Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

Book by King Barbara J

ONE
Apes to Angels
WE HUMANS CRAVE emotional connection with others. This deep desire to connect can be explained by the long evolutionary history we shared with other primates, the monkeys and apes. At the same time, it explains why humans evolved to become the spiritual ape—the ape that grew a large brain, the ape that stood up, the ape that first created art, but, above all, the ape that evolved God.

A focus on emotional connection is an exciting way to view human prehistory, but it is not the traditional way. Millions of years of human evolution are most often recounted as a series of changes in the skeletons, artifacts, and big, flashy, attention-grabbing behaviors of our ancestors. Medium–size skulls with forward–jutting jaws morph into skulls with high foreheads, large enough to house a neuron–packed human brain. Bones of the leg lengthen and shape–shift over time, so that a foot with apelike curved toes becomes a foot that imprints the sand just the way yours and mine do as we stroll along the surf. Crudely modified tools made of rough stone develop gradually into objects of antler and bone, delicately fashioned and as much symbolic as utilitarian. Caves, at first refuges for Neandertal hunters seeking shelter from hungry bears and other carnivores, become colorful art galleries when Homo sapiens begins to paint the walls with magnificent images of the animals they hunt.

Stones, bones, and “big” behaviors like tool–making and cave–painting do change over time as our ancestors evolve, and much of what we can learn about these transformations is enlightening. But the most profound, indeed the most stirring transformations in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens involve what does not fossilize and what is only sometimes made tangible: belongingness.

Belongingness is mattering to someone who matters to you. It’s about getting positive feelings from our relationships. It’s what you and I work to maintain (or what we wish for) with family and friends, and perhaps also with colleagues or people in our community; for some of us, it extends to animals as well (other animals, for we humans are first and foremost animals). Relating emotionally to others shapes the very quality of our lives.

Belongingness, then, is a useful shorthand term for the undeniable reality that humans of all ages, in all societies, thrive in relation to others. That humans crave emotional connection is obvious in some respects. Most of us marry and live in families, configured either as parents (or a single parent) living with children or, more commonly worldwide, as multiple generations living together in extended family groups. We do things, both spiritual and secular, and by choice as well as necessity, in groups of relatives, friends, and associates. We write great literature and make great art based on the deepest emotions for those we love, or pine for, or grieve for.

Who can linger over a superbly crafted love poem and doubt the depth of human yearning for belongingness? We feel, rather than merely read or hear, Emily Dickinson’s poem "Compensation":
For each ectatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.
For one reader, these words might conjure up two lovers separated, by death or by mere circumstance, after a too–fleeting time together, an image accompanied by a feeling of searing loss. For another reader, they might bring to mind what happens when a cherished child not only grows up but grows apart, a thought coupled with a bittersweet mingling of pride and regret at being the center of her universe no more.

Emerging from the emotional depths of this poem, a reader might wonder what new can be said about human belongingness that might shed light on the evolution of the human religious imagination. Compelling questions can guide us here.
WEAVING A STORY
How did humans go from craving belongingness to relating in profound and deep ways to God, gods, or spirits? How did an engagement with the sacred that is wholly unique to humans emerge from a desire for belongingness that is common to monkeys, apes, extinct human ancestors, and humans of today? These seem to me the most vital questions, and they will act as my touchstone as I weave two thick strands of information together into an evolutionary account of the prehistory of belongingness.

For two and a half decades, at work in zoos and research centers and in the African bush, I have observed, filmed, and interpreted the behavior of monkeys and apes. The social and emotional behavior of these close relatives of ours never fails to fascinate in its own right. In long–term study of particular social groups, any keen observer comes to recognize bitter rivalries, deep friendships, and enduring family ties—and becomes convinced that the animals, too, recognize them and act accordingly.

Like most anthropologists, however, I have been motivated ultimately by the wish to understand better the behavior of my own species. Coupling my own research with analysis of the behavior of our humanlike extinct ancestors in Africa, Asia, and Europe—as studied by other scholars—has allowed me to grasp something about just how we humans evolved. I am especially fascinated with the evolutionary history of empathy; of meaning–making; of rule–following; of imagination; and of consciousness. In what ways do monkeys and apes today express behaviors related to these aspects of emotional and cognitive life? How can we best seek evidence of these in our extinct ancestors? Can we uncover traces of our emotional prehistory in the remains, both physical and cultural, of the Neandertals and related groups? If so, how do these traces speak to us across the millennia about the development of religion?

These questions emerge from my own experience as an observer of primates, a writer, and a student of others’ anthropological research—and indeed from my long-standing tendency to be attracted to the “big questions” of biological anthropology. Yet no book that purports to explain something meaningful about religion can spring entirely from a single discipline. Though biological anthropology is the most appropriate field in which to ground our inquiry, it's necessary to adopt a broad perspective.

A second set of issues beckons us further into the labyrinth that must be negotiated in any study of religion. What is religion? What is the relationship—both in the present and in the past—between religious belief and religious practice? That is, must religion be defined as a set of beliefs, or can it be something different? How do theologians and other religious thinkers portray the relationship between faith and practice? Can understanding this relationship lead us to a different take on the findings from the first set of questions, those about the prehistory of religion?

The challenge is to weave together two discrete strands: the development of the religious imagination throughout prehistory, and the phenomenon of religion itself. These two threads, each with a panoply of attendant questions, seem to lead in a dizzying variety of directions. In the following chapters, I shall draw the threads together into a coherent story. Along the way, I will compare and contrast my views with those of other writers who speculate about the origins of religion. In what ways are these theorists on the right track, and in what ways do they miss critical pieces of the puzzle?

For now, the essence of my argument can be summarized in three key points:

A fundamental characteristic of all primates, the need for belongingness is most elaborated in the African apes, our closest living relatives. Though we did not descend from chimpanzees or gorillas, we share with them a common ancestor. The everyday social behavior of this apelike ancestor laid a foundation for the evolution of religion that was to come much later, a foundation that can be reconstructed from knowledge of what today’s apes do.

Drawing on my own years of up–close–and–personal encounters with chimpanzees and gorillas, I discuss in Chapter 2 the early precursors to religion—empathy, meaning–making, rule–following, and imagination—and how these relate to the issue of ape consciousness. I am convinced that apes are highly sensitive and tuned in to one another starting in infancy, when a baby begins to negotiate with its mother about its needs. More than most other mammals, ape infants are born into a highly social world, a web of emotional interactions among relatives and other social partners. Research on animals like dolphins and elephants may someday challenge this conclusion, but it seems clear at least that the way two apes respond to each other sensitively and contingently is of different quality than what happens when two wolves, say, or two domestic cats, circle each other and adjust to each other's snarls, or lunges, in a well–honed, highly instinctual dance. It even seems different from the learned behaviors of other primates, like monkeys. The apes’ finely tuned responses to each other are rooted in belongingness, in the emotionality toward others that stems from their being so keenly dependent on their mothers and other relatives from birth onward.

Second, profound changes in emotional relating occurred as our human ancestors’ lives diverged from those of the apelike ancestors. In Chapters 3 through 6, I focus on the origins of the human religious imagination in the span of time bounded, on the one end, by the divergence of hominids (human ancestors) from the ape lineage about 6 million or 7 million years ago, and on the other by the beginning of farming and settled communities around 10,000 years ago....