The story perfectly illustrates how “my right interpretation” trumps “your wrong interpretation” by claiming my interpretation is not really an interpretation whereas your interpretation is “ignorant.” I’m not sure who is more ignorant here, the reporter or the minister:

The Bible is one of the most beloved books in America. Yet it is also one of the most misused, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in this country, according to the Rev. Jim Keck. And it is this dichotomy — a nation so devoted to Scripture and yet so ignorant of what the Bible truly says — that is the basis for Keck’s lecture, “The Bible in America.”

Keck, who holds a doctorate in ministry, said this complete devotion and ignorance of Scripture has long been a concern, but perhaps no more than today when churches and politicians use dueling interpretations of the Bible to vilify, justify and demonize those who hold other beliefs and values. Christian ignorance of its most revered book has left America in a divisive, dangerous and very unChristian-like place, Keck said.

“It’s an interesting disparity — we have this huge affective emotional embrace of Scripture and yet we are fairly ignorant biblically,” Keck said. That ignorance becomes dangerous as churches declare battle lines over the role — and words — of Scripture, he said.

It was not always this way. “Early colonial society was Scripture saturated,” Keck said. People read the Bible at home. Parents read the Bible to their children. Teachers taught it in the classroom. Bible stories were a central part of school primers, the McGuffey Reader and the Noah Webster spellers, Keck said. “People were so deeply immersed in Scripture and Bible knowledge that their view of the world through Scripture was central,” Keck said. “Learning the Bible was a moral underpinning for society.”

The 1880s brought the Bible wars. Bible education was removed from public schools and churches became the place for religious education. Different denominations offered differing interpretations — and those differences sometimes led to bloodshed.

“One would have thought Christians would dutifully read the Bible, but they didn’t,” Keck said. “Once society became secularized, Christians dropped the ball. Now there are a lot of biblically illiterate people who do not hear the high call of Scripture.”

People expect the church to teach and interpret the Bible for the congregation. The American entrepreneurial zeal drives churches to compete for members under the assumption that its interpretation of the Bible is correct and therefore they are especially faithful, Keck said.

Speaking bluntly, Keck calls it “marketing crap. That’s what happens when churches get into interpretive wars. Churches create scandals and controversies over Scripture, and people are not biblically aware enough to weed through it on their own. They can only hear the slogans. They cannot interpret it. That’s how you engage if you don’t have the biblical knowledge.”

And it is setting the United States down a damaging and contentious path. “These Bible arguments of American churches are a horrible diversion from what really matters in the Bible. The Bible, in its fullness, is calling us to the reality of God, the importance of personal morality and social justice, and how to be a better person.”

But the lessons of Scripture are lost in political issues of abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women to the priesthood and more.

“It is an evasion of the real higher calling Scripture talks about,” Keck said. Far too often, political and moral stands are based on a single passage of Scripture interpreted in isolation.

“There is a high noble call in Scripture to love your neighbor, economic justice and love God. I deeply believe America needs that higher call,” Keck said. So what is the answer? “Churches have to do a better job of bringing people more deeply into a knowledge of the Bible,” Keck said. “At the very least, churches need to stop the slogans and competing with one another.”

“America has to get back to the Bible in a different way. In a way that honors the validity of other religions and the pluralism in our culture,” Keck said. “The only way to understand how to be a Christian is a higher fidelity to Scripture.”

There is so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to begin. While this is something perhaps better handled by my discourse-savvy friends over at Religion Bulletin, a few observations are in order:

– The minister imagines a time and place, the nostalgic old-timey days, where everyone read the bible without interpreting it. It’s as if the bible just inscribed itself on minds without being interpreted and there were no different interpretations. There was never such a time or place. All reading is interpretation.

– The minister, without irony, bemoans differing interpretations and then proceeds to offer his own interpretation which he anoints as authoritative with words like “true” and “real” and “fidelity” and “deep.” These are code words which mean only that the minister believes his interpretation is right and others are wrong.

– The minister repeatedly acknowledges there are different interpretations of the bible yet never acknowledges that his particular understanding of the bible is also an interpretation. His interpretive lessons (“we can’t read passages in isolation”) lead to interpretive conclusions (“the importance of personal morality and social justice”).

I could go on but you get the point. The minister’s doctoral training apparently didn’t include lessons in interpretation or discourse. The credulous reporter failed to ask the minister why his interpretations are better than others and why those other interpretations are “ignorant.”

Stark was supposed to find, in survey and similar data, that religiosity impacted behavior in all sorts of interesting and predictable ways. But he couldn’t. Stark’s failure to find religiosity effects when he knew they should exist drove him to despair. In his 1983 presidential address to the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Stark reminisced on the problem:

Some of you are aware that I abandoned the sociology of religion in about 1969 and only returned to it several years ago. My inability to discover any consistent or robust religious effects played a major part in my decision to jump ship. Particularly disappointing were my efforts to find any empirical support for the proposition that religion sustains conformity to the normative order. In fact, about the only religious effects I could find were correlations between orthodoxy and opposition to drinking, dancing, and gambling among American Protestants. Whenever I searched for religious effects more remote from religiousness per se, I found little or nothing. If it is true that religion doesn’t influence secular beliefs and activities, our field is of very limited worth.

Stark next recalls a day in the life of a young dweeb, or sociologist. He had a handy data-set on his desk and decided to test the self-evident proposition that religiosity negatively affects delinquency. In other words if a kid believes s/he will go to hell for being a delinquent, s/he will be less likely to steal candy or kick old people. Stark was shocked to find that religious commitment had no apparent effect on hellions. He duly published the results and they were soon replicated. It thus appeared to sociologists that religious commitment didn’t affect delinquent behavior.

Nearly a decade had passed without anyone questioning these results when two studies were published which showed that kids who attended church regularly were much less likely to kick grandpa or hide dentures than their non-churched peers. The baffling results caused Stark to revisit the earlier studies:

Returning to the hunt, I soon discovered that so long as religion is conceived of as an individual trait, as a set of personal beliefs and practices, we can never know when and where religion will influence conformity, for research will continue to produce contradictory findings. But, if we move from a psychological to a sociological conception of religion, clarity leaps from the chaos. I am prepared to argue theoretically and to demonstrate empirically that religion affects conformity, not through producing guilt or fear of hellfire in the individual, but that religion gains its power to shape the individual only as an aspect of groups.

Let me put it this way. It is not whether an individual kid goes to church or believes in hell that influences his or her delinquency. What is critical is whether the majority of the kid’s friends are religious. In communities where most young people do not attend church, religion will not inhibit the behavior even of those teenagers who personally are religious. However, in communities where most kids are religious, then those who are will be less delinquent than those who aren’t.

Stark had re-discovered what sociologists since Durkheim have known but which he had somehow forgotten: human life is social. We conform when those around us — our friends — share similar ideas. If your group of friends is religious, then religion is more likely to influence decision-making. But if you are religious and your friends are not, religion won’t play much of a role in the choices you make.

This kind of network influence extends of course to non-religious beliefs and puts a different twist on “birds of a feather flock together.” It would be more accurate to say that if you want to act or be a certain way, choose your flock wisely.

Reference:

Stark, Rodney (1984). Religion and Conformity: Reaffirming a Sociology of Religion Sociological Analysis, 45 (4), 273-282

I first became aware of “theological anthropology” while browsing the Evolution of Religion website, which is a Templeton funded project devoted to finding God’s plan in evolution. Here is the announcement for several nicely funded fellowships at Princeton in which scholars are to devote themselves to the discovery of God’s design in evolution:

The Center of Theological Inquiry welcomes proposals to explore how the explosion of new research in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology is challenging and changing our understanding of human nature and development, not least in relation to religion and theological accounts of the human condition. Our field of inquiry encompasses these evolutionary and human sciences, theological anthropology, practical theology, psychology of religion, religious studies, and the history and philosophy of science.

There’s more than a bit of mumbo jumbo here but the project boils down to this: now that the Creation account of human evolution has been disproven and Intelligent Design been exposed as fraud, it is our job to interpret evolution through a theological lens; to wit, because God designed evolution and foresaw everything, there are no accidents and everything is adaptive.

Sounds like a horrible way to do science and search for the truth.

Therefore, even if determinism reigns (and, if it does, there’s no free will under my definition), that doesn’t mean that we can predict our future behaviors from what we know now. Certainly the predictability of decisions made under experimental conditions undermines our traditional notions of free will.

The hard problem here is the gaping chasm between accepting physical determinism in theory and predicting behavior in practice. Freeman Dyson recently addressed this in his review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:

The scope of Kahneman’s psychology is necessarily limited by his method. His method is to study mental processes that can be observed and measured under rigorously controlled experimental conditions. Following this method, he revolutionized psychology. He discovered mental processes that can be described precisely and demonstrated reliably.

Since strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled, Kahneman’s method did not allow him to study them. The part of the human personality that Kahneman’s method can handle is the nonviolent part, concerned with everyday decisions, artificial parlor games, and gambling for small stakes. The violent and passionate manifestations of human nature, concerned with matters of life and death and love and hate and pain and sex, cannot be experimentally controlled and are beyond Kahneman’s reach.

We are a long way from knowing everything and our current models fall short. This doesn’t mean they will always fall short or we should resort to metaphysics where knowledge fails us, but it does mean that we should beware hubris because we know that science is never complete.

There is a sense in which science is always just at the beginning. The state of scientific knowledge will be dramatically different two hundred years from now and today’s understandings will look quaint or even primitive.

I was recently reminded of these beginnings, and future unfoldings, while reading this Nature report on quantum entanglement (or what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”) and this reasonable take on Daryl Bem’s psi research. The world is weird and wonderful.

This is Evolutionary Theism. Evolutionary Theists bring several assumptions to their scholarly work and interpret data through the following lens: (1) evolution is not random but is designed, (2) because it is designed, evolution is progressive, (3) evolutionary progress occurs through adaptive change, and (4) this adaptive change is directed toward the evolution of humans. With the evolution of humans, we finally have creatures capable of perceiving and worshiping the God who made it all happen.

As this story goes God designed things so that early humans would apprehend the supernatural and their supernatural beliefs would make them cooperative, moral, and fertile. This God knew that humans would wander in the supernatural wilderness for many tens of thousands of years before they arrived at the (Christian) Truth. The Truth, as imagined by Evolutionary Theists, is that God is author of all.

This is not simple or crude Creationism, whether of the young or old earth variety. Nor is it Intelligent Design, which posits an interventionist entity whose many finely-tuned creations give the false impression there has been evolution. Evolutionary Theism accepts deep time, cosmic change, earth history, and evolutionary processes. But it does so with the understanding that none of this is random: it was designed to unfold in a particular way with a particular goal. Everything has been foreseen and foreordained.

None of this presents a problem so long as it is acknowledged. The problem arises when scholars of this persuasion present their work as if disinterested contemplation of data has led to their conclusions.

While it is not possible to approach data with nothing at all in mind, it is possible to approach data without any a priori commitments to the existence or non-existence of an entity or force called God. Scholars who have such commitments are bound to interpret their data in a particular way. For Evolutionary Theists this interpretation nearly always entails a designed and directed evolutionary progression, with one adaptation after another leading ineluctably to humans who can contemplate the majesty of God.

In paleontology, Simon Conway Morris does this. In evolutionary biology, Michael Blume does it. In evolutionary psychology, Matt Rossano does it. In archaeology, Klaus Schmidt seems to be doing it.

While working on the five-part Göbekli Tepe series for this blog, I came across several articles which noted that the excavator Schmidt is Catholic. There is of course nothing wrong with this but it may explain Schmidt’s premature and probably erroneous interpretation of Göbekli Tepe as the place where shamanistic hunter-gatherers saw the light, sensed the presence of gods (or God), built monuments for worship, and discovered how to domesticate plants-animals. As this story goes, a new “religion” magically or supernaturally appeared and paved the way for subsequent civilization.

If one is an Evolutionary Theist, this extraordinary and otherwise inexplicable progression makes complete sense: history is teleological and the ground was being prepared not only for plants but also for Christianity. If one is not an Evolutionary Theist, the alleged progression is questionable and inexplicable.

It is disingenuous for scientists and scholars who are Evolutionary Theists to present their work as if it were disinterested or compelled by facts and data. At a minimum, they should fully disclose their a priori commitments so we can evaluate their work accordingly.

It is one thing for a theologian such as John Haught to read his faith into evolutionary science and present it as such. It is quite a different thing for scientists and other scholars to read their faith into their science-scholarship without fully disclosing that they have pre-judged the primary issues and their findings flow from this prejudgment.

I remember thinking the book would appeal primarily to those who were vaguely hostile to religion, but didn’t know why. In Breaking the Spell (“BS”), they would find professional confirmation that their hostility was justified. But they still wouldn’t know why. At least they would be able to say that some really smart guy, a philosophy professor at Tufts, had somehow confirmed their suspicions.

During the ensuing years, I haven’t given the book much thought. I neither recommended it nor loaned my copy. Recently, however, I stumbled across Armin Geertz’s extraordinary review of BS: “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Geertz, professor of religious history and cognition at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, rips Dennett using language not often seen in academic journals:

A recent book by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) is a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious! Dennett seems to be hellishly bent on turning his readers off.

I used to think that philosophers by definition are sophisticated thinkers, gifted in the art of persuasive argument, valiantly exposing hidden assumptions and opaque meanings. But I am wrong. What Dennett has done is a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.

Geertz’s trashing made me wonder: What did others say about BS? They were not kind.

In The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Dennett to task for not distinguishing between the past and present: “And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins?  “Breaking the Spell” is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism.” This is a poignant question, one not contemplated by evolutionary scholars of religion who (mistakenly) believe that the current functions of religion explain past origins.

Dennett’s problem is he believes everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Like David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, Dennett thinks evolution is a unified meta-theory. It isn’t, for one simple reason: cultures are not organisms. While Darwinian monism may be simple and satisfying, it is wrong.

In another harsh review of BS (Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark), Daniel Hart explains why:

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative.

This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the presupposition that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer is of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect.

When evolutionary theory is applied to culture change, we are dealing in metaphors and analogues. Societies do not evolve; they have histories. The sooner we stop talking about memes and “cultural evolution” the better. Time to break the spell.

Reference:

Geertz, A. (2008). How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260232

Over at The Atlantic, Brian Mockenhaupt reports that US Marines are teaching a kinder, gentler kind of Islam than that which prevails among the Taliban. Who needs Mullah Omar’s conservative and bellicose version of Islam when you can have the Huffington Post’s progressive and peaceful version:

A chaplain since 1999, [Navy chaplain] Solomon had arrived for his first Afghanistan deployment ready to deliver sermons, lead Bible studies, and offer counsel about marital problems, fear, and the sharp grief of losing friends. He has performed those staples of military chaplaincy, but he and his colleagues have also increasingly found themselves in the unexpected role of counterinsurgent.

This is tricky territory for chaplains, whose job is to facilitate religious expression, but not, as noncombatants, to participate in the prosecution of war. That’s an easy distinction on a battlefield: say prayers with the troops; don’t fight beside them. But what about when interpretations of religion can either feed violence or quell it?

The relative lack of education in rural Afghanistan complicates this challenge. Many of the area’s mullahs, the equivalent of small-town preachers, can’t read and write in Pashto, never mind Arabic, the language of the Koran. That makes it hard for them to deeply understand the Koran and the tenets of Islam, and easy for the Taliban to spread its version of both the duties of good Muslims.

Here, “deep understanding” is code for “our understanding.” Solomon and his Afghani assistant are giving “Koran lessons” so local citizens can understand “Islam’s true nature.” Islam does not have an essential  “nature.” Lacking any such nature, there can be no “true” Islam. There will always be many kinds of “Islams.”

All this aside, the Marines would get more bang for their proselytizing buck by teaching literacy in conjunction with reader response theory. And if the Marines really wanted to be subversive, they would hire Stanley Fish to revise his book and ask the locals: Is There a Koran in This Village?

These mistakes are the result of methodological ignorance or carelessness. In an ideal world, anyone who writes on the evolution of religion would be required to read Michael Ghiselin’s The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969). Many errors could thus be avoided.

“Good scientific investigations employ critical tests of hypotheses by serious attempts to refute them. They do not involve simply amassing data consistent with a particular interpretation, oblivious to whether or not the facts are equally consistent another hypothesis.” (239)

“It is easy to see how a psychologist, attempting to give evolutionary meaning to his data, would tend to use habits of thought quite different from those employed by Darwin. The natural inclination would be to impose an oversimplified evolutionary rationalization upon the observations. The evolutionary theorist, on the other hand, would look at the facts in order to confirm or refute the predictions of his hypothesis.” (210)

Those who do not follow this method (hypothesize, predict, confirm-refute) “completely miss the point of Darwin’s argument: behavioral properties may be mixtures of adaptations and historical accidents.” (211)

“Darwin thought that many behavioral phenomena have resulted through accidents of history comparable to the pleiotropic effects which he discoursed upon at such great length. He did not believe, as many have believed, that all behavior patterns have some adaptive significance, say, as directly serviceable or communicative.” (205)

“It is perfectly true that if a group of organisms had some property, the survival of that group would be favored once the property had been evolved; but this does not explain how that property might have originated.” (57)

The failure to take these ideas seriously has led to a great deal of unrestrained and imaginative storytelling about the “evolution of religion,” unencumbered by more compelling and parsimonious hypotheses that have non-speculative support in the historical record.

A reporter from the Norwegian Research Council covered Coulson’s lecture and then issued a sensational press release with these headlines: World’s Oldest Ritual Discovered — Worshipped the Python 70,000 Years Ago. It made for fantastic copy:

While scholars have largely held that man’s first rituals were carried out over 40,000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place.

Professor Sheila Coulson can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind’s oldest known ritual.

When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python. On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they found three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.

When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the archaeologists wondered when the work had been done. They also began thinking about what the cave had been used for and how long people had been going there. With these questions in mind, they decided to dig a test pit directly in front of the python stone.

At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that had been used to make the indentations. Together with these tools, some of which were more than 70,000 years old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen off during the work.

The story, which also appeared in the University of Oslo’s magazine, stated that the tools had been “sacrificed to the python” because several were burnt and broken. There was also mention of a hidden chamber that shamans would have used to make the python “speak” to awed spectators.

In short order the mainstream press picked up the story and ran wild with it. It appeared without alteration in newspapers, magazines, and blogs around the world. Someone even used the story and images to produce a slick video:

Another enthusiast grabbed some nice pictures of the hills and grainy footage of rock art to produce this:

It seems that only National Geographic investigated the story before reporting it. In its interview with Coulson, she appears to confirm the story at least in broad outline:

“It is the whole package of…behavior traits from our excavations that has led us to conclude that the only plausible explanation is that this site was used for ritual purposes,” she said.

“The intentional stuffing of quartz flakes into a crack in the wall beneath the snake, the exceptional treatment of all the points recovered, [these] are behavioral patterns that do not fit any patterns we know of from the many other sites [from this era].”

But not everyone was convinced, including several archaeologists who previously had worked at the cave and published on it. One of them, Michigan State anthropologist Larry Robbins, demurred: “I’m not convinced that the rock is an intentional snake at all, or that all those depressions and grooves belong together in terms of their age.”

Another, Stanley Ambrose from the University of Illinois, doubted that various aspects of the site and artifacts could be accurately dated. The founder of Botswana’s National Museum, Alec Campbell, had similar reservations and doubted whether the site was “religious.”

Motivated by their justifiable concern that the “Oldest Ritual-Religion in the World” story had gone viral and was being reported as accepted fact, Robbins and others published an article expressing concern that these sensational claims had been aired in the media but had not been published in any peer-reviewed journal. They were skeptical:

The interpretations featured in most, if not all, of the Internet news released by Coulson is that the depressions [or cupules] collectively represent the image of a python. This interpretation is highly subjective and is speculative at best.

The evidence supporting that the depressions (or snake scales) date to a single period does not exist, and as far as we are aware, there is no dating method available that is capable of confirming this assumption. Our published radiocarbon and TL dates for the MSA of Rhino Cave are about 15,000 years old and they are too recent for the Middle Stone Age.

They also quite clearly provide no support of 70,000-year-old rituals.

Robbins and colleagues were especially perturbed about Coulson’s use of modern San beliefs-rituals to interpret ostensibly ancient artifacts:

In archaeology there is a long, critical history of the use of ethnographic analogy in archaeological interpretation. Most workers in the field today would strongly object to the projection of modern beliefs directly back into the past to 70,000 years ago.

[Coulson's] interpretation of the paintings in relation to San mythology is subsequently projected uncritically into the remote past to support the claims about the world’s oldest ritual site. We stress that the oldest of the paintings at Tsodilo are probably no older than ca. AD 600.

Making a composite story out of this “evidence” that ignores the different histories and meanings of this art so that it fits an interpretation that is based on a supposed snake that is not dated is a real stretch of the information. It is flat out, misleading.

In the scientific community, these count as strong words. Because Robbins and colleagues published their broadside in an obscure journal (Nyame Akuma) and there was no accompanying press release, it went largely unnoticed. The “Python Cave” story (or myth) has therefore remained in circulation, accepted by many as “the world’s oldest ritual-religion.”

One person who noticed was Sheila Coulson. She responded with considerable dismay and explained what happened:

When I returned [from Africa] to my home institution, the University of Oslo, I was requested to give a[n]open lecture, which was covered by a journalist from the Norwegian Research Council. His article contained the usual sound bites gleaned from a talk that covered the full history of use of the cave: this included recent usage, as well as evidence from the contents of the Later and Middle Stone Age deposits. Aspects of modern San mythology, the painted panel and the carved wall were all mentioned within the context of our recent findings.

The journalist’s news article was translated to English and placed on a local Web page. The combined effects of Net reports from these two lectures unleashed the media frenzy that followed.

If any of this material had actually been written by me, I would, of course, have entertained these considerable criticisms. However, the material criticized appears in media notorious for the inaccuracy and incompleteness of their reporting, and over which I have no control.

The authors have consumed a great deal of space, time and energy in refuting statements attributed to me in Internet sites. I would have expected that any consumer of such sources of information, especially those in the academic community, would have long ago developed an appropriate sense of scepticism in regard to the reliability of their reporting, not least in scientific areas.

The “Python Cave” story was first reported in 2006. The foregoing exchange between Robbins and Coulson was published in 2007. At the end of her 2007 response, Coulson stated that her findings and opinions would be fully aired in a forthcoming article.

The good news is that Coulson’s article (open access) was finally published this year in PaleoAnthropology. The bad news is that for the past five years, many people have been led to believe that the cave (which is actually known as Rhino Cave) provides evidence for the world’s oldest ritual-religion.

Does it? That will be the subject of my next post.

References:

Robbins, Lawrence, Campbell, Alec, Brook, George, & Murphy, Michael (2007). World’s Oldest Ritual Site? The “Python Cave” at Tsodilo Hills World Heritage Site, Botswana. Nyame Akuma, 67 (June), 2-6

Coulson, Sheila (2007). Response to “World’s Oldest Ritual Site? The ‘Python Cave’ at Tsodilo Hills World Heritage Site, Botswana” by Lawrence H. Robbins, Alec C. Campbell, George A. Brook and Michael L. Murphy. Nyame Akuma, 68 (December), 2-3

Three lines of evidence are typically used to make inferences about Paleolithic supernaturalism: (1) deliberate burials with grave goods, (2) mobiliary objects such as figurines, and (3) parietal art such as petroglyphs and cave paintings. Although this evidence is fairly limited, some elaborate tales about prehistoric “religion” have been spun using it. For each kind of evidence, there are alternative, non-supernatural explanations.

With the limited evidence and alternative explanations in mind, L.G. Freeman and J.G. Echergaray argue that something more than an isolated find is required to make inferences about ritual activity:

For all intents and purposes, that means we are not concerned with everyday behavior which was simply consistent with the precepts of supernatural powers but, specifically, with religious ritual, culturally patterned symbolic behavior by which the human community (or agents thereof) attempt to influence culturally postulated superhuman beings.

The arbitrary symbolic nature of ritual behavior should be indicated in the archeological record (at least occasionally) by the fact that it is obscure, and that it is not directly explicable in terms of its efficacy in the day-to-day problems of human survival. The communal nature of a ritual could be demonstrated by indications that several individuals collaborated in its performance.

While this may be an overly restrictive method based on modern ideas, the authors fruitfully apply it to the 14,000 year old (i.e., Magdalenian) discoveries at El Juyo cave in Spain. It is a complex site containing all manner of objects arranged in unusual ways. Trenches are dug and filled with tools, shell, bone, plant, and pigment. Large rocks are moved and placed in non-natural positions, including one large slab weighing close to a ton. It is obvious that a great deal of care went into the design and placement of objects, and that many people were involved.

The pièce de résistance is a large vertically placed rock that was set near the cave entrance so anyone approaching would see it. Its natural features have been modified to suggest a face:

Having identified what clearly appears to be a ritual site using strict criteria, the authors abandon these criteria when interpreting the rock-face. They assert the face “represents a being whose nature is dual” and interpret the right side (left in picture) as an adult male human with moustache and beard, and the left side (right in picture) as a lion or leopard with long, naked nose and protruding tooth. There are painted black spots than can’t be seen in this picture but which suggest whiskers. Here is an artistic interpretation:

Extended contemplation of the El Juyo rock-face suggests to the authors this is “a supernatural being who presided over rites of initiation, and whose double and contradictory nature incorporated the concept of transcendence and served as a means of communi-cation between the real world of nature and a higher reality.” Wow.

I agree that the modified rock is a face and that the face had ritual or supernatural significance. But this is as far as I can go. I am not even sure I see the “lion or leopard” half of the face.

What I do see is an anthropomorph suggestive of an Orc:

Does anyone know if Orcs were living in Spain 14,000 years ago?

Reference:

Freeman, L., & Echegaray, J. (1981). El Juyo: A 14,000-Year-Old Sanctuary from Northern Spain. History of Religions, 21 (1) DOI: 10.1086/462884