God made humans. Who made God?

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Both.

The neat thing about spiritual logic is that it’s almost always circular. What this means is that your work isn’t really done until you’ve arrived at a conclusion where, if you reversed the order of elements and made the same proposition of truth, both propositions seem equally valid.

God made man, in that God created a world in which man could evolve, and man made God, in that it took man hundreds of thousands of years after we evolved to arrive at a passable conception of God, with very little in the way of help from Him on doing that. But we’re not done yet, we need to realize a transcendent union of those two frames.

The story of civilization is the story of humans learning to glorify God. The Egyptians didn’t build all those pyramids just because Pharoah told them to. If Pharoah didn’t tell the Egyptians to build pyramids, then the Egyptians would have lost faith in Pharoah because Pharoah obviously doesn’t understand God.

Think about a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe. What reason would these people have at all to build a city, to stop farming and to collect into these big, dirty, ugly metropolises? Many ancient cities had population densities greater than New York City despite not being able to build skyscrapers. They just crowded them in like sardines.

Cities don’t just happen. Every person living in a city is a person that has to be fed with food produced on land outside the city by a farmer who didn’t live in the city. We take it for granted now because one farmer can feed thousands of people. But in those days each individual farmer could only feed relatively far fewer people. So a city was a humongous investment from a civic standpoint.

The smart thing to do would have been to spread out, decentralize. It took vision to centralize. What kinds of visions? Religious visions. Visions of grandeur, visions that promised more than ‘mere’ ‘dumb’ existence. Pharoah would issue a command, and his courtiers would take that command and plan and organize its carrying out, and then hand those plans to minor bureaucrats to hand to managers to hand to laborers.

These people all had to have a common reason to cooperate, to actually do what their superiors were telling them to do. How could that reason be anything other than religious?

Without religion, without the ability to dream up realities that are greater than mere mundane, ordinary reality, we’d still be living brutish, nasty, and short lives. The common laborer was far, far, far removed from Pharoah, but he got to participate in the grand plan and bask in the completion of the shared goals of his society. And he could rely on Pharoah’s soldiers for protection while he did that.

Thousands of years after Egypt, the Hebrews invented monotheism. Thousands of years after that, the story of the Hebrews culminated with Jesus. Jesus remade the Western world in his image. Europe finally got the god that everyone could believe in.

Christianity built the modern world. The modern world gave us philosophers that could wield unimaginable power, far more than Pharoah ever could, to sift through the accumulated detritus of the world to answer questions about exactly how all this happened.

We are giants standing on the shoulders of the giants that were themselves standing the shoulders of even greater giants.

The most fascinating thing about Christian heroism and morality is that traditionally, being as good as Jesus was was an aspiration. Now, merely being as good as Jesus won’t even get you mentioned in the history books. We are the gods we once worshipped.

God made us, then we made God, then we became Him.