It is a thoughtful exchange but contains nothing new. Similar debates have been ongoing for well over a century without advance or resolution. Science and religion debates which take “God” as a starting point are myopic. They begin with the false assumption that humans throughout history have been preoccupied with the idea of God, and that the monotheistic concept of God is the starting point for this kind of inquiry. Such assumptions are usually embedded in a Whiggish or progressive religious history with “God” being the apotheosis of supernatural thinking.

The kind of “God” that Lightman discusses is a relatively recent idea, limited in time and space, that ignores religious history and diversity. We can see this in the definitions Lightman proposes:

For the purposes of this discussion, and in agreement with almost all religions, God is a being not restricted by the laws that govern matter and energy in the physical universe. In other words, God exists outside matter and energy. In most religions, this Being acts with purpose and will, sometimes violating existing physical laws (i.e., performing miracles), and has additional qualities such as intelligence, compassion and omniscience.

We can categorize religious beliefs according to the degree to which God acts in the world….Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God.

This is just wrong. It is not true that “almost all religions” have this particular conception of “God.” Nor is it true that “most religions” subscribe to an interventionist view of “God.”

Humans have believed in the supernatural for at least 45,000 years and perhaps longer. The anthropomorphic and interventionist kind of God to which Lightman refers is perhaps 3,000 years old. This particular conception of God is limited in time and space. It is a modern God that derives primarily from the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It is not a majority God and never has been.

Because Lightman frames his entire science/religion discussion around the God debates that take place within his own high culture salon, his definitions are not a problem so long as they are limited to that tiny arena. But they are not generalizable.

While Western intellectuals may arrive at resolutions or accommodations they find satisfying, these say little or nothing about debates that haven’t existed throughout most of human history and which huge numbers of modern people without God would never even consider.

These ostensibly disparate movements had much in common. Suffering and death are central concerns. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that all devise methods for transcending suffering and death. Such transcendence, whether in this world or life or the next, becomes an ethical matter and moral issue.

Why did these related ideas appear in several places in such short order? Because these traditions arose in widely disparate places and originated among people who were not in contact with one another, we know it was not a matter of cultural diffusion or idea migration. There are several competing (and complementary) hypotheses, most of which revolve around change, dislocation, and anomie.

The few thousands of years preceding the Axial Age were an especially turbulent time in human history; warfare, urbanization, disease, and famine were operating full-tilt and on a scale never before seen. People everywhere were at a loss and legitimacy was in short supply. Under such conditions, it would be surprising if something like the Axial movements did not appear. During times of immense and protracted crisis, intellectuals will often generate new and paradigm shifting ideas.

But before such breakthroughs can occur, the ground must be prepared. Although Axial movements were innovative, they did not simply appear sua sponte. To the extent they were reformist or reactionary, they were backward looking and dependent on the past for comparative appeal. In “Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns,” renowned ancient historian Thorkild Jacobsen summarizes that past by dividing it into three thematic and millennial epochs:

Fourth Millennium BCE — Famine

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

The fear at the very roots of existence that long ago, down through the fourth millennium, gave to the religious response in Mesopotamia its major direction would seem to have been a simple one: fear of starvation. Early Mesopotamian economy was unquestionably a remarkable achievement, able for the first time to provide sufficient food so that large numbers of humans could congregate in cities. But it was also a precarious and uncertain economy, for it was based on artificial irrigation, the most touchy and tricky basis imaginable, nervously reacting to vagaries of nature and man alike.

And the character of their religion as we know it bears this out. The powers to whom they turned were powers in and behind their primary economics on which life depended: fishing, herding, agriculture, as even the briefest look at the character of the chief gods of their cities will show. [T]heir cults were to insure the presence of these essential powers for fertility, produce, and food.

Third Millenium BCE — War

“Preserve Us From Evil”

As the settled areas of the country grew and joined, the protection that had been afforded by relative isolation was no longer there and fear of enemy attack, death or slavery, became a part of life ever present in the depth of consciousness. The intensity of the danger and of the fear it engendered can be gauged by the great city-walls that arose around the towns in this period and the staggering amount of labor that must have gone into them.

For a shield against danger men looked to the now vitally important institutions of collective security, the great leagues and their officers, and particularly to the new institution of kingship as it took form and grew under the pressures of these years. The new concept opening up, as it did, a possibility of approach to the element of majesty in the divine, was early applied to the gods and it profoundly influenced the religious outlook. The gods, seen as kings and rulers, were no longer powers in nature only, they became powers in human affairs — in history.

Second Millennium BCE — Guilt

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

[W]ith the beginning second millennium the personal fortunes of the individual worshiper, his fears of personal misfortune, anxieties in illness and suffering, begin to be voiced adding a personal dimension to the relation with the divine. [Because of famine and war, it appears this personal] god has abandoned the worshiper and lost interest in him. He realizes that the blame lies with himself-pleading, however, that no man is perfect and asks to be shown his faults, his transgressions, that he may confess them before his god and be forgiven. And the god is moved by his contrition and takes him back into favor.

There is here the beginnings of a searching of the heart: the insight gained in the preceding millennium that the divine stands for, and upholds, a moral law is now bearing fruit in a realization of individual human responsibility, but also of innate human inability to live up to that responsibility. [T]he question of man’s acceptability before his god — the problem of the righteous sufferer — led on to realization of man’s finiteness and the altogether finite character of his insights and his moral judgments.

During the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian religions stagnated, perhaps because for thousands of years they had always been concerned with that which was immanent or present in this world. If the divine was present in the world, few (other than the rich and powerful) seemed to be feeling it. It was time for something new. The stage was thus set for Axial transcendence.

References:

Strathern, Alan (2009). Karen Armstrong’s Axial Age: Origins and Ethics The Heythrop Journal, 50 (2), 293-299 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00413.x

Jacobsen, Thorkild (1963). Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107 (6), 473-484

While Weber surely was right to argue that religion and economy influence one another dialectically, few scholars accept his argument that capitalism was made possible by Calvinism. Although the Protestant Ethic remains a classic, its reputation has dimmed. Few have been more scathing in their criticism than Rodney Stark, who takes Weber to the woodshed in “Putting an End to Ancestor Worship“:

[E]conomic historians long ago dismissed Weber’s monograph as anti-Catholic nonsense on the irrefutable grounds that the rise of capitalism in Europe preceded the Reformation by centuries. Weber was aware that economic historians rejected his thesis on the basis of time order. Consequently, he progressively made his definitions finer in an attempt to restrict capitalism to “modern” Reformation business organizations. Clearly, Weber inserted the adjective “modern” in order to confound those who argued that capitalism was far older than Protestantism.

If Protestant ideals didn’t create capitalism, this doesn’t mean religion had no impact on the mercantilism and mindset that led to it. It simply means we should shift our temporal focus and look for earlier possible influences.

In “The Protestant Ethic and the Parsis,” Robert Kennedy does just this and suggests that Zoroastrianism — an ancestral monotheism — set the stage for Modernity, which encompasses not only capitalism but also science. Kennedy identifies five abstract values associated with Modernity: (1) an underlying order in nature, (2) sensory standard of verification, (3) material work is intrinsically good, (4) maximization of material prosperity, and (5) accumulation rather than consumption of material goods.

Zoroastrian and Parsi Symbol-Motif

Using historical data on the Parsis or Zoroastrian Persians who fled from Iran to India after the Islamic conquest in the 8th century AD, Kennedy examines their beliefs, culture, and society for correspondences. Finding many, Kennedy suggests that modern economy and science may have roots in Zoroastrian religion.

It is an unfortunate fact that we know less about Zoroastrianism than we would like. Although it was the official state religion of the Persian Empire for nearly seven centuries, the conquering Muslims attempted to eradicate every vestige of the faith. One thing is certain: Zoroastrian ideas and influences can be found in Judaism and Christianity. This raises an interesting possibility.

Nietzsche asserted that modern science arose in the West because the West was Christian. To make a long intellectual history short, Christianity’s obsessive search for sacred “Truth” turned on itself and (paradoxically) gave rise to a profane search for truth, which we now call science. If there is in fact a connection between Christianity and science, there may be an even deeper (or older) connection between Zoroastrianism and science.

References:

Stark, R. (2004). SSSR Presidential Address, 2004: Putting an End to Ancestor Worship Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43 (4), 465-475 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2004.00249.x

Kennedy, Jr., R. (1962). The Protestant Ethic and the Parsis American Journal of Sociology, 68 (1) DOI: 10.1086/223262

This history is long, complicated, and fascinating. There are written records going back to the Shang Dynasty which began in 1766 BC. For Westerners accustomed to thinking that 2,000 years of Christian history is ancient and Americans who think that 1776 AD was a long time ago, the time depth of Chinese civilization and religion must be awe inspiring.

In a recent post, I touched on one of the more notable aspects of Chinese religiosity: ancestor worship. While this is a prominent aspect of Chinese religions (acknowledged in the Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions) another major theme is cosmological, involving what the Chinese call “Heaven.” There is a force or potency in the cosmos that gives rise to all things and which governs everything on earth. This potency is cyclic, and under ideal circumstances there is a balance or equilibrium that results in fertility and stability.

As Howard Smith observes in “Divine Kingship in Ancient China,” Chinese cosmological monism stands in sharp contrast to Western cosmological dualism:

The universe as a whole was referred to as “heaven and earth.” Man must assist, by means of religious ceremonies, the yang forces to overcome the yin forces in the spring and early summer, but he must help the yin to rise to ascendancy in autumn and winter.

These two forces, which permeated all natural phenomena, and by their constant interaction caused all things to subsist, arose out of a primaeval cosmic unity. Neither of these two forces were conceived of in China in personalized terms, as in Mesopotamia, and there did not develop in China the concept of a cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, resulting in the final triumph of the forces of light.

Whatever dualism existed in Chinese thought was a dualism of complementary forces which worked to produce cosmic harmony, and not a dualism of antagonistic forces bent on each other’s destruction.

Although some scholars of ancient Chinese religion cite ancestor worship as being older than cosmological monism, I suspect the reverse is true. This way of conceptualizing the workings of the cosmos is quite characteristic of hunter-gatherers and shamanic naturalism; the idea is ancient and when it appears (however transformed) in post-Neolithic traditions, it is akin to a “survival.” We see examples of this in the North American Trickster traditions. The culture-hero or trickster, who is often considered to be the creator, embodies both good and bad; the two are inextricably intertwined and one cannot exist without the other.

As far as cosmologies go, dialectical monism strikes me as being more sophisticated — and consonant with evolutionary biology — than the reductive dualism which divides all things into binaries and assigns values to each. This kind of normative or Manichean dualism is of course most prominent in the monotheistic traditions.

Reference:

Smith, D. (1957). Divine Kingship in Ancient China Numen, 4 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3269343

This is of course precisely backwards but it has not stopped the search. While Ur-religionists chase ghosts, the rest of us can fret over the dismal fate of the actual Sumerian city-state of Ur, which remains largely buried — and 90% unexcavated — in the Iraqi desert.

Ur with Fake Tourist Ziggurat Built by Saddam

While this may or may not have been the birthplace of Abraham, its importance for the history of religions extends far beyond its status as mythical nursery for monotheism.

Ur is frequently used as a prefix for all that is supposedly seminal. What little we know about its religion hearkens back to the shamanic and Paleolithic past while simultaneously systematizing polytheism and moving toward monotheism. I find it incredible that such riches are buried in the sand waiting to be discovered. Ur-gh.

Brown then asks a series of nonsensical questions which imply that because Neanderthal brains were different from human brains (Neanderthals in fact had bigger brains than humans; the difference is in shape), a cloned Neanderthal would have different supernatural beliefs:

What religion would these creatures have? We know that Neanderthals had rituals, and presumably beliefs, around death. These are lost forever. Should they be replaced? If Neanderthals are enough like us to bury their dead, they will make mythologies with or without our help. What should those be? If two separate countries or cultures cloned two different Neanderthal cultures, would each regard the other as heretics?

While it is true that brains capable of symbolic thinking and language fluency will naturally generate supernatural concepts, the particulars of these ideas are not imprinted on the brain or dependent on it. Brains don’t have ritual or myth modules.

Religions are social constructions. Individuals do not spontaneously create particular kinds of belief. Brains may be naturally wired and primed for religion, but the content of such belief is never predetermined.

The cloned Neanderthal’s cultural environment will determine what s/he believes. If the cloned Neanderthal is raised in Oxford, s/he will probably have Anglican beliefs. If the cloned Neanderthal is raised in the bible belt of America, s/he will probably have Protestant evangelical beliefs. If the cloned Neanderthal is raised in Saudi Arabia, s/he will probably have Muslim beliefs. If the cloned Neanderthal is raised in India, s/he will probably have Hindu beliefs. If the cloned Neanderthal is raised in Thailand, s/he will probably have Buddhist beliefs.

And if Richard Dawkins raises our cloned Neanderthal, s/he will probably think all such beliefs are ridiculous.

As for one cloned Neanderthal regarding another cloned Neanderthal as a heretic, this kind of belief is mostly limited to exclusivist forms of monotheism. So if we had a cloned Neanderthal who was raised Catholic and another raised Sunni, they might regard one another as heretics.

If Neanderthals had anything like religion, it surely would have been similar to the shamanic practices of Upper Paleolithic humans. Because shamanic supernaturalism is pluralist and not exclusivist, the concept of heresy would not have existed.

Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.

We do not need to assume this — we know it.  I have often made the point that in most societies which are not Western and Christian (that is local and recent), ethical and moral behaviors are not linked to religion.  The normative codes that one can find in all hunting and gathering groups are not dependent on, or linked to, ideas about gods or the supernatural.  And this is not limited to hunters and gatherers.

Just last night I was reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, in which he correctly observes:

For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world.  These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice.

There were no doctrines to be learned…and no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. This is not to say that adherents of of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics — strange as this sounds to modern ears — played almost no role in religion per se.

Of course these polytheistic societies had ethical codes and standards concerning right conduct — it was just that these codes and standards were not linked to religion.  Such a linkage appears first in human history with monotheistic religions of the books.

Given these historical facts, I find the following statement by de Waal — who argues in favor of an evolved moral sensibility that can be glimpsed in chimpanzees and other primates — puzzling:

It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

It is not impossible to know what morality would look like without the modern concept of organized and systematic “religion.”  Anyone who reads an ethnohistory of North American Indians can see morality existing apart from religion.  Many such cultures did in fact exist.

Indeed, the majority of human societies or cultures have had what we consider “morals” without any linkage to “religions.”  This correction aside, de Waal’s many additional points are well taken.

In the fifth essay of Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith takes a close look at one such myth — the famous Maori creation story centered on the high god Io — and unravels the history of its making.  As is true of all native or indigenous myths that have been collected over the centuries, the Io story did not write itself.  It is an historical product, told and inscribed by particular persons in a particular time and place.  Such peoples, times, and places are never situated in ethereal or untouched circumstance — they are always thickly embedded in history.

After examining the particulars of the Io myth and detailing its all too human construction, Smith concludes:

I would draw only set of conclusions for the historian of religion from these preinterpretive investigations.  The 1907 Io cosmogony might be labeled a fraud.  It most certainly is not “neolithic,” it is not “the Polynesian creation myth,” and it cannot be used as evidence for Urmonotheismus or for the nature of archaic ritual, as has been done in previous scholarship.

This native work has been obscured by taking the text to be static, to be archaic, to be a myth.  By placing it back within its context, the historian of religion may begin to perceive its labors, its strains, its achievements.  Such a study may allow us to begin to interpret properly and appreciate Homo religiosus as being, preeminently, Homo faber.

It would be wise for us to remember that all religious texts are situated, constructed by interested humans who are not free to make their own history.

The first distinctively Sumerian villages and small cities appeared around 4,500 BCE.  At lower stratigraphic levels (i.e., before 4,500 BCE), archaeologists have discovered evidence of smaller-scale agricultural communities known generally as the Ubaidian (we do not know what they called themselves because they did not yet have writing).

As these small settlements grew or were conquered by outsiders, they eventually acquired their Sumerian characteristics.  By 3,500 BCE, several Sumerian villages had grown into city-states with populations in the tens of thousands; these city-states began building the first monumental architecture, usually in the form of ziggurats that were part temple complexes and part royal quarters.  These were impressive structures:

The Sumerians were the authors of many “firsts.”  They were the first to engage in large-scale irrigation agriculture; the first to live in populous urban settings that we call city-states; the first to develop stratified societies with specialized occupations; the first to organize and maintain standing armies; the first to develop mathematics and writing; the first to propagate laws and formulate the concept of property.  They were also the first to engage in systematic and organized spiritual practices that fit the definition of what we today call “religion.”

This latter point is critical to the historian of religion.  As Samuel Noah Kramer (1963:112) observed in his classic The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character:

In the course of the third millenium B.C., the Sumerians developed religious ideas and spiritual concepts which have left an indelible impress on the modern world, especially by way of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  On the intellectual level Sumerian thinkers and sages, as a result of their their speculations on the origin and nature of the universe and its modus operandi, developed a cosmology and theology which carried such high conviction that they became the basic creed and dogma of much of the ancient near East.

One can, in other words, find much of Sumerian religion in all near eastern religions that followed: Akkadian, Babylonian, Judaic, Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.  None of these religions sprouted sui generis from new revelations or prophets — all simply built upon and revised the Sumerians’ original formulations.

Sumerian theologians and priests developed several concepts that became key components of these later religions.  First, they conceived of the gods in anthropomorphic terms — the gods were like humans but divine.  Second, the cosmological or heavenly order was modeled on the earthly order.  Here I paraphrase Kramer:

Sumerian theologians took their cue from human society as they knew it and reasoned from the known to the unknown.  They noted that lands and cities, and palaces and temples, fields and farms — in short, all imaginable institutions and enterprises — are tended and supervised, guided and controlled by living human beings; without them lands and cities became desolate, temples and palaces crumbled, fields and farms turned to desert and wilderness.  Surely, therefore, the cosmos and all its manifold phenomena must also be tended and supervised, guided and controlled by living beings in human form.

Then, too, on the analogy with the political organization of the Sumerian city-state, it was natural to assume that at the head of of the pantheon was a deity recognized by all the others as their king and ruler.

As for the technique of creation attributed to these deities, Sumerian theologians developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near East, the doctrine of creative power of the divine word.  All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay the plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.

Although the Sumerians were polytheistic and had a pantheon of deities, there were already hints of an emergent monotheism:

The four most important deities were the heaven-god An, the air-god Enlil, the water-god Enki, and the great mother goddess Ninhursag.  By far the most important deity in the Sumerian pantheon, one who played a dominant role throughout Sumer in rite, myth, and prayer, was the air-god Enlil.

In addition to the idea of human-like deities who interacted with people and responded to supplication or prayer, the Sumerians developed elaborate doctrines, rites, myths, creeds, and temples.  I will be discussing these in future posts which will clearly demonstrate the profound and enduring influence Sumerian religion had on later developing faiths that today are known as “world religions.”