LOOK! NO GOD! |
Religion in Our GenesThis article gives an explanation of
|
It is often said that humans have a god-shaped hole in their psyche, which means that they are only truly satisfied and complete when they have God in their lives. The article below offers a naturalistic explanation for this 'hole'.
Animism as a Natural Way of ThinkingPrimitive human cultures were almost universally animistic - seeing significant objects as well as people and animals as being animate - having a mind, feelings, desires and intentions and the ability act upon those intentions. Why would this be so? Primitive people saw themselves as animate because they were aware of their own consciousness, thoughts, feeling and ability to act. They saw that other people were like themselves, so they made the (probably subconscious) assumption that they are animate too. They tended to be respectful and considerate of other people. This ensured that other people weren’t made to suffer unnecessarily and that other people would be more likely to treat them well. They also saw that dogs behave in a lot of ways like they do and therefore assumed them to be animate. So they extended their respect to them. Other things too seemed to be animate, like antelopes, birds etc. In fact anything that could behave unpredictably could be considered as animate. This of course included inorganic things like rain clouds, thunderstorms, rivers, volcanoes and so on. Without the benefits of the knowledge that is available in modern society, there is no obvious place to draw the line between things that have a mind and awareness and things that don’t. (In fact, even with modern scientific knowledge, we don’t really know where to draw the line – are spiders animate? What about bacteria? Some people even consider trees to be conscious.) In addition to their unpredictability, the behaviour of these things could be beneficial or harmful, just like the behaviour of people and dogs can, so it was worth treating them with respect in the hope that they would return the favour. This respect tended to take the form of rituals performed when coming into significant contact with these entities. Hunters will often pay their respect to their prey when they kill it. People will perform small ceremonies with flowers and the like to honour mountains, rivers, storms etc. The photograph below is one I took of a Bolivian guide paying his respects to the mountain we had just climbed.
Consider an early man walking through the savannah. He hears a noise in a bush. He might think 'That's just a noise; a noise won't hurt me.' or he might think 'That might be something intending to do me harm.' In the latter case, he would take steps to protect himself. Individuals who assume things might have intent are less likely to get eaten and so would be more likely to pass on their genes. Thus the gene pool tends to become (or remain) enriched with those genes that lead their owners to ascribe intent to things they see and hear. Basically, the whole population ends up carrying those genes and thus is pre-disposed to animism. As further evidence that humans have an innate leaning to consider everything to be animate by default, consider the following: 1. Ask a small child if you can give her teddy bear a hug. If she knows you, she will probably be happy to let you. Then ask if you can poke the bear in the eye. She will be much less likely to let you and will probably take steps to protect the bear from you and to comfort it. 2. Show a rock to a child and tell them that it doesn’t like children and causes children in the same room to have nightmares. Then ask if you can leave it in his room overnight. He will probably be seriously upset by the idea. 3. Tell a child his favourite toy car is ugly. He will likely protect it from you and act to comfort it. 4. Watch a child trying to get a bike to move in a particular way that is difficult. She might well get frustrated, tell the bike off and smack it in an attempt to get it to cooperate. Progression to PolytheismAnimism is a world view and can be seen as a basic form of religion: it is a belief that all significant entities in one’s environment have minds and intent. It is also a way of interacting with them respectfully. Some entities are clearly more important than others – they are larger, more obvious and more capable of causing benefit or harm. For instance, the sun and a volcano are more important than the stone one saw under the tree over there. Because they have more power to affect us, it is worth paying them more attention and giving them more respect. Familes and tribal groups gave way to larger societies where not everyone knew everyone else. The behaviour of entities like the sun and the rains depended on the whole society doing the right thing by them. Early people had an interest in ensuring that everyone in their society paid them the proper respect. So certain procedures and rituals got established in order to ensure that things were done in the right way. The important entities that are paid homage (worshipped) in a systematic way came to be called ‘gods’. Neighbouring societies might have had different gods that were important to them, and different (though overlapping) sets of gods (pantheons) developed. There were gods that were worshipped across wide areas and others that were worshipped just locally. Thus animism tended to evolve into polytheism as societal groups evolved from ones where everyone knew everyone else to larger groups where not everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Polytheism to MonotheismThroughout civilised history, most societies have been polytheistic with different pantheons, though with some gods, like the Sun, in common, and with different rituals for worshipping them. The move to monotheism has happened very rarely. About 1350 BCE in Egypt, Pharaoh Akhenaton declared that only Aten, the Sun God, was to be worshipped. All other gods either didn’t exist or were to be ignored. This was a very unpopular move, people worrying that the other gods would be deeply offended, and things went back to normal as soon as Akhenaton died. Around 1100 BCE, the Hebrew leaders declared that their people should worship YHWH and no other gods (though they still accepted that the other gods existed and much of the writing of the old testament assumes that they did). This may have been an attempt by the leaders to develop a cultural identity separate from the surrounding Canaanites etc. (who worshipped the same gods that the Hebrews traditionally worshipped). Part of the idea might have been that the people would see no connection with the Canaanites and thus wouldn’t mind killing and displacing them. The first commandment is ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other Gods before me.’ [Note that it doesn’t say ‘There are no other gods apart from me’.] The Hebrews were henotheistic, accepting the existence of many gods, but paying respect to and relying on just one who the leaders claimed promised them special favours and protection in return. Later, when challenged by the worshippers of the traditional Canaanite Gods (Baal, Asherah etc.), people like Elijah tried to prove that those other gods were less powerful than YHWH or even that they had no power at all. During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were influenced by the almost monotheistic Zoroastrian Persians. As a result, they decided that getting their people to believe that other Gods were non-existent was better than getting them to believe that they were less powerful. From then, Jewish religion became monotheistic. Christianity and Islam developed out of Judaism and continued the monotheistic idea (almost monotheistic in the case of Christianity). Now, over half the world adheres (at least nominally) to one of these three Abrahamic religions and so monotheism has come to be seen as normal and polytheism and animism as the result of ignorance. AtheismPeople in animistic societies tended not to question the animistic world view. They had no reason to. But later, as knowledge of the world and how it works increased, people did start to question world views. In polytheistic societies, there were those who questioned whether the gods were really there and conceived of how the world could possibly work without them. This tended to happen particularly in societies where people had time to think and philosophise about the nature of things. In classical Greece, atheism was quite common. The atheistic Atomist philosophy of Democritus and the Epicurean philosophy of Epicurus got quite a following. However, people of atheistic persuasion tended to be harassed by the theists who believed that they would upset their gods, with negative consequence for society. In India, Siddhartha Gautama proposed the non-theistic philosophy which became Buddhism and spread widely (though many Buddhists have incorporated theistic ideas with their philosophy to turn it more into a religion). From the 4th to the 16th Century in Europe, people were forced to accept orthodox Christian religion on pain of torture and death. So anyone who had doubts about it tended to keep their mouth shut. However, towards the end of that time, some people did start to openly question the ideas and to use observation of the world around them rather than religious dogma handed down through the generations to try to understand the world. The church did its best to discourage this with torture and burnings at the stake, but the movement eventually got away from them, leading to ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ in which people could develop world views based on observation of the world and logical deduction rather than solely on Christian dogma. As understanding of the world increased, so did the number of people who felt that it made more sense to think of it as run by laws of nature rather than by the whims of a god. Presently about 15% of the world is not religious, but that number is growing steadily. Summary Human cultural evolution can be seen as a gradual reduction of the number of god-like entities from millions in the case of animists to dozens or hundreds in the case of polytheists, to one (or three) in the case of monotheists and finally to none in the case of atheists. |
Top of this page          Home Page |
Image Acknowledgements Teddy Bear: Teddy Bear: File:Teddy bear produced in 1903 detail, from- Teddy bear early 1900s - Smithsonian Museum of Natural History - Wikimedia Commons |