions!

But this one is simple. The reason why people believe in a god is because we evolved to do it. We evolved to do it, because we needed an acute discomfort not knowing how the world works, but not so acute that it terrorized us into inaction.

We are driven to figure things out because people who could figure stuff out were more likely to survive long enough to reproduce. Therefore we evolved a powerful desire to figure things out, which is accompanied by an acute discomfort if we can’t figure it out.

There are, however, things that we can’t figure out. This would leave us in such distress that we’d be unable to survive. The mechanism to address this distress is the explanation that explains nothing, while appearing to explain everything.

God is necessary for most people to keep on going. However, a new kind of human is growing: one with a drive for knowledge, but without a disabling response to situations that are unknown.

Anyway, God would be invented no matter what.

Absolutely. The word would be passed for generations and then continually reinvented to suit this particular generations needs; just as it is now (for better or worse). I think the books, if you will, are guides, a retelling, a written history. I think you would be hard pressed to find many followers that live the book to the letter or for that matter believe because of a book.

It seems to me that the human mind is naturally lead to the God hypothesis by a process of analogy. We’re aware of our own ability to bring order out of chaos; we do this whenever we fashion a pot from formless clay, chip an edged weapon out of a lump of flint, etc. We rarely observe anything resembling such order emerge from less ordered states without the intervention of some intelligence. By analogy, we conclude that all order must be the result of such an act of volition, which must in turn be the product of a personal intelligence. And considering the scale and complexity of the ordered phenomena we observe, we imagine that this organizing intelligence must be far more capable and powerful than ourselves.

It’s a form of “reverse engineering” really; we perceive an object that our sense for pattern-recognition identifies as possessing order, and we imagine how we might have gone about creating it. What materials and tools might we have used? What might have been our motives? Then we project all of these human-scale creative experiences into an entity sufficiently grand to account for our material world.

Virtually all creation stories begin with a condition of chaos, variously described as darkness, water, mud, etc., and then relate how an intelligence acts to cause order to emerge. Given a limited amount of empirical resources, it’s probably an inevitable logical waystation in the quest to make sense of the universe.

@empress – old Occam’s razor can surely cut both ways.

Definite answer: Yes.

More elaborately: Yes, but not specifically the ones defined by the books. Like gods in general, but not THE God or anything.

The human race started without any of these things and look where we are now.

Just to be annoyingly p.c., I’d like to point out that “African mythology” was indeed passed down through storytelling exactly like “Asian” mythology, “European” mythology, and all other preliterate mythologies.
I’d also like to point out that there was never an “African” mythology. Africa, as Sarah Palin reminded us (G. Bush also noted this in about 2003),
is a really big “country”. It’s so big that people in, say, Egypt (did you know that’s in Africa?) are only recently able to speak on a regular basis with people in, say, Swaziland
(have you ever heard of Swaziland?), and even now they must rely on translators. People in these locations never shared mythologies.

I am tired of people being so ignorant about Africa. (And frightened.) How can we take up space in the world when we think “Africans” did this or that. “Africans” come in 8,000 varieties. oh I forgot: the way we take up so much space is to remain intentionally ignorant of the existence of anyone not exactly like our imperial Selves

Well sure. People believed in a god or gods long before the books were written.

I’m agreed with you guys, typically the religion creates its bible. The bible doesn’t create the religion (except in the case where John Smith read a secret bible out of a hat).

Yes.

I think Joseph Smith read a secret bible out of some metallic things given to him by angels also. Yeah, the urim and the thumim. I love those words more than life itself….

@susanc please don’t mock my faith

@willbrawn: If you’re a Mormon, I think susanc was about as far from mocking as carrots are from ice cream. I could be wrong. But she was trying to counter an earlier point, not mock Mormonism. A thicker skin might be needed.

If factual accuracy is considered mocking, maybe you have the wrong faith. Where was she wrong?

it wouldn’t necessarily be the same religion, but people would no doubt still believe in some higher being.

You just need to step out at night and count the stars, or watch a sunset that sets the sky on fire…........I’d still believe in a being higher than myself. Am interested in art and that really motivates me, but try as hard as we may, we’ll ever be able to compete with nature…...it’s just too awesome to ignore.

Yes. It is in our nature to believe that something out there exists that is bigger than we are.

Didn’t people believe in Gods, even before we had the bible?