A technique I like to employ when discussing a subject is to say: “OK, let’s say you’re right,” and then follow it to the logical conclusion.
For instance: I don’t believe there is a god. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is one. Let’s say he is a typical monotheist deity: created the world, has some rules he wants obeyed, desires our worship, never provided evidence of his existence except for some old books, and sends people to paradise or eternal torment after they die.
My question is: even assuming the above, why worship him at all?
I believe that this is a subject most theists never actually think about. Does God (Yahweh, Allah or a similar one) deserve worship? Why? Why should we ever make him an important part of our lives?
There are several common theist arguments, and I’ll try to answer each.
1- “Because otherwise you’ll go to hell.”
That’s nothing but an argument from intimidation. “Worship me… or else”. It’s not much different from supporting a brutal warlord, a dictator, or the Mafia. I’d like to believe that such a being should be opposed with all our might, not obeyed. Live free or die, and all that. We are not slaves, or playthings… to accept being so is cowardice, and a being who treats us as such is a monster.
2- “Because God created the entire universe, including us.”
The implication is that, if we owe our very existence to someone, our lives are his. But… do children belong to their parents? I don’t think so.
If there really was a god who created us, if he did communicate with us, he might deserve our thanks. But not worship. Not slavery. Sentient beings are not property — even if they are created by someone else (much like, if we ever create true artificial intelligence, such beings should have rights. Sentience deserves freedom.)
3- “Because God is good.”
This might deserve a full post about it, but, basically, the God that’s described in the Christian Bible or the Qur’an is, by human standards, anything but good. I could go into detail, but, basically, Richard Dawkins said it best:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Dawkins wasn’t trying to offend people when he wrote that. All of the above is in the Bible.
“Ah,” many theists will say, “but we can’t apply human standards to God.” That is, however, an argument from authority, and a circular argument. “God is good because God says so.” makes as much sense as “Hitler is good because Hitler says so.” And if we say that “good” is defined by “what God wants”, then morality becomes arbitrary, it becomes simply a question of pleasing a dictator deity. More about that in The Morality of God.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all of the above was incorrect (it isn’t), and that God, by rational standards, was indeed good. Even so… is that sufficient reason to worship a being? Respect him, probably. Admire him? Very likely. Use him as an example to follow? Maybe. But “worship”?
4- “Because God is far superior to us.”
Again… so what? If some advanced aliens arrived on Earth, would we worship them? Should we? Would they deserve our worship? And if they demanded it, what would it say of them? (Mostly, that they were pretty insecure advanced beings. 
)
You are much more advanced than ants; do you want ants to worship you?
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5. Time spent in worshipping/being with Him will give peace of mind which is scarce now-a-days in this cold society.
That is one more thing most theists say. I usually ask my friends who are theists the reason why they worship at all. That’s when they say that praying takes them away from all the anxieties and worries of their lives. Then I’d ask them why do they have to go to temple for worship. They’d say it’s God’s hang-out kind of thing. Then I’d ask them if God is omnipresent why can’t they pray Him wherever they please. Why temple alone? Their usual response would be a hurt expression and me being called a smart-ass.
Kiran: good answer, though I’d have written it as “because it makes me feel better.”
Still…
“Worship” is a misnomer. “Worship” just means “respecting”. The idea is “what is your highest ideal?” In ancient society, the options people presented were: the sun, various parts of nature, a king, or various idols. The Hebrews suggested that one’s highest ideal should be something bigger than all of these.
The only reason specified for “worshiping” God in the bible is:
“Your ideal needs to be bigger than pieces of wood”.
My highest ideal is ultimate intelligence and ultimate love. That is what I “worship”. And I don’t go to a temple, a church, or a synagogue to do so.
-micah
The devil made me do it..
Possibly the best apologist response I’ve heard to this is that, God being omniscient, knows all the answers to how we should think and act. So, when He says we should worship Him etc., It is like the worlds greatest chess player advising what move we should play. It would be foolish to not accept such sage advice.
Of course that isn’t really an answer but rather an appeal to authority, but one could question whether the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy really applies when you ask a question that presumes an omniscient being as the authority.
I’m not a Christian, but I’m going to go out on a limb and defend them on number three with the quote (which is not to say I disagree with the argument), but in fact as the Old Testament is playing out it should be considered that at the time the Hebrews didn’ believe God was the only God, but that he was the only Hebrew God. This doesn’t excuse the ridiculous evil and phobisms that God invites, but it puts into perspective the fact that this God (assuming he’s only the God of the Hebrews) put up this strict moral regimen because he felt that the Hebrews needed that kind of moral regimen to keep a healthy nation that would survive in the desert and keep them occupied with things that call for constant improvement; a motivation if you will to continue to hold Israel up to standards that would make it stronger and better than its neighbours. Thus for the Christians, I have to say this looks bad on them now that the theology has changed so that there is only one God and no competition. And in theory, Christians are supposed to be following the moral regimen of Jesus, and their trinity, not the purely Hebraic God (which puts them in a place of contradiction by maintaining Old Testament Scripts). Just putting it out there.
John Piper says
There are two reasons, I think, why we may stumble over God’s love for his own glory and his zeal to get men to praise him for it. One is that we don’t like humans who act that way, and the other is that the Bible seems to teach that a person ought not to seek his own glory. So people take offense at God’s self-exaltation both because of their own everyday experience, and also because of some Scripture.
We just don’t like people who seem to be very enamored by their own skill or power or looks. We don’t like scholars who try to show off their specialized knowledge or who recite for us all their recent publications and lectureships. We don’t like businessmen who go on and on about how shrewdly they have invested their pile of money and how they stayed right on top of the market to get in low and out high every time. We don’t like children to play one-upmanship hour after hour. And unless we are one of them we disapprove of women and men who dress, not functionally and simply and inoffensively, but instead aim to be in the latest style so they will be thought in or cool or punky or laid back or whatever the world this week says you’re supposed to look like.
Why don’t we like all that? I think it is because all those people are inauthentic. They are what Ayn Rand calls “second handers.” They don’t live from the joy that comes through achieving what they value for its own sake. Instead, they live second-hand from the praise and compliments of others. And we don’t admire second-handers. We admire people who are composed and secure enough that they don’t feel the need to shore up their weaknesses and compensate for their real deficiencies by trying to get as many compliments as possible.
It stands to reason therefore that any teaching which would seem to put God in the category of a second-hander would be suspect by Christians. And for many the teaching that God is seeking praise and wants to be admired and is doing things for his own name’s sake does in fact seem to put God in such a category. But should it? One thing we may say for certain: God is not weak and God has no deficiencies: “All things are from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). He always was, and whatever else is, owes its being to him and so can add nothing to him which is not already flowing from him. That is simply what it means to be the eternal God and not a creature. Therefore, God’s zeal to seek his own glory and to be praised by men cannot be owing to his need to shore up some weakness or compensate for some deficiency. He may seem, at a superficial glance, to be in the category of second-handers, but he is not like them and the superficial similarity must be explained another way. There must be some other motive that prompts him to seek the praise of his glory.
There is another reason from experience why we don’t like those who seek their own glory. The reason is not merely that they are inauthentic, trying to conceal weakness and deficiency, but also that they are unloving. They are so concerned for their own image and praise that they do not care much what happens to other people. This observation leads us to the biblical reason why it seems offensive for God to seek his own glory. 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Love seeks not its own.” Now this, indeed, seems to create a crisis, for if, as I think the Scriptures plainly teach, God makes it his ultimate goal to be glorified and praised, how then can he be loving? For “love seeks not its own.” For three weeks we have seen Scriptures that teach that God is for himself. “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, my glory I will not give to another” (Isaiah 48:11). But if God is a God of love, he must be for us. Is, then, God for himself or is he for us?
The Infinite Love of God in Pursuing His Own Praise
The answer which I want to try to persuade you is true is this: because God is unique as the most glorious of all beings and totally self-sufficient, he must be for himself in order to be for us. If he were to abandon the goal of his own self-exaltation, we would be the losers. His aim to bring praise to himself and his aim to bring pleasure to his people are one aim and stand or fall together. I think we will see this if we ask the following question.
In view of God’s infinitely admirable beauty and power and wisdom what would his love to a creature involve? Or to put it another way: What could God give us to enjoy that would show him most loving? There is only one possible answer, isn’t there? HIMSELF! If God would give us the best, the most satisfying, that is, if he would love us perfectly, he must offer us no less than himself for our contemplation and fellowship.
This was precisely God’s intention in sending his Son. Ephesians 2:18 says that Christ came that we might “have access in one Spirit to the Father.” And 1 Peter 3:18 says, “Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” God conceived the whole plan of redemption in love to bring men back to himself, for as the psalmist says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures for evermore” (16:11) . God is after us to give us what is best—not prestige, wealth, or even health in this life, but a full-blown vision of and fellowship with himself.
But now we are on the brink of what for me was a grand discovery and, I think also, the solution to our problem. To be supremely loving, God must give us what will be best for us and delight us most; he must give us himself. But what do we do when we are given or shown something excellent, something we enjoy? We praise it. We praise new little babies that manage not to be bent all out of shape in birth; “O, look at that nice, round head; and all that hair; and his hands, aren’t they big!” We praise a lover’s face after a long absence: “Your eyes are like the sky; your hair is like silk; O, you are beautiful to me.” We praise a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when we are down by three runs. We praise the trees along the St. Croix during an autumn boat trip.
But the great discovery I made, with the help of C.S. Lewis, was not only that we praise what we enjoy but that the praise is the climax of the joy itself. It is not tacked on later; it is part of the pleasure. Listen to the way Lewis describes this insight from his book on Psalms:
But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything —strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians and scholars. My whole, more general difficulty, about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value.
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are, the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95)
There’s the key: we praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate what we love and praise what we admire, our joy would not be full. Therefore, if God is truly for us, if he would give us the best and make our joy full, he must make it his aim to win our praise for himself. Not because he needs to shore up some weakness in himself or compensate for some deficiency, but because he loves us and seeks the fullness of our joy that can only be found in knowing and praising him, the most beautiful of all beings.
God is the one Being in all the universe for whom seeking his own praise is the ultimately loving act. For him self-exaltation is the highest virtue. When he does all things “for the praise of his glory” as Ephesians 1 says, he preserves for us and offers to us the only thing in all the world which can satisfy our longings. God is for us, and therefore has been, is now, and always will be, for himself. Praise the Lord! Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.