It is the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal who is usually credited with coining the phrase “a God-shaped hole” to describe the spiritual vacuum inside every human being that yearns to be filled. The concept, however, goes back much further—to the very origins of life on this planet. For many people argue that the religious impulse, a deep-seated need to find a more profound meaning to existence, went hand in hand with the birth of humankind.
Sincere religious believers, of course, hold that it was God who came first, creating men and women to populate the Earth. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” starts John’s gospel in the New Testament, while the Upanishads, the sacred texts of Hinduism, claim that the Hiranyagarbha, or golden womb, contained the origins of the universe, and of Brahma, the Hindu god of creation.
Others, though, suggest that the process happened the other way round. There have been many theories about the origin of religion. What all of them accept is that human beings have always created gods. So when the first men and women found themselves confronted by the randomness of their fate—with sickness and suffering just as likely to afflict them as joy and good health—they searched for and discovered an explanation for these otherwise inexplicable turns of fortune by attributing them to the actions of a distant deity.
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
St. Augustine, 354–430
A more precise starting point for the idea of a man-made God is found 14,000 years ago in the Middle East, where historians and archaeologists have detected evidence that the forces of nature—the wind, the sun, the stars—as well as less tangible but nonetheless keenly felt entities or spirits believed to exist in the landscape, were personalized and worshipped as gods with human characteristics.
The origin of the idea of God
Many historians and theologians have sought to prove that the concept of God originated in the human mind. One of the most influential writers on the subject was the German anthropologist, ethnologist and Catholic priest, Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), whose twelve-volume The Origin of the Idea of God was first published in 1912. His theory of “primitive monotheism” held that at the dawn of humankind, man fashioned a benevolent creator god—often referred to as the “Sky god,” since he was thought to reside above the Earth in a region that came to be known as the heavens—to provide an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable things, both good and bad, that happened on Earth. This god was so remote from the dilemmas of human life that it seemed pointless to make images of him, or to worship him in rituals led by holy men and women. Alienated by this sensation of distance, people turned instead to more approachable deities, shaped in the image and likeness of humans. According to Schmidt, the cult of the Sky god persisted only among isolated peoples, such as some African and Latin American tribes, and the Aborigines of Australia.
A subsequent stage in this process occurred in the centuries between 800 and 300 BCE, known to history as the Axial Age. During this period, the search for meaning in life turned on figures such as Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah, who all shared a view that there was a transcendent or spiritual dimension to existence, and who tried for the first time to formulate that idea. The primitive notion of a deity grew more distinct and refined.
These attempts to define divine overlordship eventually resulted in the various denominations and faiths that are part of the religious world today. While they all still share the common ground of addressing ethical behavior and the question of how individuals should relate to each other, they differ in how this should be done—in other words, what might loosely be termed doctrine. For instance, Christianity, Judaism and Islam are monotheistic religions. This means that they believe in a single all-powerful god. Hinduism and other Eastern faiths, by contrast, have a pantheon of gods.
“If I knew him, I would be him.”
Rabbi Joseph Albo, 1380–1445
Shadowy figures With the Axial Age came the writing down in holy books of the various religious traditions, an accompanying growth in theological study, and the establishment of codes of behavior governing membership of a particular faith. Yet to this day, in most faiths the exact nature of the deity remains shadowy. Sometimes, as in Taoism and Confucianism, this is deliberate, to place the emphasis on living an ethical life of faith rather than placing a premium on theological speculation. Yet often it is accepted that the deity is beyond conventional words. The Penny Catechism of the Catholic Church, a popular digest of that denomination’s essential rules and beliefs, and widely used until the 1960s, consisted of a series of questions and answers. To the inquiry “What is God?,” it replied opaquely: “God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself, and is infinite in all perfections.”
Any definition of the divine remains cloaked in abstractions and taboos. Jews are forbidden to pronounce the sacred name of God, and Muslims may not depict the divine in visual imagery. Yet that very mystery seems only to heighten the appeal of religion as a way of bringing order to an otherwise unpredictable world.
An ever-changing deity Human needs and desires have changed as the world evolves, and continue to change as the planet and its population face new challenges. Concepts of the divine also evolve and change, though most religions prefer not to acknowledge this, presenting themselves instead as unwavering both in the essentials of their faith, and in the rules that shape its practice within institutions.
Some scientists have recently produced research to show that the human brain is predisposed or hard-wired for belief in God. According to British academics at Bristol University, human beings are programmed to believe in God because it gives them a better chance of survival. A 2009 study by Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology, into the way children’s brains develop suggests that during the process of evolution, those people with religious tendencies began to benefit from their beliefs—possibly by working in groups to ensure the future of their community. As a consequence, “supernatural beliefs” became hard-wired into our brains from birth, leaving us receptive to the claims of religious organizations. Professor Hood’s research shows that “children have a natural, intuitive way of reasoning that leads them to all kinds of supernatural beliefs about how the world works. As they grow up they overlay these beliefs with more rational approaches, but the tendency to illogical supernatural beliefs remains as religion.” These conclusions echo other findings—notably by a group at the Centre for the Science of the Mind at Oxford University, published in 2008—which have uncovered evidence linking religious feelings to particular parts of the brain. Devout Catholics shown a picture of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when given an electric shock than non-believers because they underwent a greater degree of deadening activity in the right ventrolateral frontal cortex area of the brain.
So the idea of a deity remains remarkably flexible, and it is this flexibility, according to some people, that has enabled the concept to survive for so long. This suggestion implies a degree of calculation by religious leaders—that they have tailored their presentation to satisfy the particular needs of specific periods. That God is ultimately unknowable, however, is spelled out explicitly by all the faiths, which teach that it is in the quest to know God, or the gods, that we seek and hopefully find value and meaning in life.
the condensed idea
Deities explain the inexplicable
| timeline | |
|---|---|
| 2 million years ago | First humans and birth of the cult of the Sky god |
| 14,000 BCE | Origins of monotheism |
| 800–300 BCE | Axial Age |