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

by Robert N. Bellah

  75. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 78.

  76. Richardson, Toward an American Theology, 66. Jerome Bruner, in Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 121, says the same thing about the “spontaneous autobiographies” that he collected: “As stories of development, these `spontaneous autobiographies’ were constituted of smaller stories (of events, happenings, projects), each of which achieved its significance by virtue of being part of a larger-scale `life.’ In this respect they shared a universal feature of all narratives. The larger overall narratives were told in easily recognizable genres-the tale of a victim, a Bildungsroman, antihero forms, Wanderung stories, black comedy, and so on. The storied events that they comprised made sense only in terms of the larger picture.”

  77. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 15-16.

  78. Bruner, Acts ofMeaning, 83.

  79. Ibid., 89. This study is reported in Katherine Nelson, ed., Narratives from the Crib (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  80. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 111-113. The Roy Schafer quotation occurs on p. 111. Herbert Fingarette made essentially the same argument in The Self in Transformation, esp. chap. 1.

  81. Bruner, Acts ofMeaning, 114.

  82. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959 [1956]).

  83. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 197-206. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have edited a valuable book about this process: The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  84. Bruner, Acts ofMeaning, 50. Bruner is drawing from Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), but with some changes of terminology: Goal instead of Purpose, Instrument instead of Agency. Although Trouble is an appropriately Burkean term, I could not find it in A Grammar ofMotives.

  85. W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monograph 11 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1966 [1959-1963]), 40. Narrative continues to be central even in the most sophisticated religious discourse. See Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989).

  86. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 205-206.

  87. Bruner, Acts of Meaning, 80.

  88. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), chap. 3, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis,” 172-272.

  89. Piaget, The Childs Conception of the World, 227.

  90. Piaget, Play, Dreams andlmitation, 288. In Cultural Origins Tomasello argues, on the basis of much new research, that children learn to understand the intentions of others at a much earlier age than Piaget believed (140-145). Nevertheless, it probably takes some time for that understanding to be fully appreciated.

  91. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore (1655), in Hobbes, Body, Man, and Citizen, ed. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1962), 3.7.48.

  92. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1651]), 102, 147, 160.

  93. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (Windsor, Vt.: Argo, 1969), 754, 756. The passage of Descartes on which Rosenstock-Huessy is elaborating is: “And because we have all to pass through a state of infancy to manhood, and have been of necessity, for a length of time, governed by our desires and our preceptors (whose dictates were frequently conflicting, while neither perhaps always counselled us for the best), I further concluded that it is almost impossible that our judgments can be so correct or solid as they would have been, had our Reason been mature from the moment of our birth, and had we always been guided by it alone.” Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. John Veitch (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946 [1637]),13. Earlier in part 2 Descartes speaks (metaphorically!) of ancient cities in which over time the streets have become crooked and the buildings jumbled and of illfitting sizes and styles, comparing them unfavorably to cities newly, and rationally, laid out with buildings of harmonious size and style. The books and ideas of the ages are like the streets and buildings of old cities: it would be better to start afresh with reason alone. Yet Descartes admits that “it is not customary to pull down all the buildings of a town with the single design of rebuilding them differently.” Discourse on Method, 11-13.

  94. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 51. Gellner is affirming a term criticized by Clifford Geertz in “Anti Anti-Relativism” (American Anthropologist 86 [1984]: 276 n. 2), which Gellner first used in Spectacles and Predicaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 146. Herbert Fingarette in The Self in Transformation, 233-234, describes some of the costs of being on our side of the Big Ditch: “It is unfortunate that our slavery to the physical-causal mode of thought is so great that many attempts to assign `ontological primacy’ to the human, the dramatic realities, are beset by charges of mystification, obscurantist irrationalism, even-ironicallyantihumanism. It is ironic that the directly graspable world of human beings in dramatic conflict, the world that has been familiar to humankind since the beginnings of the raceall this we now find dark, obstreperous, esoteric, even silly or boring. The human world in the West has become peripheral and surreptitious, an `underground’ world.”

  95. Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 89, quoting from Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 356-357.

  96. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chap. 6.

  97. Jerome Bruner, Possible Worlds, Actual Minds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). Bruner writes: “[Science] rides from time to time on wild metaphors … The history of science is full of them. They are crutches to help us get up the abstract mountain. Once up, we throw them away (even hide them) in favor of a formal, logically consistent theory that (with luck) can be stated in mathematical or near-mathematical terms. The formal models that emerge are shared, carefully guarded against attack, and prescribe ways of life for their users. The metaphors that aided in this achievement are usually forgotten or, if the ascent turns out to be important, are made not part of science but part of the history of science” (48). On falsification, see Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.)

  98. Cited in Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17.

  99. Cited in Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 7.

  100. Burke, A Grammar ofMotives, 503-504.

  101. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 [1962]).

  102. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, 58-60.

  103. From “Science” (1925), in Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1965), 39.

  104. Cited in Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 199, quoting from Russell’s Mysticism and Logic (New York: Norton 1929 [1910]), 62.

  2. Religion and Evolution

  1. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 6. Italics in original.

  2. Eric J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 211-213.

  3. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1985]), 8.

  4. Ibid., 5.

  5. Ibid., 2, quoting Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: Fontana, 1974 [1970]), 160.

  6. Oliver Sacks: “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers,” New York Review of Books 55 (2008): 67.

  7. It is sometimes noted that Hindu and Buddhist measures of time are even larger than those of modern cosmology; the kalpa, for example, comes in many lengths, but the largest is the mahakalpa or great kalpa, which is 1.28 trillion years long, w
hereas the universe of scientific cosmology is a mere 13.5 billion years. However, the great kalpa is made up of smaller kalpas, and kalpas of still smaller units, in a continual repetition, with each smaller unit having a particular characteristic, such as a decline in morality, though it is really a cycle of the world as we know it, until the world ends and a new cycle begins. Thus, though the units are immense, they are intelligible in human terms in a way that scientific cosmological time isn’t, or isn’t readily.

  8. Here I, like the scientists I have quoted, am getting into the act with a statement that will have to be qualified as we go along.

  9. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1993 [1977]), 140.

  10. “K” stands for Kelvin, a temperature scale that is based, not like Celsius on the melting point of ice, but on absolute zero-that is, no heat at all.

  11. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, 146.

  12. Steven Weinberg, at the beginning of The First Three Minutes, quotes a Norse creation myth to show how many questions it leaves unanswered, apparently unaware of the irony that his own narrative raises many as yet unanswered questions, as science always does, which is not to say that it isn’t an improvement on the Norse narrative, insofar as we understand that myth as quasi-scientific explanation.

  13. Christian, Maps of Time, 502-503.

  14. For cosmic history I am relying mainly on Weinberg, The First 7bree Minutes; Christian, Maps of Time; and Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution. I have also checked a few websites to see whether what these books say has been superseded. Most of cosmic history is so staggering in terms of time, size, speed, and heat as to tax my imagination, so I can only recount what I barely understand.

  15. Christian, Maps of Time, 40.

  16. Ibid., 62.

  17. Ibid., 63.

  18. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, 154.

  19. Midgley, Evolution, 96, 157.

  20. For Weinberg’s atheism, see his essay “Without God,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008, 73-76. In this essay he discusses several features of religion that are leading to what he believes to be the decline and probable extinction of religious belief. At the time I wrote a letter to the NYRB suggesting that Weinberg had as much standing to discuss religion as I do to discuss theoretical physics. They decided not to publish my letter. Upon reading Weinberg’s essay again in preparation for this chapter, I think they were right. The essay is a personal memoir, not a scholarly discussion, and from a man of his distinction, appropriate for the NYRB. As to the universe, his view in 2008 was much the same as in 1977. He writes, “The worldview of science is rather chilling” as we don’t “find any point to life laid out to us in nature.” Thus he lives his life “on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on the one hand and, on the other, despair.” But he has his consolations: not only in the joy of his work as a physicist, but in the New England countryside in the spring and in the poetry of Shakespeare. Yet he concludes with a kind of hard stoicism: “There is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking-with good humor, but without God” (76).

  21. Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, 154-155.

  22. Midgley quotes Marcus Aurelius as expressing a somewhat more grown-up relation to the universe: “Whether the world subsists by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or an intelligent Nature presides over it, let this be laid down as a maxim, that I am part of a whole, governed by its own nature … I shall never be displeased by what is allotted to me by that whole … Let us then properly employ this moment of time allotted to us by fate, and leave the world contentedly, like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.” Meditations 10.6 and 4.39. Quoted in Midgley, Evolution, 106. We should remember that in Marcus’s Stoicism there was the belief that the world goes through cycles, ending in general conflagrations before beginning again. I might also note that Marcus’s comments are a rebuke to my earlier comment on the cheerlessness of the cosmic metanarrative.

  23. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 406-407.

  24. Ibid., 408.

  25. Ibid., 162.

  26. Ibid., 169-170.

  27. Ibid., 162.

  28. Although I am in no position to judge, the idea of emergence as opposed to sheer chance is appealing to me. Among those who have pursued the idea of emergence are Stuart Kauffman, AtHome in the Universe: The Search for the Laws ofSelf-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Terrence Deacon, “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,” in The Re-Emergence ofEmergence, ed. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 111-150. Deacon’s forthcoming book develops these ideas more fully. See Terrence W. Deacon, Mind from Matter. The Emergent Dynamics ofLife. At an earlier period when emergence first became an issue, George Herbert Mead, one of the founders of sociology, strongly advocated it. See Mead, Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. 277 and 345.

  29. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 898; see the chart of the three domains, with the three tiny twigs on the far right, 899. Archaea are the third kind of monocellular organisms that were discovered relatively recently and that for my purposes can safely be ignored. For a fuller treatment of the remarkable characteristics of bacteria and why we still live in “the age of bacteria,” see Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony House, 1996), esp. 167-216.

  30. Gould, Foil House.

  31. Christian, Maps of Time, 113, quoting Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 114.

  32. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995).

  33. Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  34. Ibid., 256.

  35. Ibid., 47.

  36. Ibid., 253.

  37. Ibid., 255.

  38. Ibid., 51-55, 255.

  39. Ibid., 55-57, 255-256.

  40. Ibid., 57-58.

  41. Gould, Full House, 175-176.

  42. Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility ofLife, 62.

  43. Ibid., 68-69.

  44. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), v.

  45. Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility ofLife, 252-253. Another evolutionary biologist whose work complements that of Kirschner and Gerhart is Mary Jane West-Eberhard. Like them she emphasizes the role of the organism (phenotype) in its own evolution: “I consider genes followers, not leaders, in adaptive evolution. A very large body of evidence shows that phenotype novelty is largely reorganizational rather than a product of innovative genes. Even if reorganization was initiated by a mutation, a gene of major effect on regulation, selection would lead to genetic accommodation, that is, genetic change that follows, and is directed by, the reorganized condition of the phenotype. Some authors have expressed this pattern as `phenotype precedes genotype.”’ “Developmental Plasticity and the Origin of Species Differences,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102, suppl. 1 (2005): 6547. See also her book Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  46. Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility ofLife, 264.

  47. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  48. Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility ofLife, 1-5.

  49. Ibid., 271-273.

  50. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, annotated by
James T. Costa (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009 [1859]), 345. The relevant sentence is: “The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many palaeontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed.”

  51. Gould’s most extensive discussion of Darwin’s ambiguous, ambivalent attitude toward progress is in Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 475-479.

  52. Gould points out that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event “drove several groups to extinction through no adaptive failure of their own, while imparting fortuitous exaptive success to creatures that had lived throughout the long reign of dinosaurs, and never made any headway toward replacement, or even toward shared dominion with one of the most successful vertebrate groups in the history of life.” Ibid., 1332.

  53. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  54. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony House, 2009), 123.

  55. Ibid., 139.

  56. Ibid., 67.

  57. Hrdy, Mothers and Others, 38-39.

  58. De Waal, TheAge ofEmpathy, 131.

  59. Gordon Burghardt suggests that this common view of reptiles is inaccurate and that reptiles too “may form bonds, have extensive parental care, have long-term mates, live in extended kin groups, and so on.” Personal communication.

  60. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns (New York: Aldine, 1996 [1971]), 128.

  61. Ibid., 127.

  62. Ibid., 111.

  63. Freud, using a broad definition of sexuality, would see parental care itself as sexual, as the importance of the mammary glands so clearly indicates. But whereas sexual reproduction goes back to the eukaryotes, parental care is much more recent. They overlap, but because their origins are so different, conflict between sexuality and love is a recurrent problem, obviously among humans.