Part 3

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
by Barbara J. King, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 3)

The archaeologist Steven Mithen rescues Neandertals, for instance, from the caveman-dragging-cavewoman-by-the-hair stereotype by acknowledging this rich inner life; he writes of "intensely emotional beings: happy Neanderthals, sad Neanderthals, angry Neanderthals, disgusted Neanderthals, envious Neanderthals, guilty Neanderthals, grief-stricken Neanderthals, and Neanderthals in love." While I embrace Mithen's sensibility, I would have put the statement a bit differently: "Neandertals making each other happy, Neandertals making each other sad..." Emotions, before, after, and during the Neandertal period, are created when individuals act together and make meaning together, starting in infancy. The excitement in understanding human evolution is centered in tracing this mutual creativity and meaning-making, indeed in tracing the evolution of belongingness.

Third, the hominid need for belongingness rippled out, eventually expanding into a wholly new realm. In tandem with, and in part driven by, changes in the natural environment, in the hominid brain, and most important, in caregiving practices, something new emerged that went beyond empathy, rule-following, and imagination within the family and immediate group, and that went beyond consciousness expressed through action and meaning-making in the here and now. As I explain in Chapters 6 and 7, language and culture became more complex as symbols and ritual practices began to play a more central role in how hominids made sense of their world. An earthly need for belongingness led to the human religious imagination and thus to the otherworldly realm of relating with God, gods, and spirits.

From the building blocks we find in apelike ancestors emerged the soulful need to pray to gods, to praise God with hymns, to shake in terror before the power of invisible spirits, to fear for one's life at the hands of the unknown or to feel bathed in all-enveloping love from the heavens. To express in straightforward language the profound depth of this human emotional connection to the sacred is a challenge. The inaccessibility to language of the sacred experience mirrors what Martin Buber writes about when he describes human relating with God: it "is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet we feel addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth."

Buber's I and Thou is a wonderful (in the word's literal sense) lead-in to understanding my thesis. Buber says that "all actual life is encounter," that "in the beginning is the relation," that "man becomes an I through a You." (3) This is so and has been so for a very long time in our prehistory. What's so beautiful and compelling about the human religious imagination in all its ineffable relating is how it emerges from its evolutionary precursors and yet completely transfigures them.

In highlighting this critical balance between evolutionary continuity and evolutionary transformation, I want to be crystal clear about the role of belongingness in the origins of religion. I see belongingness as one aspect of religiousness - an aspect so essential that the human religious imagination could not have evolved without it. In scientific lingo, belongingness is a necessary condition for the evolution of religion. Over the course of prehistory, belongingness was transformed from a basic emotional relating between individuals to a deeper relating, one that had the potential to become transcendent, between people and supernatural beings or forces.

My focus on belongingness distinguishes my perspective from the dominant one today. In our age of high-tech science, when gene sequencing and brain-mapping reign supreme, it is little surprise to find that the most popular theories of the origin of religion center around properties of genes and brains. Specific genetic-biochemical profiles and inherited brain "modules" devoted to the expression of religion animate these theories. While something can be learned from such scenarios, they are sterile to the degree that they fail to grasp the significance of what matters most: people deeply and emotionally engaged with others of their kind, and eventually with the sacred.

That social interactions played a central role in the origins of religion is not, of course, an original insight. Such an emphasis may no longer be favored, but at least since the time of the pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim in the early twentieth century, and indeed since Buber, theorists have expressed the importance of connections between religion and social-emotional phenomena. A few theorists continue that trend today. But as I have indicated, to fully probe the origins of religion, we must look beyond even the first glimmers of human evolution to examine the emotional lives of the apes. And so I start the evolutionary clock earlier than do others who chart the origins of the religious imagination.

The challenge at the heart of this book is to tell the story of the earliest origins of religion. As is already clear, commitment to an evolutionary perspective on religion amounts to a claim that humans evolved God gradually and not via some spiritual big bang. Before moving, in subsequent chapters, to specifics of the evolutionary perspective itself, it remains to say something more concrete about religion itself. One linguistic clarification can be made immediately. By adopting the term "the human religious imagination," I do not mean to imply that humans simply make up God, gods, and spirits in their imaginations. Nor do I claim - nor, indeed, could I claim - that these sacred beings are real in our world. Matters of faith are not amenable to scientific analysis, experimentation, or testing; writing as a biological anthropologist, I remain agnostic on this question. My focus is on our prehistory, and on how - and why - we evolved God as that prehistory unfolded.

Copyright © 2007 by Barbara J. King

About the Author

Barbara J. King is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. A biological anthropologist, she has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon, in Kenya, and at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park. She lives in Gloucester County, Virginia.