I think stories about gods have reason and purpose. These shared stories are part of the larger knowledge we share called culture. Culture is what binds us together.
But I don’t think gods have purpose anymore than the universe has purpose.
Your thoughts?
I’m not sure I understand the question, but here goes.
“Stories about gods”. If we’re talking about Apollo and Odin and those guys, then doubtless there is a cultural element to them; a means of underscoring life lessons and wisdoms that could be considered entirely human in origin. On the other hand, one could believe that the stories of the gods represent “intimations of Divinity” that are inherent in humans and have an outside source. What precedes what? Do people develop theologies and moralities because they intuit them then attribute them to gods, or do people find certain things successful, then create gods to give more authority to the precepts? The latter would be a cultural explanation. The former would be something else entirely; perhaps something we cannot explain in a natural way.
I’m not too familiar with mythology, but at one time I became very interested in Zeus as represented in the Iliad. Somtimes, he is just a very powerful guy, definitely not worthy of admiration, let alone adoration. Sometimes, he is a “principle”; something very much like an Aristotelian “first cause”. Sometimes he is something very close to the Supreme Being, not terribly distant from the Judeo-Christian God. In reading the Iliad, one can assume either that the thuggish version of Zeus is meant as a convenient “Deux ex machina”, and everybody knew it (rather like the witches in Macbeth) or that this version was for the consumption of the “goundlings” whose ignorance made them capable of understanding deity only in this way. The other portraits of Zeus in the Iliad; the ones in which he really does seem worthy of adoration, seem perhaps to appeal to a more thinking group (and, yes, truly religious ones). Those portraits, it seems to me, seem to arise from “intimations of Divinity”; something Christians might think of as a product of grace. But for sure, the portraits of Zeus in the Iliad are absolutely not consistent, and few listeners could have been unaware of that. As a purely cultural device, it would have failed miserably. As a combination of a dramatic device and a very complex, “intuitive” concept that would have doubtful “cultural utility” in the culture in which it was introduced, it works. Others might think differently about the following, but I do think the clever Tom Wolfe touched on this in his otherwise hilarious portrait of the “Zeus Revival” in “Bonfire of the Vanities”. In the absence of any real knowledge of the Judeo-Christian God, people still “find” Him, even if only in Zeus, because something in earnest souls points them toward it, like a magnet to true North.
If I understand the second statement you made, it seems an irrelevant concern. If there is anything like the Judeo-Christian God, He is his own purpose. Your statement seems to suggest an extrinsic purpose, which would imply yet another, greater Being giving Him purpose, in which case the “targeted” or “perceived” or “posited” God would not be God at all, but a very powerful creature of perhaps the “real God” or maybe of a “mesne god”.
