THE EVOLUTION OF GOD John MacDonald Smith I want to qualify the SoF assertion that religion is a human creation, and suggest that it is as evolution-driven as our brains or lungs.
My argument comes from Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin, 1990). Jaynes suggests that about three millenia ago evolutionary changes in the functioning of the brain forced us to learn consciousness. His thesis is that before we learned to conjure up an analogue ‘‘I’’ and hold it for long periods, the left brain hallucinated the speech of the gods into Wernicke’s Area of the left dominant brain via the area known as the Anterior Commissure. The gods “‘dwelt’’ in our heads and ‘‘spoke’’ from one side of the brain to the other. “I have endeavoured’’, writes Jaynes (p 201) “...to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilisations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as we are, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millenia of time; that instead each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call divine and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.”’ Language developed about 40,000 BCE to meet the needs of an increasingly complex culture. As people began to be individuals, names evolved about 10,000 BCE. Religion then began to develop as a means of controlling the large non-conscious communities of people without analogue selves but with specialist skills who began to conurbate together. With its inherent organising ability and capacity Religion is NOT a human creation but the product of evolutionary biology. We no longer need theology. for long-term thought (unconscious of course) the right brain fed the left brain hallucinatory commands, keeping the individual at the task allotted by the king or chief.
When the king dies, his hallucinated commands continue and, buried in a prominent place, he can continue to give them. If a special building is erected over his body and his successors are interred there, a temple is created, complete with relics. When his successor hears and mediates his hallucinated voice, a priesthood emerges. A statue, with connotations of permanence, can be erected and the dead king is a living god whose commands are hallucinated from right brain to left via a mediating priesthood. The gods behaved like humans because that is what they were; and religion was revelation in our heads.
The Fall The Old Testament is full of bicamerality. Amos wouldn’t know what it meant to think of himself as an ‘‘I’’ and is totally besotted with he-who-is. Ecclesiastes, on the contrary, is not bicameral and is appropriately ethical, hardly mentioning he-who-is. The breakdown of bicamerality is recorded in the story of the Fall (Genesis 3) as “‘the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked’’, after eviction from the garden in which he-who-is could be seen and talked to like anybody else; and with consciousness there came a sense of right and wrong.
Moses speaks to he-who-is as a friend (Exodus 33:11) and there is a group hallucination when Moses and _ the seventy elders all see he-who-is standing on a saphire pavement (Exodus 24:9f). But bicamerality does not last: soon he-who-is will be surplus to requirements because a constitution will be written on blocks of stone. The increasingly silent word of the lord was giving way to an ethical system and, in contrast to former times, the high priest alone visited the holy place, and only once a year at that. Ethics and consciousness emerged together and the gods were consigned to non-reality.
Jaynes suggests that several factors were at work in the transition. These included the weakening of the auditory sense by the invention of writing; the instability of hallucinatory control; the unreliability of gods in a crisis; the realisation that other people, and peoples, are different; and evolutionary pressures for survival.
Bicamerality did not disappear everywhere at once. It is tempting to suggest that the resurrection appearances of Jesus, his transfiguration and his commission to the apostles were visual hallucinations; that the conversion of Paul was an audio-visual hallucination; and that the temptations in the wilderness were hallucinations suffered by Jesus under the stress of deprivation. The Apocalpse of John is plainly bicameral, in common with ‘much contemporary literature. What the church calls ‘‘revela- tion’’ is in reality a consequence of lingering Palestinian bicamerality.
We have struggled to avoid the ethical demands of evolutionary change. The first christians welcomed Jesus as God with us and a reversal of the Fall, fervently hoping for his return in glory. Before them, Jewish scholars worked at the Torah to codify the will of an absentee Yahweh into a constitution which was all they had to differentiate the people who said they belonged to Yahweh from others. Still-bicameral prophets explained why Yahweh did not reveal his strength in time of need, and in honouring the last of the prophets we are really recognising an evolutionary change in the operation of our functionally plastic brains.
Midrash was another palliative of the need to run for cover when we realised the need to use our own minds.
John Spong (Resurrection: Myth or Reality? p 9) defines it as ‘‘the affirmation of a timeless truth found in the faith journey of a people so that this truth can be experienced afresh in every generation... It is the means whereby the experience of the present can be affirmed as true inside the symbols of yesterday’’.
Because bicamerality has broken down, the divine is no longer at hand to guide, protect and cajole, and current crisis-events have to be interpreted in terms of precedent created when it was a desperate attempt to keep the cultural story going. The church has used typology for a similar purpose - but the originating events on which it is all based occurred when we were not responsible beings.
It is small wonder that the sense of desertion consequent on the rise of consciousness led to feelings of ontological guilt and unworthiness and gave rise to stories of a moral fall and a myth of redemption.
Left with a dead god Religion, as opposed to ethical system-building, is not a human creation but a biological inevitability to which we are no longer subject. God is no longer in our heads, and that’s the only place that divinity has ever been.
Meanwhile the right brain Wemicke’s Area can find something else to do. This seems to mean that we no longer need theology, assuming we ever did: metatheology, perhaps, but not theology. We are left with a dead god, a written ethic in constant need of rewriting and a consciously purposive brain, and that’s theosis, or deification.
Now there is a human creation, waiting to happen.
John MacDonald Smith is author of On Doing Without God (‘‘a voice the religious community needs to hear’’ - Bishop John Spong), a former Church of England priest, Aldermaston scientist, and anti-nuclear campaigner. i ess] RELIG POLITICS?