A Brief History of the Last 2 1/2 Million Years
When and why we created God, and how religious belief transforms our evolution.
Table of contents:
Part 1.
Religious Belief – 2 ½ million to 25,000 years ago
Prologue.
Chapter 1. Where do we come from?
Chapter 2. Inductive Reason: our first evolutionary milestone.
Chapter 3. Hume, and the so say problem of induction.
Chapter 4. Homo habilis to Homo sapiens.
Chapter 5. Cave paintings.
Chapter 6. How we date the past.
Chapter 7. Language.
Chapter 8. Religious rituals.
Chapter 9. Religious Belief: our second evolutionary milestone.
Part 2.
God– 25,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Chapter 10. The first villages: our third evolutionary milestone.
Chapter 11. The law.
Part 3.
Us – 5,000 years ago to the present.
Chapter 12. Athens: the secular state.
Chapter 13. The sun, the moon and the stars: What goes on in the heavens?
Chapter 14. Knowledge, and the scientific revolution.
Chapter 15. Aristotle, Anselm and the ontological argument.
Chapter 16. Plato 1: His two wrong turns, Pythagoras and Parmenides.
Chapter 17. Plato 2: His pernicious legacy: spirituality.
Chapter 18. Free Will: Epicurus’ sleight of hand.
Chapter 19. From the supernatural to the scientific.
Chapter 20. Beyond God: Nietzsche and Socrates.
Epilogue.
Select bibliography.
Appendix 1.
Prologue.
When they pared down the question as to what it means to be human, reducing it to its very essence, Ibn Sina and then René Descartes arrived at remarkably similar ideas. The former, one of the key figures from the Golden Age of Islam, proposed his ‘falling man’ thought experiment in the tenth century. While the latter ushered in the European Enlightenment when he published A Discourse on the Method in 1637, in which he puts forward his famous cogito, ergo sumargument, I think, therefore I am.
What they were both determined to do was to strip away anything extraneous and to bore down into our very core. What they concluded was, that the fundamental element that makes us human is our awareness of ourselves as thinking beings. Not merely our ability to think or reason per se, but our understanding that we have this faculty. It is this combination, of being able to reason, and of being conscious of ourselves as thinking beings, that elevates us and marks us out as unique.
Ever since we have been capable of that process, and have had that understanding, we have been asking ourselves a series of fundamental questions: where do we come from, how did we get here, and what is it that makes us who and what we are? And for thousands of years, a myriad of thinkers have put forward their own set of competing explanations.
But over the last three or four hundred years, the world has gone through a series of astonishing technological revolutions, each of which has proved to be even more world-changing than the one that preceded it. Which together have been propelling changes that are not merely accelerating, but are accelerating at an exponential rate. Beginning with the scientific revolution in the 17th century and culminating, for the moment, with the digital revolution that we are currently in the midst of.
So that it is often said that if you took someone from 16th century Europe, and, at the click of your fingers, transported them back a thousand years to the 6th century, there is little that they would be confronted with there that they would find either strange or startling. Not one of the privileged few at the centre of courtly power, but a normal working man or woman living an unremarkable, average life in rural France, Italy or Germany.
But that if you took that same, average person from 16th century Europe and transported them five hundred years into the future to deposit them in the 21st. century, they would literally be incapable of comprehending the world that they found themselves in. Such have been the changes in those intervening years.
Trains, cars, planes and rockets, buildings made of steel and glass rising up hundreds of metres into the clouds above. Radio carbon dating, molecular biology and genetics, satellite technology, mass spectrometry, DNA, radar, lidar, X rays, computers and, of course, the storing and exchanging of limitless amounts of information, instantaneously, to and from anywhere in the world, and beyond, via the Internet, courtesy of a device that sits in your pocket.
All of which has meant that we suddenly have the wherewithal to look at one of those fundamental questions in a completely new light. Or at least, at one element of it. For the question as to where do we come from and how did we get here has always carried with it a sense of implying two, distinct elements.
On the one hand, it looks back, physically, at our material past, and asks, literally, where did we start out from, and in what form? How did we evolve, by what stages, and how did we come to move from there to here?
But on the other, it suggests a deeper and more enigmatic question; who or what put us here to begin to make that journey? And to what end? What is our purpose?
Because a great deal of the energy we have invested into exploring questions around who we are, and what our relationship is to the world we live in, has been spent in trying to unravel our relationship to the spiritual realm that we are both connected to, and are living separately from.
In other words, that question around where do we come from and how did we get here, heads off in two, parallel directions. The one physical, the other metaphysical.
What has happened over the last few hundred years is that modern science has suddenly provided us with the means to substantially answer the physical side of that question. And, if to not yet fully answer it, to be able to fill in a huge number of what had previously been large gaps. That knowledge that we now have about our physical history and our material past enables us to reassess our understanding of our relationship to that spiritual realm. Indeed, it demands that we now completely re-evaluate it.
This then is what this book will be exploring. How do the discoveries of modern science and the knowledge that we now have of human history affect our understanding of our place in the world? It is then a history of human culture and an exploration of the light that modern science shines on some of our most important and foundational philosophical ideas.
What do all these recent discoveries reveal about some of the principal ideas that have helped mould the human psyche, many of which have demanded of us that we focus on the metaphysical at the expense of the physical? How can modern science help us bridge that gap, between what we know about the physical, and what we believe about the metaphysical?
The only way to answer any of which is to do exactly the same thing that we would when trying to answer any other set of questions. Namely, to examine the evidence and draw whatever conclusions it suggests. The only way to do that is by untangling religious belief from God, so that we can piece together an independent history for them both.
Because we begin practicing belief at a particular moment in time, and for a very specific reason. As soon as we do so, our evolution is transformed and, almost overnight, we evolve into the sorts of fully-fledged human beings we recognize today. But it is only much later that we then create God, and we bring Him into being for very different and very specific ends.
This book then presents a history of religious belief, followed by a separate history of God. Because once we begin to chart that early history of ours, it quickly becomes obvious quite how pivotally important religious belief is for that evolution. As a matter of fact, it is what our evolution culminates with, and is the explanation for the explosion in our development which takes place from around sixty thousand years ago on.
For some two and a half million years, we evolve at a steady pace. Until suddenly, around sixty and fifty thousand years ago, that evolution bursts into life and everything changes. The reason that change comes about is because it is at this point that we begin to practice belief.
Over the past few decades, we have managed to unearth an enormous amount of evidence detailing what those changes to our development were. What they meant for our daily lives, and what they tell us about how our evolution progresses. So that today, we are in the unique position of being able to join up all of those various dots.
This puts us in an incredibly privileged position. We are the first people to have ever lived who can look back in time and describe, in a scientific and objective way, where we came from and how we got here. To be able, in other words, to answer that first half of that question, around our physical history and our material past.
Which is not to say that we have now answered all of those questions. On the contrary, because the biggest change of all is our new appreciation of what knowledge is and how it works, which I shall be discussing in more detail in the course of the book. What we now appreciate is that knowledge is neither absolute nor relative, it is progressive. We know more today than we did yesterday, and will know more again tomorrow.
This new understanding of how knowledge functions, and the revelations that have resulted from those explosive revolutions in technology, mean that we really do have a unique understanding of where human beings come from and how we got here. Which means we can now explore that second side to that question from a completely new perspective.
Because all those discoveries that modern science is making possible allow us to conduct this investigation into why it is we that we have this compulsion to practice religious belief. Which will help explain why we immediately become so incomparably stronger as soon as we begin to do so. And why we now need to re-examine what we believe and why we do so.
But there has been a huge resistance to looking at either religious belief, or God, in a scientific way, subjecting them both to scientific analysis using the tools we have today to produce separate histories for them both. And in order to understand what lies behind that reluctance, we need first to look briefly at the way in which our attitude towards science and religion has changed over that last century or so.
Science Vs Religion
After the publication of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species in 1859, there was a palpable sense of religion coming under attack, and of science being pitted against religion. Either, you accepted the material evidence thrown up by science, which clearly contradicted the claims made by any of the faiths, and specifically the idea that God had created an unchanging world. Or, you rejected the ‘claims’ made by science and insisted instead on holding on to whatever truths your religious convictions provided you with.
That sense of Us and Them, of science and religion being two opposing and contradictory forces, was one of the principal characteristics of the twentieth century. And it was the product of two separate legacies from the century before.
First, Darwin was part of a nineteenth-century quartet comprising of him, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, all of whom came to have an enormous influence on the twentieth century that followed. All of whom, very unusually, were atheists. This is a complete historical anomaly.
The vast majority of the world’s most influential figures, whether throughout the history of culture or the history of science, were moved to do what they did to better understand the glory of God, and to celebrate the wonder of His creation. They were each as passionate about their beliefs as everybody else around them was. Indeed, a disproportionately large number of them could comfortably be described as mystics, from Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Plotinus to Kepler, Newton, Spinoza and Wittgenstein.
And second, the nineteenth century had witnessed the culmination of the Romantic movement, and one of the central ideas at the core of that had been the conviction that nineteenth-century man was the culmination of our species, and represented the very apex of civilization. Proof of which, it was contended, were all of the discoveries that science had made over the previous couple of hundred years. And there was a palpable sense that science was on the verge of answering all our questions and of solving all our problems.
These two currents came to coalesce, so that one of the ‘problems’ that science seemed to have now solved was religion. Hence, for many people at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the triumphs of modern man was that, thanks to science, he could now free himself from the shackles of organized religion. As, any moment now, science would provide us with a definitive explanation for everything.
But as the twentieth century unfolded, that sense of triumphalism was completely upended. On the one hand, the unparalleled chaos and violence unleashed in the new century seemed to suggest that, if anything, modern man had taken a giant leap backwards rather than forwards.
And on the other, the two great discoveries of twentieth-century science, Relativity and quantum physics, not only failed to answer any of those last, few remaining questions. They seemed, as far as anybody could make out, to throw up a plethora of unfathomable new ones. Far from clearing anything up, the picture of the world that modern science was producing seemed to be incomprehensibly murky and significantly more confusing.
Not only that, but people began to notice that that transformation into the largely secular world that so many people had predicted for the twentieth century had failed to take place. And, looking at the world that they lived in, they saw that the vast majority of people were every bit as passionate about their beliefs as people had always been. It was only in a tiny corner of the modern world, in the mass media and down certain corridors of academia, that people had become predominantly secular.
Which then resulted in a reaction against the idea of seeing science and religion as being inherently oppositional. It waspossible to practice science rationally and reliably, and to hold and practise your religious beliefs in private. What you thought, intellectually, and what you believed in, spiritually, were two entirely separate entities. Not only that, but so they must remain.
It was just as important, it was now thought, to keep your beliefs out of your scientific enquiries, as it was to avoid making the mistake of allowing your religious certainties to be pointlessly subjected to the rigours of so say scientific analysis.
So that, instead of being seen as oppositional, science and belief were now viewed as occupying two completely distinct spheres, that did not, and must not intersect. There was even a name for this, which Stephen Jay Gould came up with in 1997; NOMA, or Non-overlapping Magisteria.1
All of which sounds like a terribly sensible and even a generous attitude to have adopted. But as an eminent evolutionary biologist, Gould of all people really ought to have known better. Because what this did was to prevent us from conducting precisely the kind of scientific investigation that we need to if we want to find out what it is that is so useful about belief. And why it was that, much later, we then came to create God. Which proved to be every bit as useful, albeit for a very different end. In effect, it delayed us from more speedily piecing together all of the evidence that has started to surface over the last century or so.
Because all the evidence that we have now amassed really does place us in this remarkable and genuinely unique position. On the one hand, there are areas of enquiry, and tools to delve into them, that were unavailable to us in any other epoch. From radiometric dating and DNA analysis to satellite imaging and computer mapping. And on the other, anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can have instantaneous and unlimited access to pretty much any of that mountainous data.
All of which means that, for the first time in our history, we are now in the extraordinarily exciting position of being able to answer what is probably the oldest questions that has ever occurred to us; where do we come from?
- It first appeared in an essay published in Natural History, in 1997, and was then elaborated on in Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, by Stephen Jay Gould (Ballantine Books, 1999).
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