The Doctrine of God  

"Much has been made by critics of the human origin of the belief in God and of the anthropomorphic character of our conception of Deity. It has been said that "God is the noblest work of man" ; and to Heine we owe the taunting remark that "if God made man in his own image, man made haste to return the compliment." Back in the early days of Greek philosophy Xenophanes satirized the anthropomorphisms of his day by saying that "the Ethiopians make their gods black-haired and flat-nosed, and the Thracians make theirs red-haired and blue-eyed." "Yes," he added, "and if the beasts had hands and could paint and carve, the horses would make their gods like horses, and the oxen make theirs like oxen." The assumption underlying such utterances as these, which have been repeated through the centuries, is that the idea of a personal God is man's creation, the giant reflection of his own personality, and that on this account it cannot have objective validity* But in response it may first be pointed out that nothing can exist for us except as we think it."--The Doctrine of God by Albert C. Knudson