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Carving New Gods
How our expanded horizons are forcing us to create new mythologies
In order to function in an environment containing lots of different elements, organisms have to reduce the complexity of the stimuli they receive through their sensory organs. We do this by forging patterns that are “good enough” most of the time. This pattern-forming enables us to recognize repeating conditions and by representing such repeats in a simple pattern we gain speed while reducing computational requirements. It’s a great strategy for any organism living in a relatively stable environment.
The only drawback with pattern-forming brains is the inevitable tendency to imagine patterns where they don’t actually exist. For nearly all of our evolutionary history, however, this over-fitting was harmless. It didn’t matter if our distant ancestors looked up at the night sky and imposed on the stars imaginary people, animals, and artifacts. It doesn’t matter much today if small children look up at clouds and see castles and faces. From similar impositions of the human imagination we have fashioned our gods since before recorded history.
Because gods are the result of the pattern-seeking hardwiring of the human brain, our gods have always necessarily reflected our environment. For most of our history we were hunter-gatherers (though a more accurate and less self-aggrandizing term would be…
