An Atheist's History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention
256
An Atheist's History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention
256eBook
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Overview
As our dreams and nightmares have changed over the millennia, so have our beliefs. The gods we created have evolved and mutated with us through a narrative fraught with human sacrifice, political upheaval and bloody wars.
Belief was man's most epic labor of invention. It has been our closest companion, and has followed mankind across the continents and through history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619023710 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 433 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
INVENTING GODS
Someone Who Picked Up a Piece of Mammoth Tusk
Around 33,000 years ago, in what is now Baden-Württemberg in south-west Germany, but which was then a frozen wilderness nestling between great ice sheets, somebody picked up a piece of mammoth tusk and, probably crouching by a fire to keep warm, began carving.
When finished, the figure they had made was only 2.5 centimetres, or less than an inch, tall. Tiny though it is, it is immediately striking, and also a little puzzling. It stands on two legs, in a pose easily recognisable as human, yet it has a lion's head. Precisely what was done with it remains a mystery, though it was clearly the object of much attention. Over time it became polished smooth from being held by fingers. Eventually, whether deliberately or by accident, it was broken into pieces and left deep in a cave, the Hohle Fels. Here it remained until 2002, when it was discovered, and carefully reassembled, by a paleoanthropologist, Nicolas Conard, and his team.
Why should we be interested in this tiny lion-person? It is one of the very oldest examples of figurative art yet found. It also holds another first that, to my eyes, makes it much more intriguing. It is the first clear example of religious art. It provides the earliest evidence that people believed in supernatural beings. Can one really have an idea what beliefs people held 33,000 years ago? The answer, perhaps a little surprisingly, is yes.
Why, one might ask, should we be interested in what people believed so very long ago? Put simply, beliefs have a way of enduring. Despite the claims of religious visionaries across the ages, I would suggest that there is no such thing as a new religion. Religions are like ice cores. In each, one can find layer upon layer of past belief. Beliefs, even from 33,000 years ago, are still present in our world. This book seeks to examine some of these ice cores, to discover how their many layers came into being, and to see how they continue to influence our world, sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
Before looking at what beliefs the maker of our lion-person may have held, I would like to pause for a moment, and consider what one might expect them to be. What would people today, whether they believe in a god or not, consider to be the essential prerequisites of any religion?
Paradise would probably come top of the list. One of the chief functions of any religion, surely, is to offer an alternative to the grim prospect of our temporary existence. Almost all modern religions dangle the hope of a happy afterlife that can be reached by their faithful if they follow the rules, at least most of the time. And yet, as will be seen, heaven first appears around 4,000 years ago. This makes it, when compared to the lion-person, a distinctly newfangled invention.
What, then, of morality? This, many would say, is at the very heart of all belief. According to almost all modern religions one's behaviour is carefully supervised by gods, and one's actions will be appropriately rewarded or punished. Yet morality, too, is a relatively new innovation. It appears, in fact, to have emerged side by side with the idea of heaven.
If heaven and morality are not the key elements of all religions, then what is? The answer, I would suggest, is reassurance. From the earliest times every religion has given people comfort by offering ways – so their followers believe – of keeping their worst nightmares at bay. What these nightmares are, inevitably, has changed a good deal over time. As people's lifestyles have altered, so have the things they most fear. It is the changes in our fears, I would argue, that have caused our religious ideas to change. In effect, our need to quell our nightmares has inspired humankind's greatest imaginative project: an epic labour of invention that puts fiction writing to shame.
What were people's worst nightmares 33,000 years ago? How can we hope to have even a vague idea of beliefs that existed a full 28,000 years before writing was first developed, and human history set down? The simple answer is, by making comparisons. By examining peoples whose way of life was recorded in recent times, but who led a similar existence to the carver of the lion-person. As we will see, humans are unoriginal creatures. Put them in similar locations, give them similar ways of spending their hours, and similar needs and fears, and they will generally come up with similar ideas about their world.
Studies of hunter-gatherer peoples in recent times have revealed something rather surprising. All across the world, from the Arctic to Australia, from Patagonia to southern Africa, these peoples, despite having had no direct contact with one another for many tens of thousands of years, had a great deal in common. They all lived in tribes of the same size, of around 150 people. They all moved from place to place with the seasons, and in search of animals to hunt. And they were all very interested in the curious business of going into a trance. Entering a trance, in fact, lay at the centre of all their beliefs.
There was great variety in the way in which different tribes entered a trance, from taking psychotropic substances to starving their senses in silent darkness. Likewise there was variety in who did it: in some tribes many people became entranced, though it was more usual that only one or two specialists did so. These specialists are best described as shamans. The experiences such people had when they entered a trance were very similar the world over. They heard noises like the buzzing of bees, saw geometrical patterns, and had the sensation of being drawn into a great tunnel. They felt they could see themselves transformed into something else, usually an animal. They felt themselves to be flying, and often claimed to be guided by a spirit bird. They would enter a land of spirits, which were also usually animals. These animal spirits had the power to help humans, especially in three precise areas, which recur in hunter-gatherer beliefs all across the world. Firstly, spirits could help heal the sick. Secondly, they could control the movement of animals to hunt. Finally, they could improve the weather.
So, it seems, we catch a glimpse of humans' earliest angst. These fears do not seem particularly surprising. Sickness would have been a constant and incomprehensible danger. For people who had no choice but to spend much of their time outside, bad weather was not only frightening, but life-threatening. Finally, if hunter-gatherers failed to find game to hunt, they would slowly starve to death. So it is only natural that the trio of disease, animal availability and meteorological conditions would have been high on people's worry list.
Can we be sure that these recent hunter-gatherer beliefs were the same as those of the carver of the lion-person in the frozen wilderness of Baden-Württemberg 33,000 years ago? It is widely accepted today that the statuette found in the Hohle Fels cave depicts a shaman who is lost in a state of trance and believes himself, or herself, to have been transformed into a lion. It is clear that the Hohle Fels statuette was no random piece of creativity as a second and larger lion-person, dating from around the same time, was found in another nearby cave. It seems these figures represented something that was well established in people's minds. So it appears that as early as 33,000 years ago people had already devised a simple form of religion. If one entered a trance and contacted animal spirits, they might help one cope with disease and bad weather, and make one's endless search for prey a little easier. A way of lessening life's frightening uncertainties had been found.
Clues as to how this early religion might have looked and felt can been found in the remarkable cave paintings of south-western France and northern Spain, some of which date from only 1,000 years or so after our lion-person was carved. The paintings are almost all of animals, and it used to be thought that they depicted hunting scenes. Rather puzzlingly, though, the creatures often lack hooves, so they seem to hang in the air. Also lacking are details of rocks or foliage. What does this signify? David Lewis-Williams, a cognitive archaeologist, came up with a notion. Having studied one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes to have kept its old ways right up to the present – the San people of south-western Africa – and then examined early-European cave paintings, he concluded that these paintings in fact represented animal spirits.
How would these first supernatural beings have been worshipped? What were early religious services like? Archaeological finds offer some ideas. People would have crept into the depths of caves, far beyond the reach of any natural light, using simple lamps made of animal fat on flat pieces of stone, with strands of juniper as wicks. These would have flickered feebly, illuminating only tiny patches of the paintings. Deep in the caves, perhaps with a small congregation gathered round them, shamans would have entered a trance and tried to contact the spirits. There could well have been music. A number of bone flutes have been found in early caves, while people may also have sung or chanted, and used stalagmites as natural bells, striking them to produce deep booming sounds. The caves lacked oxygen, which would have added to the sense of unreality for those taking part. The whole effect of music, smoke, near darkness and airlessness would, when combined with the utterings of the shaman lost in trance, have been intense.
So, even thirty millennia ago, religion was already a leading sponsor of the arts. As people endeavoured to make their world less frightening, and so to feel less helpless, they devoted their hours to making music, to carving sculptures, and to creating paintings that, to this day, remain hauntingly beautiful. It was the beginning of a remarkably fruitful association. Up to our own times religion has encouraged breathtaking art, architecture, music and literature. Whatever reservations one may have about religion, it is hard not to admire the many beautiful creations it has inspired.
Before leaving this distant era, I would like to ask one more question, one that takes us even further back, to times when evidence is negligible and conjecture can only be of the vaguest kind: why might people have devised such a strange thing as religion? What on earth could have prompted them to believe that their fate lay in the hands of beings they could not see or hear, except when lost in a state of trance? Here, unsurprisingly, no clear answer is forthcoming. Yet a little theorising is possible.
In recent decades there has been increasing interest in a remarkable human ability: one which is on a par with our skill for using complex language, or tools. That this talent had escaped much notice before now was perhaps because it is so basic to our nature that it was almost invisible to us. It is our skill at imagining others' points of view, known as 'Theory of Mind'.
Theory of Mind is something that only humans possess to any degree. Even chimpanzees struggle to comprehend any view outside their own. Theory of Mind lies at the heart of all fiction, and, arguably, storytelling may have come into existence to provide us with a little practice. Fiction certainly offers the best means of describing what Theory of Mind is. Shakespeare's Othello is sometimes cited as an example, though any bedroom farce would do. In Othello members of the audience need to keep in their heads, simultaneously: Desdemona's point of view (innocent and unknowing), Othello's view of Desdemona (filled with jealous suspicions she has little idea of) and Iago's view of Othello (maliciously leading him astray by planting his suspicions). Plus, perhaps, Shakespeare's view of all the characters, and, finally, the member of the audience's own view of the whole effect. People can routinely balance four or five layers of others' points of view.
Why did humans develop this skill to such remarkable levels? Almost certainly because it was key to our ancestors' survival. In a hunter-gatherer tribe, where violence was likely to have been common, especially when stomachs were empty, having a good grasp of Theory of Mind would have helped people to recognise, and fend off, danger from their fellow humans. It would have allowed them to make alliances and friendships, to win the help of others in protecting and feeding themselves and, crucially, in protecting and feeding their children. It would have been a case of survival of the most intuitive.
This remarkable talent for Theory of Mind leads us to imagine other people's thinking, every waking moment of the day, whether we intend to or not. We constantly consider others' feelings towards ourselves, and try to guess the reasons for their behaviour. It seems not such a big step to suppose that, at some point long ago, our specialisation led us to start detecting humanlike personalities even outside the world of humans. We began to detect them everywhere. We began to see human points of view in anything that was important to our survival. We saw human moods in the sky, in the weather, in brooks we drank from, in trees that might conceal prey or give us shade. Most of all we gave human personalities to animals, whose thinking we needed to understand if we were to find and hunt them. Almost anything could be given a personality, or spirit. Naturally we sought help from these beings, just as we sought help from one another. To contact these spirits, people entered that mysterious state of trance, which they found they were also skilled at. So, it may have been, that we invented our very first gods.
There would, needless to say, be many, many more.
A New Pastime on a Bare Mountain
One day, around 9500 BC, on a mountaintop with panoramic views – now Göbekli Tepe in modern south-east Turkey – a group of people occupied themselves doing something wholly new. It was also wholly backbreaking. They chipped away at a bed of limestone rock, using only tiny flint blades, until they had cut free a gigantic piece of stone. Thin and T-shaped, it looked like a huge, slender stone mallet. It was five metres high and weighed almost ten tons. The group then hauled the stone for several hundred metres to the mountain's summit, where they set it carefully upright, facing another just like it. The two became the centrepiece of a stone circle, dug into the ground like a kind of sunken bath and enclosed by a wall, which contained no fewer than eight more giant mallet-shaped stones.
At some point the circle was covered with earth, and, over a period of some 1,500 years, another nineteen or so circles were created, on top of one another, so they formed a large mound on the mountain's summit. On some stones there were carvings of scorpions, foxes, snakes, lions and other creatures. One was decorated with the disturbing image of a detached human arm. Some had patterns that, to modern eyes, look beguilingly – and misleadingly – like writing. Finally, around 8000 BC, after some fifteen centuries of work, the site was abandoned. It remained forgotten for another 10,000 years, until, in 1994, it was visited by the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who quickly realised he had found something remarkable.
The people who built Göbekli Tepe did not live there. No houses or waste tips have been found that would indicate the presence of a village. It seems they clambered up the mountainside from settlements elsewhere. They commuted. Why, one might wonder, did they choose to make their lives so very hard? Why, instead of struggling up a mountain, to carve out and haul vast pieces of stone, did they not just stay comfortably down below, as their ancestors had been content to do? Why not spend their hours on tasks that were easier, and more practically useful, like gathering nuts or hunting animals? What, once they had built a stone circle, did they do up there?
As is so often the case when looking back to prehistoric times, answers are elusive. In fact, in many ways, it is harder to guess what went on at Göbekli Tepe than it is to guess what occurred some 20,000 years earlier in the painted caves of Europe, whose occupants' religion is easily comparable with those of recent times. This situation may change. Only a small part of the Göbekli Tepe site has so far been excavated, and further work may provide new clues. In the meantime, it is possible at least to point to an idea that, almost certainly, was keenly present in the minds of stone-circle makers. This was a notion that had a limited place among hunter-gatherers, but was much in vogue among the societies that gradually displaced them. It was sacrifice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "An Atheist's History of Belief"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Matthew Kneale.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
1 Inventing Gods,
Someone Who Picked Up a Piece of Mammoth Tusk,
A New Pastime on a Bare Mountain,
Dressing for Breakfast,
2 Inventing Paradise,
Cape Canaveral of Dead Kings,
Zarathustra and Friends,
Revenge of the Supernatural,
3 Inventing Deals with God,
4 Inventing the End of the World,
Be Careful What You Prophesy,
The Wrong End of the World,
Daniel's Dream: The Sequels,
5 Inventing Humble Heaven,
Jumping Hurdles,
Jesus for Gentiles,
6 Inventing a Religion, Inventing a Nation,
7 Inventing Elsewhere,
Ecstasy in Sober China,
Blood, Calendars and the Ball Game,
8 Inventions from the Underground,
Laughing All the Way to the Pyre,
Opening Pandora's Box,
9 Inventing Witches,
10 Inventing New Comforts,
Balm for New Wounds,
Waiting for the Revolution,
Ahead to the Past,
Filling the Great Vacuum,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Sources and Further Reading,
Index,
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