Maybe there is a God who made everything and maybe there isn't. Assign a probability to that.

Look around and consider what God made, if he did. Quantum Theory to snowflakes to butterflies to the biosphere to the cosmos to sex to families to friendship to music to everything else that is good to enjoy.

Forget all other concepts you've heard about God except that he's a person. What's the risk that he's going to think you're a tad ungrateful if you never thank him for anything he's made?

This is a bet we are never going to be able to hedge. More anon.

This is essentially Pascal's Wager. It's a classic burden-of-proof fallacy. The problem is that if you're willing to give non-zero probabilities to arbitrary hypotheses, you have an equally strong argument for obeying every other religion and indeed every other completely loony idea that you're capable of conceiving--like, if you don't wear enormous rubber bug-eyes all day every day, you'll spend eternity pulling out carpet tacks with your nose in a bright pink unicycle factory.

More deeply, it's animism. The reason that "the universe has an author who rewards obedience and punishes disobedience" seems a more likely hypothesis than "when you die, you go to a pink unicycle factory," is that we've got a lot of wired-in cognitive machinery for reading people's minds. We're so good at reading our fellow humans' mental states from subconscious cues like eye movement and vocal intonation, that we sometimes sense personality even where it doesn't exist. Sort of like the way ants go through larva-feeding actions when triggered by strange bugs with just the right pheromones, or the way people baby their cats because cats' faces trigger our baby-recognition machinery (large eyes in proportion to the face, etc.).

-- Ben Kovitz

The focus here is not our own eternal bliss but whether a God who made everything, if he existed, would deserve our gratitude. That is an important difference for me to Pascal's Wager. Would such a God deserve gratitude? A secondary question is: would the daily habit of thanking someone external to ourselves do us good as human beings? What do you think?

A good topic. Thanks for bringing it up! Here are two thoughts:

(1) I've felt gratitude and received gratitude but I don't really understand it. So here are some speculations. Gratitude is part of the vocabulary of emotions and gestures through which humans navigate throughout their social groups. It seems that gratitude is a feeling of indebtedness, felt toward people who have given you something for which you haven't paid and for which they ask no payment. Nevertheless, you must give payment, and the payment comes in the form of increased social status. I understand that there are entire cultures where combat for social status happens almost entirely through gift-giving.

I'm not sure, though, that a God would deserve gratitude, since God isn't a member of a human society jockeying for social position. To see the strangeness of the idea of gratitude to God, consider how much we "owe" the Sun. Every day, the Sun showers us with life-giving radiation, fueling the growth of the food that we and our prey eat. We couldn't live without the gifts of the Sun--really, the Sun has given us the gift of life itself--and the Sun asks nothing in return. But it's a bit odd to feel or show gratitude toward a big ball of radiation-spewing plasma. A being that could have created the universe must be even more bizarre than the Sun, and consequently a less likely target for gratitude.

Nevertheless, the gratitude response can be triggered by all sorts of things. So maybe deserve is simply the wrong question. (I guess this is the same view that I proposed on Why Bother Being Angry.) The person to whom I feel the most gratitude is Beethoven, and he's certainly not a member of a social group that I navigate in, nor is he going to benefit from higher social status. "Deserved" or not, when people suppose that a person-like being created our clouded hills and mountains green, and all the daffodils and termites' hills that man hath ever seen--the gratitude response is triggered. And that's that.

(2) Throughout all different cultures, people have acted toward their gods in all the same ways that they act toward their members of highest social status, usually taken much further than when done toward people. Kneeling, bowing, beseeching, building monuments, respectfully obeying commandments in sacred texts, respectfully obeying their gods' representatives on Earth, offering gifts, celebrations in the gods' honor, prayers of thanks, etc.--expressions of gratitude toward gods abound and even dwarf the rest of the culture in some cases.

A practice so ubiquitous and so powerful surely has an important biological function. We might not know what it is, just as we aren't sure what purpose art serves or cat-owning serves, but gratitude toward gods and the consequent rituals and practices almost certainly benefit the people who practice them.

So I think the answer to your second question is: yes, thanking a deity would do us some good. But I don't know why. Of course, I can speculate. Probably there are many, many fairly unrelated reasons why the practice is so widespread and stable. Each individual reason might be fairly small. Here are a few possibilities:

• It gives you perspective: you can better appreciate what you've got, and how easily it could all be lost.

• Another perspective it gives: you can better see how little power you have over things.

• Another perspective: you can better see how complex and varied the world is, how it is beyond your imagination's ability to conceive--how you couldn't possibly have made or even thought of anything so magnificent.

• Another perspective: you can better appreciate the beauty and design of the world. Thus you feel like you belong in the world, and that the world is a good place to be, even though life is thorny sometimes. And you see better what is truly important versus what is merely petty.

• It reinforces the notion of a god that all in the tribe must obey, which serves the usual goals of social coordination.

• It reinforces the notion that a leader is properly a leader not just because of brute power, but, equally importantly, because of wisdom and benevolence.

Maybe someone else can come up with some more.

--Ben Kovitz

It's undoubtedly cool to want to thank Beethoven. I suggest we kick this around some more. When I have time. Or even better, before then.

I don't find much fault with the above list of reasons, but most of them don't strike me as biological functions. -- Tom Kreitzberg