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Part I
The World According to the Gods
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1
The Failure of Science to Explain Religion
This book tells a story about a relative we all know: religion. For some, he is very much a member of our family, inevitably invited to sit at the head of the table when celebrating important events, expected to sanctify our weddings, say a few words at a funeral, or to speak at other memorable events. And he never fails to say grace at dinner. Faithful, he is there when we need him. His presence and words are reassuring. But for some, this relative lingers in the background, a distant, somewhat eccentric, and elderly uncle, perhaps, respected but not taken too seriously. He is only invited to the very important family gatherings. And there are those who, uncomfortable with this relativeâs questionable past, have disowned him, not even allowing him to say grace. But however we may feel about him, he is kin, so it behooves us to get to know him better.
The purpose of this book is to show why we really do not know this relative very well, and however we may feel about him, he has valuable lessons to teach us about our past, our future, and our very nature.
The Problem with Current Scientific Explanations of Religion
Why the strident tone in some recent atheist literature? It undoubtedly comes from a frustrated acknowledgment that religion, after so many centuries, shapes our beliefs. But I strongly suspect another reason: despite many valiant attempts, secular science has not satisfactorily accounted for the origin of religion. Though books on atheism, which scientifically dismiss religion, have garnered much attention in the popular imagination, they fail to explain adequately why superstitious beliefs, irrational behavior, and far-fetched storytelling characterize religious experience. Certainly, it is not a difficult challenge to point out the scientific fallacies and logical inconsistencies of pre-Enlightenment, premodern peoples. After all, these religions were formed millennia before the discoveries of modern science. Just peruse the Bible or any other sacred text and look for examples. Of course, it is more comforting for some of us to assume that such odd behaviors were not really believed in wholeheartedly by their practitioners. Or we may conclude that explaining such practices and events (e.g., conversing with Yahweh) in neurological or cultural terms does not invalidate them as genuine spiritual experiences. The point is that conversing with the divinities, a practice irretrievably lost to the modern mind, had a real-world impact and thus demands explication.
In this book, I offer an explanation that I believe is superior to previous accounts about the origins of religion. In order to lay out the basics of this explanation, a number of concepts need to be introduced. This is the purpose of the next two chapters.
Let us continue our discussion with a simple but underappreciated fact: religious activities, invested with great effort and expense, were carried on for centuries. For example, in ancient civilizations, before about 1200 BCE, statues were not mere depositories for divine energies or symbolic stand-ins for godsâthe statues were gods. This is why these wooden and stone carvings were awakened, fed, washed, dressed, and perfumed by priests.
Beyond âChildhood of Humankindâ Explanations
Good science is the simplest explanation with the widest applicability. So rather than dismissing odd beliefs and practices as mere superstition, we need to provide a rational account of their surprising ubiquity and remarkable longevity. And to do this, we must approach the archaeological and historical records with an open mind and with the same curious attitude that welcomed Darwinism among the more enlightened in the late-nineteenth century.
Many of us have some vague notion that religion emerged in the âchildhood of humankind.â Not yet schooled in the ways of common sense (let alone modern science), pitiful humans could only tremble in fear when the heavens thundered and huddle in caves when lightning flashed. They ensouled not just creatures but plants, rocks, and mountains as they populated the world with fierce and fearsome entities. Our ancestors were simply confused. We rational moderns, more advanced and fortunate, can forgive them in the same way we unthinkingly let pass the endearing ignorance of a small child who believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. As humankind graduated from early education of times past and dark, it marched toward the illuminating light of Enlightenment science.
A Failure in Astonishment: Appreciating the Ruptures of History
Religion is still around, of course, but as I noted above, for many it loiters around like a distant relative. But the view that humanity has witnessed an incremental, gradual progression from childish knowledge to the adult level of enlightened maturity is a nonexplanation. Indeed, such an unsatisfactory perspective goes against the historical record. This should be evident to anyone with even a dilettantish interest in ancient civilizations. The truth is that the timeline of religion, rather than a smooth, slow-but-sure advance, is one of ruptures and major shifts in mentality. The history of human spirituality is a fascinating story, but it is in terrible need of a plot, a grand narrative that explains its breaks and its accompanying psychological transformations. By appreciating these changes, we can better understand the larger context of our evolutionary saga.
Part of the problemâin fact, a very big part of the problemâis that in a certain sense we are too accustomed to religion, that old, quirky relative of ours who makes a polite appearance on holidays and other important rites of passage, reminding us that quaint customs once had more significance. To be sure, the original intent of these practices has not been completely forgotten, and they still convey a solemn and serious message. But their primal meaning has, for the most part, been layered over with rationalist explanations and comfortable routinization. The more spiritually minded among us have heard religious tales so many times that we take them for granted. Our unreflective absorption of so many religious images and iconsâthe Egyptian pyramids, well-known Biblical quotes, Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments, the ruins of ziggurats, the silhouette of the Vatican, solemn Shang bronzes, the tranquil face of Buddha, the dancing, multilimbed Hindu godsâhas desensitized us from realizing the utter strangeness and extraordinary grandeur of ancient religiosity. However, in order to remind us of the ubiquity of a long-forgotten but hardly understood religious mindset, we should peruse the works of Sir James George Frazer (1854â1941), the great Scottish scholar of comparative religion and mythology. Especially relevant for our purposes is his 1300-page The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead.1 Today, a book like this is theoretically dated, but its impressive detail and wide-ranging topics should alert us to how much we truly do not appreciate about that relative of ours, whose past still shapes our present times.
Scope of This Work
In this book, I cast my net wide to make the point that everywhere, despite local variation, significant patterns do exist. What this book loses in detailed treatment (depth) of one particular place or period, it makes up in breadth in order to demonstrate common historical trajectories. Though my focus is on China, classical-period Greece, India, Israel, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Mesopotamia, I also look at Anatolia (Hittite kingdom), Persia, Minoan, Mycenaean Greece, North America, South America, and SyriaâCanaan for examples. This book covers much ground, then, both temporally and geographically. However, my intention is not to treat exhaustively all eras and areas. That would be impossible. I do not offer a detailed account of world religious history, so the reader will forgive me if he or she comes up with a topic not dealt with.
My plan is to put most of the pieces of a puzzle in place, especially those that frame the picture, as it were, since these form the theoretical parameters of my arguments. Given this projectâs tasks, some pieces of place and period will be missing. However, the careful reader should be able to perceive roughly what the completed puzzle looks like. Some may want to argue about which piece of the puzzle goes where, but my task is to convince the reader of the metapatterns of the human story and offer answers to certain historical enigmas. Some readers might wonder why I did not mention a certain people or place. But if the reader thinks of examples that fit into this puzzle, then I will know I have accomplished my goal.
A Caveat about Terminology
Before proceeding, a caveat is in order. The concept of religion, like science or politics, is an abstraction that condenses multifaceted and complex sociohistorical developments. It is also a product of modern intellectual debate, that is, emerging as a reaction to the growth of science. A word was needed to distinguish an increasingly secularized and rationalized worldview from an outdated and superstitious mindset. Like âsocietyâ and âscience,â religion is a very modern notion, and we mistakenly assume that it exists as an isolated entity from other human endeavors. Whatever use they may have, concepts such as religion, society, and science are methodological artifacts developed in the nineteenth century to account for the massive transformations the industrializing world witnessed as new understandings of the human condition emerged.
The problem with the aforementioned terms is that they end up concealing more than they reveal, steering us down a road of assumptions and misconceptions. For example, consider how they encourage us to assume that social reality comes prepackaged into discrete bits and pieces that can be described as social, religious, psychological, neuro-biological, and so forth. But we all know that this is not how reality is experienced; it is seamless, a nexus of interrelated processes that we vainly try to pin down with names and labels. With this problem in mind, I combine terms into single wordsâtheopolitical, neurotheological, neurocultural, and so forthâin order to alert the reader to how arbitrary modern categories of thought are and how they distort our view of the world.
A related issue deserves comment. For ancient peoples, politics simply did not exist separately from the natural world or the abode of the gods. In order to translate this alien sentiment, for the sake of convenience, I will use âtheopolityâ to designate the realm of gods and humans and âcosmopolityâ for the more inclusive realm of nature and gods and everything in between.
How presumptuous of me to condense millennia of the worldâs religions, with all their rich diversity, sublime splendor, and ancient wisdom, into twenty some chapters.2 But this is the task this book has undertaken. The organizing thread tying the chapters together is a psychological interpretation inspired by the work of Julian Jaynes about the origins of religion. Using such an approach illuminates why the ancients believed that the gods once regularly visited and spoke with us, why they departed, and why over the centuries humankind has witnessed a general trend toward having the self replace the gods (i.e., the psychological interiorization of spiritual experience).
Admittedly, Jaynesâs theories would sound bizarre to me if I did not take up his advice to expose myself to the texts of ancient civilizations and religions. Before anyone accepts or rejects the ideas presented, they should adopt an inquisitive and scientific attitude by actually examining the evidence and ask: Why did so many people report hearing the voices of gods in ancient times? Certainly, more than poetic device was at work. In any case, none of my arguments make sense unless one has at least a passing familiarity with ancient civilizations, particularly their religions. The greatest failing of mainstream research psychology is how it ignores our relatively recent history (relative to our Paleolithic past).
In chapter 2, we will interrogate that relative of ours, asking him about some unsolved puzzles. In chapter 3, we introduce some conceptual tools to help us better understand the origins of religion. The second part of this book deals with the early years of our relative, recounting his adventures, exploits, and quests. The third part explores his later years. At the end of the book are appended supplementary, more in-depth materials for those who are interested in the off-the-record, secretive stories of that intriguing relative of ours.
Notes
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2
Why the Gods Began to Speak
History is being rewritten in Southeast Turkey, near the mountains that act as the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Not far from the Syrian border, at a site called Göbekli Tepe (âpotbelly hillâ in Turkish), the work of Klaus Schmidt from the German Archaeological Institute is challenging common views about when, why, and how religion developed. To begin with, the site is old, very oldâthe twenty-two acre site of about twenty structures was constructed, apparently without wheels or draft animals, some 11,600 years ago, about seven thousand years before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is the oldest known remains of religious monumental architecture.1
Rewriting Our History
As of this writing, four of the structures have been unearthed, revealing rings of eighteen-foot tall, sixteen-ton, T-shaped, limestone pillars, some of which have carved reliefs of snakes, gazelles, foxes, scorpions, insects, cranes, and boars (for some reason representations of humans are rare). Other pillars do seem to represent human figures or gods; although highly stylized, one can make out arms, shoulders, elbows, and fingers. Stone walls, at a lower height, connect the pillars. Intriguingly, every few decades the pillars were buried and new structures were erected, though eventually this would stop. Since no water source has been found nearby, it appears as if the builders, who lacked metal, writing, or pottery, were nomadic and regarded the site as a âpurely ceremonial center.â2 Interestingly, these structures were not the focal structure at the heart of a town, which would be a much more common pattern characterizing religious architecture thousands of years later. So far, no sign of habitation or settlement has been discovered nearby, that is, no hearths or tombs richly filled, which would indicate social stratification and hierarchical relations.
Göbekl...
