Conceiving God

The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion

David Lewis-Williams

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780500770320
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

At once polemical, insightful and thought-provoking, Conceiving God is essential reading for all those interested in the origins of religious thought, and the respective roles of science and religion in contemporary society. Building on the insights and discoveries of his two earlier books, The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind, cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams explores how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in the supernatural realm.

CHAPTER 1

A New Way of Thinking

Through archaeological windows we glimpse the remains of ancient human activities. Some of these snapshots look mundane: people set about the tasks of hunting, making pots for cooking, tilling the soil or building dwellings. Others seem irrational, mysterious: people carve enigmatic images; they kill other people in specially constructed buildings; they produce texts that they revere and treat in special ways. In many instances, we can interpret these activities as manifestations of what we today call ‘religion’.

Then, in more recent times, we begin to see another activity, one that emphasizes rationality and evidence. It is science. It is not my intention to provide an account of all the pivotal practitioners in the development of science. Instead, I ask two questions:

1. How did science emerge from the kind of thinking that we detect in the making of geometric patterns at Blombos, Maya human sacrifice, and violent divine intervention in the Old Testament?
2. How did the seemingly ineluctable entanglement of science with religion develop and change over the centuries?

As we grapple with these questions, we shall find that science has always been uncomfortably intertwined with religion: the present conflict is – at least in essence – nothing new. Religion was the cocoon in which science developed, but from which it has found it difficult to emerge.

Ionia and crucial philosophical distinctions

Although there are many diverse cultures in the world, there is today only one kind of science. We know it works because it makes verifiable discoveries and produces technologies that function no matter what the beliefs of the people using them may be. The moon is not a divine dwelling place; it is a large lump of dry rock. We know this statement is true because scientific theories of physics and the complex technologies derived from them have enabled people to go there and check. We also know that belief systems founded on the unpredictable interventions of supernatural beings and forces could never lead to the successes of science. How, then, did people break away from mythical thinking and create scientific reasoning?

A sixth-century BC Greek thinker, Thales of Miletus (a town on the coast of Ionia, modern-day Turkey – see Fig. 5), was one of the first people to question the traditional mythical form of explanation and to propose coherent and consistent natural explanations for natural phenomena.¹ The mythical explanations that most people of his time unquestioningly accepted did not have the qualities of coherence and consistency. Mythical explanations are necessarily ad hoc: that is, they ascribe events and natural phenomena to the capricious intervention of fickle gods. Completely different mythical explanations may be put forward to explain why mountain A exists and why mountain B, just a few kilometres away, is where it is.

Here is the crucial point: to attain consistency of explanation, Thales had to think of the natural world as a unity that was free from idiosyncratic, supernatural interventions – one god who was responsible for this and another who was responsible for that. For instance, he argued that, fundamentally, the whole world and everything in it was made of water. Rocks and trees may be different things, but he believed that they shared a common origin in water. Two lesser known Milesians, as the group became known, also argued for the fundamental unity of nature. They were Anaximander (c. 610–c. 545 BC), who thought that air was the fundamental substance, and Anaximenes (writing in c. 545 BC), who argued for an unidentifiable entity that he called apeiron.

At first we may think that Thales’ proposition about water is little different from the mythical explanations that most people of that time accepted as truth. But, in principle rather than content, Thales’ idea was not as bizarre as it may at first appear. He had reasons, not just beliefs, for thinking it. Objects made of stone and wood respond in identical ways when they are subjected to mathematical measurements and calculations in the construction of buildings and monuments; water too can be weighed and measured. In Thales’ view, there was thus a commonality in the material world that existed beneath the diversity of the objects and substances that we see. The ubiquity of water suggested to him that it was the fundamental substance. For someone living in a world generally believed to be governed by capricious gods, this was a remarkable and crucial insight. In it we can see the beginnings of one of the chief characteristics of scientific thinking: overarching, unifying principles make better sense than idiosyncratic, ad hoc mythical explanations. Indeed, if we can discern laws of this kind operating in the natural world, there will be no need to invoke repeated interventions of gods. The retreat of the gods began in Miletus.

5 Ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, the birthplace of Western science and religion.

That Thales was later shown to be wrong about water being the fundamental substance of the whole world is, paradoxically, another of the strengths of his new type of explanation. Mythical narratives and explanations of the way in which the world works do not come accompanied by a set of instructions explaining how each may be evaluated and, if found wanting, discarded. All mythical explanations have to be accepted at face value: their underlying validation resides with the gods and their priestly representatives on earth and therefore cannot be challenged by mortals. With mythical explanations, there can be no critical thinking beyond the bounds of which god did what, and, because the gods are, like people, unpredictable, it is pointless to look for consistency. At best, you may substitute one mythical explanation for another. In stark contrast, Thales’ way of thinking meant that, as knowledge about the world increased, explanations could be superseded and discounted without endangering the whole philosophical structure – the internal logic – of the new way of thought. Indeed, nothing was sacred, nothing was to be accepted simply because those in authority proclaimed it. Priests were retreating in step with the gods.

This is a crucial distinction: continuous criticism is one of the principal features that distinguish Western science from other systems of knowledge. Scepticism, not faith, is the hallmark of science. If we are asked, as sometimes happens these days, to consider ‘alternative’ forms of ‘science’ that embrace ‘mystical’ elements, we must at once enquire if these other ‘sciences’ have critical methods built into their very nature. Do they show signs of continuous evaluation and rejection of superseded explanations? Or are all the ‘modernizations’, theological innovations and ‘broadness of thought’ that they sometimes proclaim merely rewordings of old, unassailable belief systems?

Another difference between older ways of thinking and Thales’ system also hinges on the unity of knowledge. The ancient Egyptians understood much about geometry: that, after all, was how they managed to build enormous pyramids and temples. But they saw their calculations of angles and triangles merely as tools for measurement in the practical construction of monuments rather than as statements of universal truths that are inherent in the very substance and functioning of the universe.

We can take one example. As every (well, perhaps not every) schoolchild today knows, the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is always equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Pythagoras, the sixthcentury BC Greek philosopher and mathematician, showed this relationship to be so. Not even the gods can change it. It is a universal truth – at least in any dimension we are likely to experience. In addition to this sort of practical knowledge, useful if you are building a pyramid, the ancient Egyptians knew much about the movements of heavenly bodies, and they constructed many of their edifices to tie in with those movements. But they considered this sort of information to be religious secrets to which only priests had access, rather than statements that could be challenged and, if necessary, rejected by ordinary people. They thus recognized that there were two distinct kinds of knowledge: the one kind practical and debatable, the other sacred and the possession of an elite. Ironically, they used consistency to construct monuments to the capriciousness of gods.

Thales was unhappy with this distinction. He sought a kind of knowledge that was independent of – or that existed beyond – the inhibiting distinction between practical, discoverable information and that which was super-naturally vouchsafed by the gods. In seeking to attain this verifiable sort of knowledge, he went further than the Egyptians by devising abstract statements – to take another geometric example, that the opposite angles of two intersecting straight lines are always equal. He was thus beginning to detect universal ‘laws’ that would be true at all times and in all places, a universality that is not implied by ad hoc mythical explanations.

Perhaps Thales’ greatest triumph was his prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 BC. How could he possibly have achieved this feat using only mythology? He could not have. Rather, he had to work with laws and calculations that were inviolable, even for the gods. Here we have the first instance of the predictive value of scientific thinking, one of its chief features. Today many historians note that Aristotle considered Thales’ successful prediction of a solar eclipse to be the origin of Greek science: at a single stroke it became clear that the cosmos was governed by laws that are immutable and not subject to the caprice of gods. Rational thinking could also be profitable: Thales used it to predict good weather and a bountiful olive harvest. To demonstrate his confidence in rational thought he bought up all the olive presses he could. He was proved correct.

I have emphasized the dangerous dichotomy between two kinds of knowledge because it threads its insidious way through the history of science right up to the twenty-first century and our present-day conflicts. To take an example: did God give the Holy Land to the Jews, or did Allah give it to his followers? In these kinds of disputes, there is no point in appealing to history, demographics, environmental issues, rigorous logic or verifiable evidence. Supposedly revealed knowledge takes precedence over practical, scientific knowledge. Precisely what information has to be merely (one could say, blindly) accepted and what can be questioned has been a continuing theme in the history of science and its entanglement with religion.

If we are talking about the planets and the stars, scientific astronomy, astrology, the ancient Egyptians’ celestial route of the dead, and Maya beliefs about a three-tiered cosmos are not all equally valid ‘ways of knowing’. Astrology and that sort of thing is, to put it bluntly, nonsense. It is not ‘another way of knowing’ about planets and stars. On the other hand, if we are talking about the ‘meaning(s)’ of Hamlet, we are in another realm altogether. But for the material world in which we live there is only science.

In all human history, justifications for the existence of two types of knowledge about the real world have been sustained deceits, sometimes consciously contrived, often unthinkingly accepted by those for whom they were intended. The legitimizing of different ‘ways of knowing’ about the real world has inhibited the advance of human understanding, retarded the development of human rights, and supported grotesque social inequalities. When today the progress of science is challenged, we shall do well if we recall the disastrous effects of sacred beliefs that are said to stand beyond human critique and that some say should control the practice of science.

Why did this momentous shift in understanding take place in Greece and not elsewhere – in ancient Egypt, for example? It seems that Greek Ionia, strategically situated as it is on the western shores of Asia Minor, differed from Babylon and Egypt in that it was not part of a powerful state that could impose its every whim on its subjects. Rather, the Ionians were a strongly independent trading people and, through commerce, they had contact with ideas in distant parts of the known world. They knew that there were people elsewhere who did not hold the same religious beliefs as they did but who nevertheless managed to get by without major trouble. Apparently it did not matter what myths people believed – life simply went on. Nor was Ionia priest-ridden. There was no privileged, priestly class with vested interests in the status quo. ² Such classes of people insist that some knowledge is not to be questioned – the knowledge that they themselves possess and guard.

‘A continuous scale of ascent’

The critical thought that developed in Ionia spread to the rest of ancient Greece, from one city-state to the next. The names of those who led the way are familiar: Pythagoras, Archimedes, Democritus, Euclid (who coined what became the Latin phrase Quod erat demonstrandum, QED), and many others. Today we rightly see them as the founders of Western thought. Together, they constitute a formidable phalanx. Now we need note only two of the most famous of these towering figures: Aristotle and Plato. The relationship between these two men’s different ways of thinking encapsulates a tension that manifested itself through subsequent centuries, through into the Christian Middle Ages and, in different garb, to present-day disputes about science and religion.

Aristotle (384–322 BC), sometime tutor to the young Alexander the Great, came from a well-to-do family (Fig. 6). His father was a physician at the Macedonian court. He studied at Plato’s Academy for as long as twenty years, and also in Asia Minor. A polymath, he wrote about ethics, physics, zoology, politics, rhetoric and, still influentially, poetics and drama. It is through Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy that we today have the notions of hubris and catharsis.

Aristotle did not concern himself much with religion. He seems to have subscribed, outwardly at any rate, to the formal religion of his day, but he saw God more as a principle than a person. The great philosopher’s openendedness in such matters has led to ambivalent attitudes to him among world religions. Perhaps he intended it this way. His best comment on religion comes in his Politics, in which he explains that subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, he observes, if the subjects believe that the ruler has the gods on his side, they are far less likely to rebel. Cynically, Artistotle advises tyrants to present a religious face to their subjects, an injunction that seems to be widely observed in today’s world, where there is no shortage of pious rulers, and the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, is invited to address the United Nations.

Like the Pope, Aristotle also spoke of a ‘soul’, but he did not mean the eternal ghost believed to survive a person’s death. He meant a kind of essence, the thing which a particular object or creature does by its very nature. The soul of a human being is his or her ability to think and act rationally. In Aristotelian ethics, excellence in human beings is to act in accordance with our rational ‘soul’. It is manifested especially in friendships.

Here we are concerned with only one component of Aristotle’s vast and varied scientific output. His greatest contribution was the attention he gave to scientific method.³ Indeed, it could be said that he invented the discipline of science. He tried to formulate rules of logic to guide the sort of work that Thales had undertaken. In doing so, he distinguished between inductive and deductive reasoning. This was a huge step forward: it laid a foundation for rationality. What are induction and deduction? Nowadays the two words are often used loosely and interchangeably in common parlance, but the distinction between them is worth making. Let us start with induction.

Induction is the kind of logic that governs much of our daily lives. For instance, we notice that, if we approach unknown dogs, we are liable to be bitten. If this happens a number of times consecutively, we conclude that dealings with all unknown dogs will be dangerous. The more cases of being bitten, the more we feel that our generalized conclusion is justified. This is numerical induction.

6 A bust of Aristotle from the ancient world. The philosopher was fond of saying that a ‘likely impossibility’ was always preferable to an ‘unconvincing possibility’.

For Aristotle, the next step in scientific method was deduction. The generalization or hypothesis (all strange dogs bite), having been formulated, was to be used as a statement from which testable deductions could be made (that unknown dog over there will bite me if I get too close to it). The argument may be formally expressed as a syllogism: if such-and-such is true for all things of a particular class, then, if X is a member of that class, it must be true for X. For instance, I may deduce that Nero, a particular strange dog, will bite me if I get too close to him, simply because I have...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prolegomena: Windows on the Past and Some of the Questions they Raise
• 1 - A New Way of Thinking
• 2 - From Skies to Species
• 3 - A Tale of Two Scientists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
• 4 - Explaining Religion
• 5 - Religious Experience
• 6 - Religious Belief
• 7 - Religious Practice
• 8 - Stone Age Religion
• 9 - Hildegard on the African Veld
• 10 - God’s Empire Strikes Back
• Epilegomena: Of Babies and Bathwater
• Notes
• Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Sources of Illustrations
• Copyright