Why might gods be benevolent towards humanity?

The title says it all.

Currently working on a pantheon for a story idea I’ve had for awhile and looking at general mythology it seems that most of the time gods didn’t have the highest view of the humans they were watching over.

What reasons might something like divine beings have for being actively benevolent towards the little humans running around?

The obvious answer is Gods Need Prayer Badly, in which we feed them with our faith/worship/souls/whatever and so they have a built-in motive to keep us at least happy-ish, if not precisely in perfect harmony.

Of course, any presumption of omnibenevolence runs into The Problem With Evil and thus into The Evils of Free Will. A world with kind, caretaker deities is not compatible with a world in which Adolf Hilter or child cancer exists, so why do they? The answers are, roughly:

• The gods are not collectively omnipotent: they exist in a universe with rules that they have to follow and cannot make up as they wish.
• Not all of the gods are benevolent. They compete or strive against each other with mortals as proxies of some sort.
• There is something about free will and suffering that is essential to increasing a soul's nutritional value, so the gods can't eliminate it without cutting off their food supply.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 11th 2022 at 3:31:31 PM

Well, empathy and compassion are the first thoughts that come to mind: if they see us as people, if they have kind hearts, then they might well act benevolently towards us.

Otherwise, they might feel that treating us well leads us to being more likely to look well upon them, and thus to worship them.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jan 11th 2022 at 10:30:43 PM

Buddhism is your go-to codifier here—the bodhisatva's only become divine in the first place by being benevolent and helpful during life. Even after their elevation, they can only look forward to being released from the cycle of Samsara by becoming even more benevolent and transcending material desires.

While that may be a system designed to produce benevolent gods, it doesn't seem to be doing too good a job at making life pleasant for the ones of us who are still in the mortal part of the cycle. The benevolence isn't trickling down very fast, as it were.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a novel that tried to make those transcendentalist ideas accessible to the English reader and did a fairly good job of it, but those who ascend to the higher planes are shown as very expressly not interested in helping out the poor mortals.

These have been some great responses, I appreciate the feedback.

For a little clarification this came from an idea I had for a setting I was working on. Essentially, two Creator God brothers emerged from the primordial chaos and (like in many creation myths) crafted the first humans out of clay with divine magic to be tools. One of the brothers grew strangely fond of the funny little humans, while the other wanted to wipe them out and start over. They killed one another and from their corpses sprung the “New Gods”.

The New Gods who sprung from the Creator brother who defended humanity inherited his fondness for humans but with a twist. While the parent god viewed humanity more like a beloved pet, his New Gods shared a much more genuine sense of kinship with the humans since they were both “born” from basically the same divine materials (the Creator Gods had life-giving blood which infused the clay with soul which is how the New Gods arose from his dead body). While not as powerful as their parent god, the New Gods taught humans concepts like agriculture, hunting, architecture etc. so that may be able to sustain themselves while the New Gods were away monitoring for divine threats.

It's a cool concept, but whence comes strife, pain, war, disease, and so on if these gods are all nice and helpful? Is it that they are not, collectively or individually, all-powerful? This might be the case if they are not the whole of the original deities but rather some limited portion of them, with the remainder infused into Creation or something like that.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 11th 2022 at 10:02:51 AM

Yeah, they’re not all-powerful. They’re just fragments of their parent god, which is why they taught humans enough to be self-sufficient so that they had time to do their own self-assigned job.

Things such as strife, war, pain and the like came about when the OTHER Creator God’s body brought forth its own New Gods. These New Gods, as opposed to the others, were furious that their “father” was killed over something like the feeble humans and so took to undermining the other New Gods. Tending to their own domains to make sure there was no unnatural divinely-influenced phenomena and beating back the opposing New Gods when they get a bit too ballsy takes up a lot of their time.

Okay, so you have an opposed pantheon. You didn't say that before. You just asked why gods might be benevolent. If they were born of a parent deity that liked humans and wanted to help them, that's really all the cosmological explanation that's needed.

Okay, thanks. Sorry for not making that clearer at the start haha! ;D

I should point out that this cosmology sounds very much like the setting for the Diablo games. A greater deity splits into good and evil halves; they fight and kill each other; their bodies become Heaven and Hell and give birth to angels and demons who then run the place while continuing the war. The main difference is that humans come about sort of by accident and neither side really gives a damn about them.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 12th 2022 at 12:21:57 PM

Huh, that’s interesting. I actually was never really that acquainted with the Diablo lore since mechanically speaking those types of games were never really my cup of tea. It’s cool to have something to compare, though!

I can imagine how evil Divinities would straight up love Mankind though.

If some of mankind plays "Good", then they are a challenge to overcome.

If some of mankind plays "Evil", then it becomes a test to see how far down they are willing to fall and discover where their limits are drawn for depravities committed at the suggestions by the evil gods.

Evil gods that loves humanity, would ironically give Humanity a much better reason to "better" itself and become good people, rather than having "Good Gods" that rewards with love for doing "nothing", prompting Humanity to become evil and full of itself instead as there is no reason for it to better itself if they are spoiled regardless of their actions.

I dare say, make the gods evil, and you'll see how much the value of "choice" spikes in mankind who got the main stock in this ability to do so and "choose goodness" rather than have no reason to become better people in the first place in a world without evil.

I don't follow any part of your logic at all. History has shown that religions that teach that bad humans are punished with suffering in the afterlife does not prevent humans from being bad.

An evil god would want humans to be evil, not good.

A world without evil would exist because all humans are good. Human morality directly affects whether the world is good or evil; it is not independent from the world. Saying that world without evil would not motivate humans to be good is illogical. You have the cause and affect backwards.

Edited by shiro_okami on Jan 12th 2022 at 12:32:46 PM

Nope, it makes sense, my argument, that is.

To quote "Spoiled children turns into rotten adults."

Goodness must come from within the human soul, not from divine external factors.

That is why it is goodness and why "GOD" keeps its "100% hands off" approach regarding to humanity, neither punishing or rewarding it for anything it does or doesn't do.

God knows better than that.

An Evil God though, would create Goodness through the "Hardships" it creates in order to break humanity, by making Humanity muster the strength and all its virtues to overcome those hardships by its own choices, rather than divine promises of rewards down the line for doing so.

The purest acts of goodness, are those done for no reward at all.

That is what makes it "Good".

Not "Obligatory"... just "Good".

(End of part 1.)

I can agree with these statements. However, nearly everything in between doesn't make sense. Real life has shown that while hardships and disasters bring out the best in some people, it also brings out the worst in others. So this part of your argument does not hold up to reality.

Yes, humanity does not deserve rewards for doing what it should. But that is a separate issue from the existence of hardships and evil. A truly good humanity would choose to be good without the existence of any evil. A good humanity would not need any prodding by any god to do good. Goodness can exist and be appreciated without the existence of evil.

Now we're getting into questions of theology and philosophy that go well beyond the subject of this thread.

It is perfectly fine to have a fictional cosmology in which some gods are benevolent towards humans, guiding them and helping them prosper, while others are malevolent, trying to drive them towards evil and/or exterminate them. The main question from my point of view is: what do the gods get out of these actions?

Are the nice gods nice because they it feels good to them and the mean gods mean because they're dicks? Are the gods Made of Good or Made of Evil by the nature of their creation and so they have no moral volition? Do the gods get power or currency from worship or from souls that come to them after death? Is there a cosmic Balance of Good and Evil that can be shifted by humans' actions?

If good souls go to Heaven and bad souls go to Hell, as in many religions, then there is an inherent motivation for the gods that run Heaven to try to get people to be good and the gods that run Hell to try to get them to be evil. Of course, you could always create a satirical cosmology in which the gods detest humans and actively try to make them go to the other place. That sounds like something one might find in Discworld.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 12th 2022 at 3:08:12 PM

Why does some think that my discussion of "Goodness" and "Gods of Evil" can only be applied to Reality as the basic standard?

In the work of the authors, infinite-universes are available, each similar,each different and some significantly different, than from the alternative that is known as "Reality".

When I discuss, I always pick of the alternative-verses and how it functions, for example.

This is the "Writer's Block" forum after all.

If I wanted to discuss theology, I would head for the proper thread in a different forum to do so.

...

Even so, "Benevolent" Gods needs to be taken with some scrutiny.

Edited by TitanJump on Jan 12th 2022 at 5:18:01 PM

Because you are taking an unoriginal, realistic scenario and applying a supernatural origin to it. There is no need to speculate about certain scenarios if they already exist in reality.

Hardships exist in reality, so there is no need to use fiction to speculate how humans react to them. Yes, you can apply any result to a realistic scenario in fiction, but they are not guaranteed to be believable.

The "good humanity" that I described does not exist in reality. So it's not like I am making a special effort to focus on realism.

If you want a discussion that avoids realism, then come up with a truly unrealistic concept instead of taking a realistic concept and slapping divine origin on top of it.

Edited by shiro_okami on Jan 12th 2022 at 11:31:20 AM

Let's just not derail this thread and return to the topic of the question, everyone.

...

Reasons for active benevolence towards humans by divinities:

Honestly, I draw nothing but blanks here.

Edited by TitanJump on Jan 12th 2022 at 5:33:27 PM

i like the idea of gods being grandiosely malevolent to mortals they dislike, grandiosely benevolent to mortals they favor, and grandiosely ambivalent to mortals they don't have relationships with ; so, one creature's good god can be another creature's evil god - the reason i emphasized grandiosity is because i like the idea that gods are basically humans Turned Up To Eleven ~

I gave a whole bunch of ideas... are none of those compatible with your story?

My story?

It is not my thread and I am not the one asking.

You need to correct the number of arrows, I believe.

No, I forgot who the OP was. That's my bad.

In the most common forms of Buddhism divine beings are not tasked with protecting humanity, so they tend not to be active guardian spirits or anything like that. Most of them act instead as role models and hold out the promise of a better existence for those who follow the eightfold way. The more people who strive toward enlightenment, the better a world this will be, according to doctrine.

But if you want more activist benevolent Gods, then Hinduism may be a better model. The various Devas, including Brahma, Vishnu, and so forth can be appealed to like other pantheons. Like most pantheons, the Gods protect human beings who manifest righteous behavior, make sacrifices, and avoid taboos. Also, like most pantheons, the motivations of the Gods are not closely examined. I find the Hindu cosmology more complex and self-consistent than most other, Christianity included. The universe is structured such that manifesting certain traits will more properly align one with it, leading to an avoidance of suffering. The Gods follow this same karmic principle, and can be seen as the avatars of these traits. Therefore the Gods are "good" because they represent ("are made out of" in D&D parlance) the path anyone must follow to free oneself from the cycle of desire and suffering.

I'd love to see that translated into a fictional universe.