The creation of god, part 2
How the creations escaped the creator.
This is a three-part series on the creation of god. If you have not seen part one yet, give it a try.
Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime. - Imre Lakatos
We elaborated previously why the creation of god was a necessity in ancient times for societies to form and prosper. In this part, we are going to focus on how religion impacted on the course of human civilization.
Although religious belief developed organically and was evolutionarily advantageous for a society, the unification of religious theories left a long and bloody track over the last few millennia. How did that happen? Almost all early societies started out with a polytheistic belief; basically ascribing one god to a particular phenomenon that needed answering. What is the sun and why does it move every day? What happened to my crop harvest? Why does it rain? The go-to solution was to think that a god is probably responsible. Similar to the question, where do we come from? We did not understand, so probably god must have created us. Intriguingly, the vision of ourselves as god’s creatures clearly separated humans from nature and other animals.
An elegant side-product of believing in god was his power to shape human perception of reality. We started dividing our experiences into nature (things we could explain) and divine (all the things we did not have an answer for yet)
This simplification of reality had several consequences. By separating nature and divine, the division of self from nature was not an abstract concept anymore. Psychologically, it made us humans special and most importantly introduced a qualitative hierarchical order (with god the creator on top) to a previously perceived chaotic and frightening world.
This understanding of order shaped how human societies were managed; the kings and spiritual leaders as either descendants or messengers from god were on the top of social hierarchy, with the body of people to serve and live under them. This bigger hierarchical “order” of classes and birthrights ultimately replaced the old tribal organization of small human groups and allowed at the same time large amounts of humans to fit in this system. A system which started to out-compete the previously existing natural order of an “ecosystem”.
Nothing in the last five millennia up until the introduction of nation states impacted the shape of the world as much as religious belief, it was the designer, organizer and judge of almost all human activity.
Around this time, humans took the final step out of their ecological niche, from the smart tool using ape to a frightening power, shaping the environment and bending nature to their will.
The pyramids, artificial water canals, deforestation, cities, bit by bit the combined effort of human civilization left its mark on our planet, shaping it, transforming it.
Unfortunately at this point, we start to encounter the darker site of religion; when it starts mixing with politics and power plays. There are many aspects to this side of the story;
- the shift to and the rise of monotheistic religions, a model more suited for totalitarian emperors/kings of the Middle Ages than almost democratic polytheism of Ancient Greece. Although mostly associated with Greece, democratic governance started earlier and was far more widespread throughout Western and non-Western world alike before the rise of monotheistic religions; usually in cultures that had polytheistic spiritual beliefs.
- the use of rituals to enforce social control. A recent nature paper associates ritualistic human sacrifice which ‘legitimizes political authority and social class systems, functioning to stabilize such social stratification’
- justification of war in the name of religion. Most if not all wars up to the introduction of nation-states (a quite new concept that brought us already two world wars) were religiously motivated. The Crusades throughout 11th to 15th century, the French Wars of religion, the Thirty Years’ War and these are just some of the big ones of Christianity and Europe. More recently we see the notion of Jihad in several parts of the Middle East.
- exclusion of non-conformists and minorities. No matter if atheists, Jews, different races; every alternative to conformist ideology was branded sacrilegious and morally devaluated, using religious conformity to disenfranchise political opponents.
“The process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
So did religion bring us more good or bad?
In a way, we can understand wars between religions as an abstract evolutionary struggle for ideological survival, which led, though mostly bloody and brutal, to a selection of fittest ideas, and extinction of the rest.
A religious ideology is quite similar to a virus, both follow an evolutionary principle. Interestingly, the most successful viruses are hyper-virulent (contagious) but do not kill their host (non-lethal). This ensures its survival more reliably compared to producing so much virus the host dies without being able to spread it further.
Back to religion, virulence and lethality are key in why rather peaceful ideologies have more traction in the long run than radical ones. If we compare radical ideologies like Nazi-Germany or the ultra-communist Red Khmer, these ideologies also spread virulently but were eradicated just as quickly, with the Nazis having about 12 years of terror and the Red Khmer as short as 4 years (still causing absurd amounts of people to die). These ideologies were not feasible nor sustainable from an evolutionary point of view.
However, if we take a look at soft ideologies, e.g. Buddhism, it has spread all over the world and proven to be very resistant to eradication (many tried) and managed to be one of the world’s biggest religions until today. The same can really be said about all big religions; Christianity and Islam are fundamentally remarkably peaceful ideologies.
However, the beautiful and frightening thing about evolution is that it does not stop, especially not for ideologies and its minor offspring, ideas. We perceive evolution as history, something that happened and explains partially why things developed the way they did to what we can experience and perceive now. The compelling thing about the evolution of ideas (of how we try to make sense of our world, which is the basic job of any ideology, religious or otherwise) is its ingenuity in coming up with ever newer and fitter models.
One great example of a fitter ideology outcompeting the old paradigm started in the 14th century, the renaissance (of ideologies originating from Greeks and Romans) and its later baby, the Age of Enlightenment.
Many humans at the time got fed-up with a reality perception of a god you cannot fathom, questioning and transitioning from a dogmatic theocentric to a anthropo-centric view of the world.
With god completely out of the “able to experience” picture, humans could use their rational conscious minds to understand natural principles; Systematic reoccurrences of events like the sun/moon/tides cycle, seasons or shape of the earth could be investigated as mechanical phenomena and accurate predictions could be made. I can only imagine the relief they must have felt, finally being able to stop praying and hoping for things to happen and taking one’s fate into one’s own hands. In any case, the Age of Enlightenment led to the strongest advances in science and knowledge ever experienced in human civilization, paving the way for the industrial revolution and the evolution of technology.
Despite what one might experience with all the media coverage, religious belief is in decline all over the world, whereas evidence-based scientific beliefs are increasing. The world is not getting crazier but better. This does not mean that people are less susceptible to believe something weird, but at least the majority accepts the truths of science behind the machines they use every day, like smartphones and the internet.
The world is getting better. This is not coincidence, this is evolution of better ideas outcompeting less fit ideologies.
Where is this evolution going to end? The scientific paradigm (the fittest and most inclusive explanation of our world and universe so far) and the idea of technological progress, constitute the next unequivocally successful thought-system to advance our species.
Religions, as we know them, will eventually perish.
With science as the next fittest ideology, humankind started a process that is way quicker in transforming the world and potentially universe than processes rooted in biology will ever be able to, effectively out-competing the biological evolution which created us. Life is getting very interesting for us now. Silicon-based information technology, computation, automation; these are the faces of this new kind of evolution, and like the physical, chemical or biological evolution that spawned it, it works way faster in creating complexity than the revolutions before it.
The power of shared religious paradigms transformed us from social primates to an earth shaping master civilization. Imagine now what power of shared scientific paradigm can do to our future.
Through science, we are now the masters of our physical, chemical and more and more biological existence.
The creation of god helped us escape our real creator (nature), but with the creation of science we are finally able to take driver’s seat in determining our fate. And in that car, there is no place for god anymore.
Unless we become gods ourselves.
This is the end of the second part of “the creation of god” series. Don’t miss out on the conclusion with creation of god, part 3!
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