Religion Is Everywhere

Why religious beliefs will never disappear

Image credit: Business Insider

As best as we can tell from archeological evidence, for as long as homo sapiens has existed we’ve always been conjuring up various invisible magical pixies and other fantastical notions we then cling to with quite extraordinary tenacity. The fact that our gods always reflect the social structures that give rise to them and that these pixies know nothing we humans didn’t already know never daunts us in any way. Since at least the Bronze Age we’ve even gleefully slaughtered each other over arguments about whose pixies are best — and we continue to do so today.

It would be a grave error, however, to assume that all religions are invariably connected to one form of invisible magical pixie or another. For the 300,000 years in which our species was essentially pre-technological it was natural that our febrile imaginations should conjure up such human-like pixies because there was nowhere else for our creativity to go. And so we had anthropomorphic gods of the hearth, the river, the sky, and so forth. Gradually, in certain parts of the world these animistic religions evolved to mirror the evolution of the societies that gave rise to them. It’s not surprising that the hierarchical city-states of the ancient world should invent hierarchical pantheons to mirror the contemporary experience.

As some rulers became increasingly powerful, subordinating their peers and dominating the territory over which they ruled, the gods we invented likewise became more powerful and ultimately became monolithic. No doubt our religious inventiveness would have remained bound within the confines of these fairly primitive constructs had a series of chance events not permitted the eventual rise of scientific industrialism in north-west Europe commencing around 1700 CE.

Due to a series of quite random events, the former glacial pace of technological innovation began to accelerate from around 1440 CE. That was the year in which Gutenberg invented the printing press and although he died in poverty his invention was crucial in enabling more widespread dissemination of information, some of which would in the centuries ahead have enormous importance. In 1609 Galileo developed a telescope for the purposes of identifying ships’ flags when they were still too far out for human…