humans are predisposed by their very nature to imagine gods

humans aren't interested in worshipping "inhuman" gods

likely DO NOT exist

Therefore, it is prima facie reasonable to reject belief in the ultimate reality of any gods

the basic argument here is that humans are predisposed by their very nature to imagine gods--human faces on reality. Therefore, it is prima facie reasonable to reject belief in the ultimate reality of any gods. They are, at best, metaphorical or analogical constructs of the mind

I'm not going to waste time endlessly repeating the same points until you decide to address them rather than your strawman caricatures.

That's why I gave a link to the review of Guthrie's book

supports the argument with voluminous examples of how humans constantly personify everything in their environment.

I don't mean to shock you, but I am an atheist

Do they not use their false gods in an effort to try to cope with their difficulties?

Surely you can agree with me that Christians pray to God in order to seek his aid to cope with life's difficulties

Where we disagree, I think, is just in that part about ALL gods being imaginary.

humans are predisposed by their very nature to imagine gods

"In general, humans aren't interested in worshipping "inhuman" gods..." Again, anthropologist Guthrie gives a great deal of data to support this claim

A case in point was Tillich's "God is Dead" movement in the 1960s. As gods go, human ones are far more popular in human societies than animal and abstract gods. I'm surprised that you find this counterintuitive.

55.88873885%

I'm just making the point that there is a perfectly good explanation for the widespread belief in gods that has more to do with the way humans think than in external reality.

But even deist versions of God tend to have very human traits--e.g. the ability to plan and emotional states.

but it is clear that the majority of gods proposed throughout human history have been false ones

They are half-baked attempts

This is not just about any belief. It is about the way we learn new experiences

The ones who believe in false gods believe in imaginary gods, don't they?

Why are you having so much difficulty in agreeing with the obvious?

If I understand you correctly, you never pray to God for guidance. You are the only one in a position to know that

I'm sorry that you take it as a personal attack that an atheist thinks your god is imaginary

Absolutely. I have a healthy imagination, just as you do

To the extent that most gods are false gods, it is more likely that any particular god is likely to be false

All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism.  But you cannot do that with Christianity.  It is precisely the story of a great Miracle.  A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian.

The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle;  they begin much further back.  When a man who has had only the ordinary modern education looks into any authoritative statement of Christian doctrine, he finds himself face to face with what seems to him a wholly 'savage' or 'primitive' picture of the universe.  He finds that God is supposed to have had a 'Son,' just as if God were a mythological deity like Jupiter or Odin.  He finds that this 'Son' is supposed to have 'come down from Heaven', just as if God had a palace in the sky from which he sent down his 'Son' like a parachutist.  He finds that this 'Son' then 'descended into Hell'- into some land of the dead under the surface of a (presumably) flat earth- and thence 'ascended' again, as if by a balloon, into his Father's sky-palace, where he finally sat down into a decorated chair placed a little to his Father's right.  Everything seems to presuppose a conception of reality which the increase of our knowledge has been steadily refuting for the last two thousand years and which no honest man in his senses could return to today.

It is this impression which explains the contempt, and even disgust, felt by many people for the writings of modern Christians.  When once a man is convinced that Christianity in general implies a local 'Heaven', a flat earth, and a God who can have children, he naturally listens with impatience to our solutions of particular difficulties and our defences against particular objections.  The more ingenious we are in such solutions and defences the more perverse we seem to him.  'Of course,' he says, 'once the doctrines are there, clever people can invent clever arguments to defend them, just as, when once a historian has made a blunder he can go on inventing more and more elaborate theories to make it appear that it was not a blunder.  But the real point is that none of these elaborate theories would have been thought of if he had read his documents in the first instance.  In the same way, is it not clear that Christian theology would never have come into existence at all if the writers of the New Testament had had the slightest knolwedge of what the real universe is actually like?'  Thus, at any rate, I used to think myself.  The very man who taught me to think- a hard, satirical atheist (ex-Presbyterian) who doted on the Golden Bough and filled his house with the products of the Rationalist Press Association- thought in the same way; and he was a man as honest as the daylight, to whom I here willingly acknowledge an immense debt.  His attitude to Christianity was for me the starting point of adult thinking; you may say it is bred in my bones.  And yet, since those days, I have come to regard that attitude as a total misunderstanding.

.... many paragraphs later...

Let us now apply this to the 'savage' or 'primitive' articles of the Christian creed.  And let us admit at once that many Christians (though by no means all) when they make these assertions do have in mind just those crude mental pictures which so horrify the sceptic.  When they say that Christ 'came down from Heaven' they do have a vague image of something shooting or floating downwards out of the sky.  When they say that Christ is the 'Son' of 'the Father' they may have a picture of two human forms, the one looking rather older than the other.  But we now know that the mere presence of these mental pictures does not, of itself, tell us anything about the reasoanableness or absurdity of the thoughts they accompany.  If absurd images meant absurd thought, then we should all be thinking nonsense all the time.  And the Christians themselves make it clear that the images are not to be identified with the thing believed.  They may picture the Father as a human form, but they also maintain that He has no body.  They may picture Him older than the son, but they also maintain the one did not exist before the other, both having existed from all eternity.  I am speaking, of course, about Christian adults.  Christianity is not to be judged from the fancies of children any more than medicine from the ideas of the little girl who believed in horrid red things [the girl assumed all little red pills were poisonous because of the color red growing up].

At this stage I must turn aside to deal with a rather simpleminded illusion.  When we point out that what the Christians mean is not to be identified with their mental pictures, some people say, 'In that case, would it not be better to get rid of the mental pictures, and of the language which suggests them, altogether?'  But this is impossible.  The people who recommend it have not noticed that when they try to get rid of man-like, or as they are called, 'anthropomorphic', images they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kind.  'I don't believe in a personal God,' says one, 'but I do believe in a great spiritual force.'  What he has not noticed is that the word 'force' has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation.  'I don't believe in a personal God,' says another, 'but I do believe we are all parts of one great Being which moves and works through us all' - not noticing that he has merely exchanged the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.  A girl I knew was brought up by 'higher thinking' parents to regard God as a perfect 'substance'; in later life she realised that this had actually led her to think of HIm as something like a vast tapioca pudding.  (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca).  We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity, but we are mistaken.  If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophica conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always acompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the man-like images aroused by Christian theology.  For man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous experience.  ... If God exists at all it is not unreasonable to suppose [nonetheless] that we are less unlike Him than anything else we know.  No doubt we are unspeakably different from HIm; to that extent all man-like images are false.  But those images of shapeless mists and irrational forces which, unacknowledged, haunt the mind when we think we are rising to the conception of impersonal and absolute Being, must be very much more so.  For images, of the one kind or of the other, will come; we cannot jump off our own shadow.

...

The assertion that God has a Son was never intended to mean that He is a being propogating His kind by sexual intercourse:  and so we do not alter Christianity by rendering explicit the fact that 'sonship' is not used of Christ in exactly the same snese in which it is used of men.  But the assertion that Jesus turned water into wine was meant perfectly literally, for this refers to something which, if it happened, was well within the reach of our senses and our language.  When I say, 'My heart is broken,' you know perfectly well that I don't mean anything you could verify at a post-mortem.  But when I say, 'My bootlace is broken,' then, if your own observation shows it to be intact, I am either lying or mistaken.

...

Nothing in this chapter helps us to a decision about the probability or improbability of the Christian claim.  We have merely removed a misunderstanding in order to secure for that question a fair hearing.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of

Lewis's point is that your objection is rooted in ignorance.

...The essential objection to anthropomorphic language that Lewis would give to you is that you are just making a cheap potshot, because you are unable to replace the anthropomorphic language with any type of language construct that is not also metaphorical.

Lewis's comment about not reading books written for grown-ups clearly applies in this thread here.  Christianity has NEVER thought that God was of the sort that you suggest in this thread.  Neither has Judaism.  This is not a new point made by CS Lewis, which is one of his points.  Therefore, you are not acting rationally in raising it, again at least in regards to Christianity.

The upshot is that in fact we are in agreement.  You reject an anthropomorphic God... but so do Christians...We are in agreement.

The difference is that we Christians understand that we still are confined to using language to discuss and describe God, and apparently we also possess a certain mental superiority that you do not, as well, that being that we are able to recognize that when we choose to use anthropomorphic language, it is mainly a mental approximation.  This ability you seem to lack.

So (again, in regards to Christianity at least), for you to continue to raise anthropomorphism as an argument only reveals that you prefer to argue against a strawman.  Christianity is not guilty of the charge you are raising, and never has been.

"I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man." Hosea 11:9.

Does this new knowledge change the way you view Christianity?  Does learning that it also rejects anthropomorphism in a very real way and understands its use and limitations and purpose increase its credibility in your eyes?  Nope.   And what does that actually say about yoru frame of mind and the arguments that proceed from it?

If you cannot understand books written for grown-ups, you shouldn't talk about them.