Conquering the Gods (2022) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

Humanity needs authorities. Authorities are a source of wisdom greater than our own. Authorities may guide us to wiser choices. When they are above us, they provide a common bond between us. Whatever I may think, i defer to the authority I recognize and if someone else recognizes the same authority, then the world becomes not just my perception vs. your perception, it becomes what the authority says plus my perception vs. what the authority days plus your perception. The authority becomes our common denominator. Such authorities in societies become the common denominators that act as glue, holding the society together because it provides a common point of reference to which, we can resolve our differences in perception.
Authorities provide the objective framework against which all our perceptions can be tested and without which they cannot be compared. What you perceive is not better or more insightful than what I perceive unless we have a third reference against which both our perceptions can be compared. My perception is more in keeping with what the authority says and therefore, my perception is superior to yours, or vice versus.
The gods gave us authorities and a One Great God gave us a more universally applicable source of authority.
Stewards of God, priests, kings, wise people, learned people ... all gave us sources of authority that allowed us to objectively weigh our views against a greater authority.
History gave us a source of authority for those that knew history could see what had worked and failed in the past and compare competing views to those lessons.
Science is an authority if rigidly followed. The theory is that there is a reality and science is a system for suppressing our subjectivity to examine reality objectively.
But what happens to us if we begin to overthrow our sources of authority?
What happens if we decide that God is a fairy tale told by ignorant people to explain what they didn't understand?
What if we decide that history is a fiction made up by the victorious to make future generations believe the victors were right?
What if we decide that the wisdom of the past is valueless because we know more now than they did then?
What if we discover that those we designate as "scientists" didn't really follow the methods of science and what is presented as objective truth is really mostly just subjective opinion?
What if we think that the learned who have most studied a subject have been deluded by their own subjective prejudices into selectively, subjectively building their subject knowledge and really their opinions are not necessarily more learned than out own because false assumptions do not make facts?
What if we build fantastic mathematical constructs of existence and then realize that there is nowhere in reality that 1 and 1 are equal? "X" - "X" may = 0. But this X minus any other X = either >0 or <0 but never 0. X + X never in reality = 2X.
When Emmanuel Kant wrote his "Prolegomena to All Future Knowledge" explaining the "Limit of Self-awareness" he explained that we never experience the world directly, we only experience changes in our sensory inputs that may or may not be responses to change in a physical world beyond ourselves, he recognized that the only existence of which any of us is aware is our self which our thoughts correctly or incorrectly interpret as indicative of what may be changing in a world beyond ourselves. He called this sensory experience, "phenomena" and the theoretical world beyond our self, "noumena."
David Hume contributed to this isolation by pointing out that we also never experience the present, only what is already past and therefore no longer existing. So, we never actually experience existence at all.
If you are not already familiar with these issues you should take a few hours or years, whatever it takes you to grasp the implications of this, to not just think it through, but test it by trying to incorporate this awareness into your sense of reality. Death could show up next to you in the next fraction of a second and you could blunder right into it because you simply didn't perceive it as being so close.
And while you are absorbing that, remember, this means there is no way for you to know if there is a true authority that can guide you on your way through life. There is no way for you and another person, assuming there are other people to agree on an authority to act as your common denominator.
There is no objective way for you to determine what is real or not, but if you don't, you will die. So, for you to live at all, you will have to rely on ... faith. You will have to choose to believe that existence is not all phenomena, that at the origin of those phenomena lies the noumena, objective reality. And if you are not to live in constant conflict with the theoretical people and things around you, you will ultimately have to accept that there is a true authority, a one true authority on which to separate intelligences might agree.
So having overthrown the gods, you must now find them again, whether they are gods or one God, whether science, past experience, wisdom or learned opinion, recognizing that you are alone you must assume you are not. Recognizing that you are the only authority you actually know is real, ("Cogito ergo sum," and all), you must find an authority greater than yourself, or at least the belief in one.
But this is too simple, and you didn't think this was going to be simple, did you? For you to find the authority you can believe in, and hope others will believe in, you must find an authority that can be found and once found, will free you from having to find it, because if you can't choose not to find it you can't choose to find it.
But pursuing the reasoning behind that gets very complicated and I'm not inclined to explain it in a context no one might choose to read.

Related themes

GodsRebellionRecognitionAuthorityCommon Denominators