Dylan Stoll | Copy Editor
Featured image courtesy of Pixabay
Humans are an intelligent, contemplative, and very complicated bunch. We do our best to learn about the world, our home, everything it has to offer, and everything it hopes to hide; we are seekers of knowledge, and have been since our very inception, over 200,000 years ago.
And there’s a good reason for this. Knowledge has been one of our greatest tools in our conquest of the planet. It has given us the ability to become the ultimate apex predator, and to some, it is what differentiates us as humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, but is it our only tool?
Self-awareness is another essential instrument to our survival and proliferation. Maybe that is what separates us as stewards of this Earth. But there are animals that have displayed signs of self-recognition. Elephants, monkeys, and dolphins, for example, have all shown evidence of self-awareness. Why aren’t they the dominant creatures of this Earth, or at the very least, a contender for the throne?
What about agriculture? Are there any animals out there that grow crops? Despite its evidently key place in human society, there are animals that also engage in this behaviour. Leaf-cutter ants, for example, gather leaves not to eat, but to use as a compost of sorts for the growth of a fungus, which they then eat later on.
The Bible, arguably one of the most influential books written by man, claims to have the answer to this timeless question. As the Bible professes, human beings are separated from the beasts of nature, not by our intelligence, not by our self-awareness, not by our agrarian lifestyle, but by our creator, in that we are created in the image of God.
Vinod Goel, a professor of psychology studying cognitive and neuroscience at York, is currently writing a book in relation to that very same topic. In regards to our genesis, or rather, the genesis of god, Goel believes the truth has been flipped. “I personally think the correct way to say it, is that man created God in his own image. We could even say that man is compelled to create gods. All gods, of every culture, share many human attributes. They are just men and women with superpowers.”
But why are we compelled? What draws us as members of humanity to our reflection in the pool, to narcissistically build gods in our own image?
“I think there are two relevant data points to suggest that we are predisposed to religious beliefs as a function of our biology: the ubiquity of religious beliefs and cross-cultural similarities, and the neuropsychological evidence from patient populations,” says Goel.
This may come as a surprise to some, but religion could very well, as Goel stated, have a biological source of origin, which would also mean that religion evolved. But there are few evolutionary adaptations that have no purpose, if any. Evolution, after all, is efficient in its trade-offs. To invest energy in a useless construct would be in opposition to everything we understand about evolutionary traits.
If there is indeed a mechanism in our brain that “predisposes” us to religious beliefs, then spiritual experiences, feelings of spiritualness, and spiritual thoughts or ideas would therefore be products of that same mechanism. In a study published by researchers at Yale University, a response was observed in the left inferior parietal lobe when participants listened to recordings of themselves explaining “personally meaningful spiritual experiences,” during an fMRI scan.
A study of a similar nature was conducted to look for that same ‘god part of the brain’ by Vilayanur Ramachandran, a professor at the University of California, but instead involved participants who specifically suffered from epileptic temporal lobe seizures. In addition, they were subjected to words of a spiritual nature, rather than recordings of their own personal spiritual experiences.
“If I remember correctly, Ramachandran’s epileptic patients who experienced enhanced spirituality during seizures, had their foci centered somewhere in the left temporal lobe. But whether it is temporal lobe or parietal lobe doesn’t particularly matter,” adds Goel.
The parietal and temporal lobe are both structures that evolved in all other mammals, so it stands to reason that they too would be susceptible to the same spiritual characteristics. That being said, there is no evidence, anywhere on the face of the Earth, that other mammals, or animals in general, are religious. They do not pray, they do not gather in churches, they do not perform rituals to an invisible being; they simply do not display the behaviours that are indicative of a developed, religious belief system.
But therein lies the key word: developed. Religion may hold its source in the human brain, but so too do great skyscrapers, and massive, earth-shaping excavators, and not unlike the former or the latter, religion has its predecessors, its prototypes if you will, and as such, it is safe to say that it has become its modern self through a slow, gradual process of change, and may very well have evolved as yet another tool in our arsenal of ascendance.
And of course, to discover why there was this moderate manifestation of today’s religions, one must look far into humanity’s past, as far as 100,000 BCE, with the discovery of some of man’s earliest examples of religious-like activity. Not only that, one must also observe how religions change over time, and how this change may parallel other developments in our history.
But which developments do we choose? How about agriculture? It was, after all, a significant contributor to our success, and remains so to this day.
To begin, we must first find god. One such example of early religious activity can be found at a burial site in the Middle East, called the Qafzeh cave. Located at the bottom of Mount Precipice, south of Nazareth, the Qafzeh cave holds 15 skeletal human remains, seven of them adult, and the rest being children. 71 pieces of ochre were discovered along with the bodies, as well as deer horns in the hands of two of the deceased, indicating that some sort of ritualistic funeral practice had occurred.
Professor Kathryn Denning, an archaeologist and anthropologist at York who teaches courses such as Ancient Civilizations, and Archaeology and Society, explains one of the main problems in truly understanding our long-forgotten, intentional dealings with the dead.
“For the very earliest cave burials without obvious ritual objects or modifications, it’s hard for us to know for certain whether it was done for pragmatic purposes, like ‘we don’t want our dead relatives to attract animals,’ versus something spiritually-oriented like ‘we want our dead relatives all to be in one place so they can hunt together on the other side, give us advice about things, or keep each other busy and not haunt us.’”
Despite the obvious ritualistic nature of the Qafzah cave burials, there is little else indicating these people were members of an organized religion, or believed in a god, gods, or something else entirely. As such, burials are hardly a trustworthy indicator of religion. Could the earliest known production of effigies be a more promising, rewarding venture in our search for god?
Effigies are sculptures made in a human form. The Aurignacian-Lowenmensch figurine, one of the most ancient known carvings dating back to 38,000 BCE, interestingly had a mixture of both animal and human characteristics. Some researchers believe this to be one of the oldest deities, though it could have simply been the production of one of our more creative ancestors, with a desire to merge animal and human body parts. There is no way to tell, as at that point in time, there was no form of written communication. All we can do is speculate as to what this animalistic, anthropomorphized effigy could have represented.
Denning echoes the same sentiment: “We have to accept a certain amount of ambiguity: if we have a sculpture of a known animal (let’s say a bear), and it’s from so long ago that we don’t have accompanying oral traditions, then how do we know whether it’s a depiction of a generic bear, or of a particular bear, or a representation of a bear spirit, or something imbued with magic to keep the resident hibernating bear quiet, or the Almighty Bear God? We don’t, at least not for sure. But we can be sure that there was a story of some kind that was attached to the bear sculpture.”
Denning further elaborates on this thought: “Belief in a god, goddesses, or gods, is somewhat trickier to infer because the nature of divinity is very slippery, and ancient art tends not to be helpfully labelled ‘This is god X.’ Sometimes it is, but, of course, only for cultures with writing.”
By approximately 3,000 BCE, however, cuneiform, an invention of the Sumerian people of ancient Mesopotamia, as well as the earliest known form of written language, provided us with an avenue to circumnavigate this problem. In so doing, we established a connection to our ancient past, a connection that surpassed the problem of time.
Immortalized upon clay tablets in the form of distinct wedges, cuneiform not only provided the Sumerian people with all the advantages of writing (food supply records, census taking, etc.), but also inadvertently permitted modern man to view the ancient world of the Sumerian people through a lens less muddied by the conjecture associated with a lack of written proof.
It was through this lens that researchers discovered not one, but many gods, each associated with some aspect of life in ancient Mesopotamia. Some of them include: Tiamat (oceans), Enlil (sky), Enki (earth), Marduk (storms), Ishtar (desire), Ninurta (agriculture), Sin (fertility), and Shamash (sun). These gods provided the Sumerians with someone they could worship, someone they could ask to save them from the toils of ancient life such as famine, disease, war, and death.
Egypt was another civilization born of the same era. Though gradual in its emergence (over the course of 3,000 years), around 3,100 BCE, the Egyptian state was established definitively with the building of the capital by King Menes at a location known as White Walls, near the apex of the Nile river delta. This could also be considered the cradle of Egyptian religion, setting the framework upon which many, many gods emerged (some estimates say there could be thousands!). Some of the more prevalent Egyptian gods include Min (fertility), Osiris (agriculture/underworld), Isis (magic), Horus (sky), Set (chaos), and Ra (sun).
Another popular polytheistic religion is that of ancient Greece. Around 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod wrote the Theogeny, which tells the story of the origin of everything, from the nothingness that is chaos and the void, to the gods and goddesses that evolved thereafter, referred to as Gaia (Earth), Ouranos (Sky), Pontos (Sea), and Tartaros (The Underworld). These primordial entities preceded the Olympians, some of the more notable being Poseidon (sea), Hermes (trade), Haphaestus (fire, metalworking), Dionysus (revelry), Demeter (agriculture), Athena (wisdom), Artemis (hunting), Ares (war), Apollo (sun), Aphrodite (love), Hera (women), and Zeus (thunder).
It should be noted that in all these ancient religions, be they Sumerian, Egyptian, or Greek, the polytheistic approach provided each god or goddess with their own portion of existence to watch over and maintain. It was their place, their purpose in reality, to control some aspect of human life.
And one of the more important aspects of not only ancient life, but modern, is, as stated before, agriculture. Each and every one of the aforementioned religions has a god for the harvest. The Sumerians have Ninurta, the Egyptians have Osiris, and the Greeks have Demeter. The advent of agriculture was essential to humanity’s proliferation across the globe as it allowed sedentary civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, the ability to establish themselves, and feed their growing populations.
Then there was Judaism of the Hebrew Bible, and with it, monotheism. Though originally believed to have been written sometime around 700 BC, recent findings suggest that the Bible may have been written three centuries earlier. Regardless, Judaism is considered to be one of the oldest, truly monotheistic religions of the world. In the case of Judaism, there is only one god who encompasses all aspects of life. He is considered omnipotent, omniscient, indivisible and an incomparable being. A well-known statement of Rabbinical Judaism, or mainstream Judaism, is the Second of Maimonides’ (A medieval Torah scholar) 13 Principles of faith:
“God, the Cause of all, is one. This does not mean one as in one of a pair, nor one like a species (which encompasses many individuals), nor one as in an object that is made up of many elements, nor as a single simple object that is infinitely divisible. Rather, God is a unity unlike any other possible unity.”
Christianity was then born, years after the death of Jesus, during the first century AD as a Jewish sect in Judea. Following the same monotheistic approach, Christianity proliferated across the globe, becoming one of the most dominant religions on the planet today, garnering over 2.19 billion followers by 2010, just under a third of the world’s population.
So it can be seen that the religions of the world began as polytheistic, with each god or goddess covering a wide range of difficulties we face as humans who are forced to subsist in an unforgiving landscape. As time passed and these difficulties subsided, perhaps monotheism became more applicable. Monotheism is, after all, the dominant form of religion on the Earth today.
There are several cases, as stated in Guy E. Swanson’s book The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, where certain polytheistic societies (though they are not Mesopotamian, Egyptian, or Greek), eventually became monotheistic after becoming more agrarian. As he said in his book, “monotheism, and especially elaborate monotheistic beliefs, are most likely to appear in societies which have the most stable sources of food, namely a settled agriculture which produces grains.
Furthermore, in a research paper written by Ralph Underhill of the University of Chicago, Underhill stated: “Swanson does report that having a ‘settled agriculture which produces grains’ is related to monotheism even though other indicators of economic development are not.”
Perhaps religion was a tool, not only in our conquering of the planet, but in our conquering of the earth, or rather, the dirt! Religion may have evolved to serve a purpose in pushing us to trust in the seeds that we sow, and in so doing, toss aside our nomadic way of life. Without a trust in the harvest, a trust in a god of agriculture, be it Ninurta, Osiris, Demeter, or the God of the Jews and Christians, we would have never established civilizations, built walls, homes, castles, fortresses, cities, skyscrapers, and megalopoli.
And like all of these structures, religion began as an idea, a construct of the mind, a solution to a problem, a tool, and became something transcendent, touching the lives of every human being on the planet. It is arguably one of our greatest devices in our domination of the Earth, not by virtue of its physical effect on our surroundings (like the plough, or the spear), but by virtue of its effect on the human condition.
