Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Geertz defined religion as providing a model of “a general order of existence,” not far from Huizinga’s “sacred order of things,” and several other cultural systems have, over evolutionary time, developed out of that originally global and undifferentiated way of thinking, notably art, science, and philosophy, all of which are concerned in their different ways with the general order of existence and so possibly in competition with each other and with religion. In particular the question has arisen historically as to the relative status of the truths about the general order of existence that each of these fields has claimed to have discovered. It is hard to deal with this issue in the abstract, as the relation between these fields has changed so much over time. Art began almost always as a form of religious expression and, in the West, from the Pleistocene cave paintings until early modern times, continued to be so. In recent times as art has emancipated itself from religion, its claim to truth has been quixotic. On the one hand literature is quite happy to be viewed as “fiction,” so that no truth claims seem to be involved, but then the question arises as to when fiction is truth or truth fiction, and we have not gotten very far with that issue.14’

  Philosophy in its early forms-in ancient Greece or China, for examplewas in many ways a kind of religion. As Pierre Hadot has convincingly argued, philosophy was in its classical beginnings (and, I would argue, in China as well as the West) a “way of life,” not just of thought, that dealt with all the problems of religion and that actually was a form of religion for its, usually educated elite, adherents.143 Even some Enlightenment philosophies, if we may take Kant and Hegel as examples, were as concerned with ways of life as with ways of thinking. More recently philosophy has concerned itself almost exclusively with ways of thinking that almost, but never quite, ignore the fact that ethics and politics, say, are practices of life, not just forms of thought. Science, until quite recently, perhaps as late as the nineteenth century, was only a field of philosophy, seldom venturing to provide conceptions of “a general order of existence,” until scientific cosmology and particularly Darwinian evolutionary biology came on the scene.144 Though “natural philosophers” criticized forms of myth from ancient times, the war of science and religion is very much a modern phenomenon.

  Religious Naturalism

  As I noted early in this chapter, I was surprised to see how many distinguished contemporary scientists still concern themselves with religion and feel the need to take some stand in relation to it. Even more, I am impressed with those who seem to want to bring the war between science and religion to a peaceful conclusion or at least an amicable armistice. We noted in the Preface Stephen Jay Gould’s distinction between religion and science as two non-overlapping magisteria,‘445 and in this chapter that Kirschner and Gerhart “draw the line between faith and science at a different place, one more defensible in the light of the modern understanding,“146 which seems very close to Gould’s intention. The attempt to describe science and religion as two different “cultural systems” that work in different ways toward different ends seems to me right, but making clear the distinction and the ways in which they do and do not overlap (because all cultural systems overlap, and all of them have an impact on the world of daily life) is not easy.

  I noted early on, following Mary Midgley, that the grand scientific metanarrative of cosmic and biological evolution could be viewed with cosmic optimism (Chaisson) or cosmic pessimism (Monod, Weinberg) or just with a kind of acceptance that this is the only world we have (Marcus Aurelius, Oliver Sacks). I need to report one other view I have found, which is in some ways similar to that of Chaisson but significantly moves beyond it: this is a view that accepts the scientific story as all there is, that explicitly disavows the supernatural, yet views nature from a religious perspective, thus giving religion a degree of autonomy that cosmic optimism in its unabashed version doesn’t quite do. This version is sometimes called religious naturalism, recognizing that there is something religious about it but that it doesn’t involve anything beyond nature.

  Some of these views even use the word “God” though giving it a new meaning. The biologist Harold Morowitz offers a clear but rather startling view. He begins by accepting a kind of Spinozist pantheism, but he wants to move beyond the immanence of pantheism to some kind of transcendence. As a student of biological emergence, he is prepared to argue that the emergence of consciousness is a kind of transcendence: “We, Homo sapiens, are the transcendence of the immanent God … We are God.“147 He concludes his book with the following paragraph:

  To those who believe that we are the mind, the volition, and the transcendence of the immanent God, our task is huge. We must create and live an ethics that optimizes human life and moves to the spiritual. To do this we must use our science, our knowledge of the mind of the immanent God. I am reminded of the words of the Talmudist: “It is not up to you to finish the task: neither are you free to cease from trying.“148

  What I am trying to get at with this example is that, by calling the universe the immanent God and human beings the transcendent God, Morowitz has clearly gone beyond scientific language and has used explicitly religious language, even without positing any God beyond nature. In this sense his view can be called religious naturalism, which in his case means essentially using religious language to refer to aspects of the natural world.

  Another version of religious naturalism is not quite so radical in its claims, even though it moves beyond cosmic optimism. Stuart Kauffman, a biologist who has done a great deal of work on complexity theory, in his book At Home in the Universe, which already, by its very title, indicates the optimistic turn, suggests something more in the book’s final section, entitled “Reinventing the Here is a religious term, “the sacred,” used in ways that most religious people would not recognize because they think the sacred is not something that can be invented or reinvented. In 2008 Kauffman took the title of the last section of his 1995 book, At Home in the Universe, as the title of a new book that spells out his views about science and religion in detail, Reinventing the Sacred.- A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.150 Here Kauffman speaks not only of the sacred, but of God, though he gives that term a novel meaning: “God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity of the universe.“151

  Kauffman goes as far as he can to alleviate the fears of religious believers that science reduces everything to atoms. In a chapter entitled “Breaking the Galilean Spell,” which I in my ignorance thought was going to be a criticism of Jesus, Kauffman is actually criticizing Galileo and his numerous followers to this day who seek to reduce the complex invariably to the simple. As a proponent of emergence theory, Kauffman believes that emergent forms in evolution, cosmic and biological, cannot be reduced to or even fully explained by the entities of which they are composed: new forms of organization give rise to genuinely new and irreducible complexities. An essential aspect of the emergence of new forms of organization is their creativity, for they cannot be predicted in advance-in one sense they could even be said to be beyond reason, though they are fully natural. After considering the possibility that such a purely natural definition of God might offend some religious people, Kauffman affirms the genuinely religious meaning of his intention: “If we must live our lives forward, only partially knowing, with faith and courage as an injunction, this God may call to us as we step into mystery. The long history of life has given us tools to live in the face of mystery, tools that we only partially know we have, gifts of the creativity that we can now call Kauffman, like most religious naturalists, is basically offering us a theory, a theory about what the term “God” could mean in a fully natural world. He makes clear that his God is fundamentally different from a Creator God who intervenes in nature from outside, so to speak, and so could not be a person.

  Those who think religion is not primarily a theory, but a practice, would find it a little difficult to see how one could worship the creativity of the universe, how it could become the basis of a way of life, to use Hadot’s term. Ye
t in the last passage from Kauffman quoted above he speaks of his God as “calling” to us and giving us “gifts.” It almost seems impossible to avoid personalization once one has adopted religious language to the extent that Kauffman has, though he does not deal with the implications of what he has done. Like Chaisson, however, he does think there will be practical consequences if his proposal is widely accepted: it will “heal the split between reason and faith,” and provide the basis of a “new global ethic.“153

  Most of those who propose some form of religious naturalism to meet the need for meaning in a world where science is viewed as incompatible with historical religions are not concerned to explain the evolution of religion, whereas most of those who have worked on the problem of the evolution of religion have not been concerned with the problem of religious naturalism. The reader may note that I have not cited the many works on religious evolution that have appeared in the last decade or two. This is largely because, as I said in the Preface, my concern is first of all to understand what religion is and then to consider the question of whether it is adaptive, maladaptive, or adaptively neutral in evolutionary terms. Most of the work in the field has been primarily oriented to these latter concerns, so they have not been very helpful in my project. Some have not been helpful at all, especially those coming from a particular strand of evolutionary psychology.154 I have learned from some of those who have focused on the adaptive possibilities of religion, such as Robert Wright, in The Evolution of God, and Nicholas Wade, in The Faith Instinct, but I have found their focus too narrow ethnographically, too concerned with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with only passing reference to other kinds of religion, and even then lacking a subtle knowledge of their subject matter. The best of the books stressing religion as adaptive is Douglas Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral, whose focus on particular cases is often illuminating.‘55

  However, there is one evolutionary biologist who has written both on the evolution of religion and on religious naturalism whom I have found particularly helpful. I have cited him in other contexts earlier in the chapter, but here I would like to discuss briefly what he has to say about religion. The scholar I have in mind is Terrence Deacon, evolutionary anthropologist and neuroscientist, who has written both as a religious naturalist and about the evolution of religion. The piece on religious naturalism that he wrote jointly with Ursula Goodenough, “The Sacred Emergence of Nature,” expresses an emergentist view, as is clear from the title. It opens with a strong criticism of reductionism and an argument for the irreducibility of emergent forms. Like the emergentists discussed above, Morowitz and Kauffman, Deacon and Goodenough are cosmic optimists, whereas reductionists such as Monod and Weinberg are cosmic pessimists, suggesting, though my sample is small and not random, a correlation between emergentism and optimism, reductionism and pessimism. Deacon and Goodenough, however, make more moderate claims than Morowitz and Kauffman-they speak as “religious nontheists” and they avoid using the term “God.“156 Further, they are more aware than their fellow emergentists, or at least express themselves more clearly, that religion is not only often adaptive but can also often have very negative consequences, and that even short wrong turns can have long-term effects. As its title indicates, the main point of the article is to describe how emergence works and then to find meaning in celebrating it. They write, “Understanding the human as the emergent outcome of natural history allows us to understand who we are in exciting new ways.” They then quote from an earlier article by Deacon:

  Human consciousness is not only an emergent phenomenon, it epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. Human minds, deeply entangled in symbolic culture, have an effective causal locus that extends across continents and millennia, growing out of the experience of countless individuals. Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing, a process continually transcending itself. To be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening.157

  They note a series of spiritual and moral responses to this understanding, but Deacon places them in an evolutionary context more explicitly in a second article, written with Tyrone Cashman, “The Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origin of After making the point that religion is found in no other species but our own, they link it to the evolution of symbolic capacities. They note three ways in which our symbolic abilities move us beyond the cognitive and emotional range of other primates. The first point they make is that only humans have the ability to create narratives, or, indeed, to have the memory, sometimes called autobiographical memory, of life as a series of related events. Other intelligent mammals have what is called episodic memory: that is, they can remember particular events when they are in a situation that calls them to mind, and they can act in the present on the basis of what they have learned in similar situations in the past. However, in animals, and in young children as Gopnik has shown, episodic memories cannot be recovered unless cued by some current circumstance that calls them to mind, and they are not linked to each other in any sequential way.159 Our animal relatives have another kind of memory, procedural memory, that arises from repeated practice and the development of skill. For us, learning how to ride a bicycle or play tennis are examples of procedural memory, so embedded in our bodies that we cannot even explain them clearly except by acting them out, but they involve extended sequences rather than discrete situational memories such as episodic memory does. For early humans, learning how to make an Acheulian ax, a quite complex skill that takes a long time for moderns to master, would be an example of procedural memory.

  What Deacon and Cashman argue is that learning a language involves procedural memory-that is, a great deal of memorization and practice until the ability to utter sentences, like riding a bicycle, is almost automatic. Sentences, however, are composed of words full of content that necessarily constantly cue episodic memories. Language, therefore, involving a kind of fusion of episodic and procedural memory, necessarily gives rise to narrative. The emergence of narrative, based on language with its capacity for a synergistic union of the two earlier forms of memory, is central for religion: narrative, as we saw in Chapter 1, is the basis of identity, personal and social, and religion is more than anything else a way of making sense of the world, of forming an identity in relation to the world. Deacon and Cashman are very helpful as far as they go, though for the role of narrative in religion we need to see it as deeply embedded in practice, above all ritual, a matter that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3.

  In addition to the narrative contribution to the religious capacity to find meaning in existence, Deacon and Cashman suggest that the very nature of narrative could have led to ideas that life does not end with death: “The tendency to believe in an afterlife might be a natural by-product of the narrative tendency.“160 This is an interesting suggestion, but one I would not be entirely ready to accept, particularly if we are thinking of early humans. The afterlife can become obsessive in archaic societies-think of ancient Egypt, which will be described in Chapter 5-and is important in one way or another in most of the historic religions. But hunter-gatherers are not necessarily interested in this issue, as, for example, the Navajo are not. Even those who are, such as the Australian Aborigines, simply assume rebirth. The spirit of Uncle X or Grandmother Y, now after their death resident in a local water hole, may enter the womb of a woman and reappear in her newborn infant. There is nothing supernatural to the Australians in this very natural belief in the continuity of life. Gananath Obeyesekere, in his work on karma as a significant element in Hinduism and Buddhism, has discussed at length how widespread much simpler ideas of rebirth are among tribal peoples on every continent.”’ I would even question the usual interpretation of graves of early humans, sometimes with elaborate grave goods, as indicative of “a belief in the afterlife.” Such graves could be simply an expression of grief and the need to remember. Strong feelings of grief are widespread among intelligent animals, who almost surely don’t believe in the afterlife. Giving physical
expression to such grief should not be overinterpreted without good evidence.

  Deacon and Cashman make a second suggestion: that symbolism could lead to a consciousness of a difference between “the visible world of real objects and living beings” and “a world of symbols that are linked together by meaningful associations and constrained by the `rules’ of grammar.“162 The dualism of thing and word, they suggest, might give rise to metaphysical dualisms such as are found in many cultures both tribal and historic. But such dualisms do not need to be metaphysical-they occur often enough in the world of daily life, giving rise to many of our ordinary problems in understanding others. Further, this dualism is fundamental for science, where what appears is not the same as what science has discovered to be the truth: that the earth goes around the sun rather than that the sun goes around the earth, as appears to the naked eye. Even in a culture where “everyone” knows that the earth goes around the sun, there are very few people who could prove it-it is a belief based on faith in science even though it contradicts the senses. And scientific explanation depends heavily on invisible, at least to the naked eye, though natural, entities such as genes. Does that make common sense real and science imaginary?

  Deacon and Cashman give the example of the Aboriginal Australian idea of the “Dreaming,” which we will discuss in some detail in Chapter 3, as involving “a hidden reality for them, more real than the visible world.” But it is more real, I would argue, because it is more condensed, and more powerfully expressed than the language of everyday, but it illuminates precisely the realities of the visible world, as science does in a different way. It is not an expression of illusory imaginations that draw people away from “the real world.” It is the Dreaming that allows the Australian Aborigines, as one of their most astute students put it, “to assent to life, as it is, without morbidity.” The metaphorical and analogical uses of language are very important for religion, as for several other cultural systems, including, in different ways, science and literature, but they can be strategic ways of understanding reality more deeply, not necessarily of avoiding it. Further, we may note, metaphor and analogy, along with other linguistic forms, are often used in the context of play. Huizinga devotes a whole chapter to “The Play-Concept as Expressed in Language..“‘63