Atheism, & ‘Becoming God’: The Least Scientific Sorts of Religiosity

In Aristotle’s view, man cannot by searching find out God. The mind could be applied to reasoning out of what God expects of man, but the mind could not in of itself discover God. So then, Aristotle believed that there exists a right way to live, and that it is man’s duty to search out and discover the right way to live. The right way to live consisted of how best to order one’s life, and how best to order one’s relationship with others, essence of his treatises that expounded on ‘happiness’ as objective of human existence.

In Aristotle’s view, Government or Governance is a natural outcome of definition of happiness as the best way to order one’s life, and the best way to relate with others. In his view, it was impossible that regardless of right treatment of one another, that there would not be demand for mediation of conflicting paths by some neutral entity, hence natural emergence of ‘government of the people, for the people, by the people’.

Naturally, Aristotle’s philosophy was rooted in the belief that God exists, a belief that is rooted in human experience, a belief that is scientific. For though we were not present, not a single human being believes that the Pyramids of Egypt emerged out the Egyptian desert by chance all by themselves.