Ancient Peoples, Shamanism, and on the Origin of Religion

The origin of religion, if we are to put it that way, is not a mystery, which some scholars like to speculate and puzzle about. The word mystery suggests that it is possible to uncover what the mystery is; it tempts us to solve it as if it were some sort of puzzle. Here, however, if there is a factual account of origin we can give, if talk of origins here is intelligible, that account is not a mystery as much as it is simply lost. Yet at the same time, it is not lost for we have scattered remnants of what religion at one point might have been like. There are skeletal remains, artifacts, ritual diagrams, etc, which if we piece together may help to give us a picture of the beginnings of religion. I guess the sense the word ‘mystery’ plays here is in the hope that we can put all these puzzle pieces together to come up with some cohesive account, no matter how skeletal, that might show us the sense of a religion that early peoples might have had.

But the reason I say it is lost is because of what seems to count for evidence these days. There is no empirical evidence to point to in order to say “yes, here we have a religion” that can be tested scientifically and then proven to be so. In other words, there is no firm criteria to base the claim that a certain early people of this lost tradition or that vanished custom was practicing a religion in the sense the term ‘religion’ has for us today. All that can be done is to look at the scattered remains of long past peoples and perhaps speculate that religions, in the sense of ‘world religions’, possibly have their beginnings in such traditions.

Yet while those remains may speak volumes of the origins of religious tradition to one, it may say very little of religion, if religiosity can be spoken of here, to another. For example, just because one finds what seem to be valuable possessions in the graves of some, for example, Neandertals (in one case pollen was found suggesting flowers), it may not necessarily mean that they were religious or that they believed in anything – for example, life after death. All we can say is that they were buried with such things and it hints at such beliefs. And in a way, this is the proper procedure to go about reporting such findings if one is to remain honest to the discipline of science specifically and an ethics of pure description more generally. I do not mean to suggest by using the Neandertals as an example that we were directly related. The scientific evidence seems to be turning against this view. What I am saying is that if Neandertals had such practices, and their level of sophistication culturally was such that we can propose religion, it is not a great leap to propose the same of Homo sapiens, the burials of which we have ample evidence.

But it is difficult to ignore a sense of wonder at the fact that one would find anything in the grave of a Neandertal – or that there is a grave at all! Perhaps it derives from the fact that Neandertals not only lived up to 300,000 years ago, having disappeared, according to the fossil record 24,000 years ago. It is not commonly thought that Neandertals were more like us than a number of anthropology scholars of a particular school of thought would like to admit. If one takes their view, then familiar practices that we take for granted such as interment of the dead might seem misplaced in a society that is so far removed from ours such as the Neandertals’.

For these same anthropologists, Neandertals, due to certain mental and physiological traits should not be placed, in the same taxonomic category of Homo sapiens as we are, and as the Neandertals at one time were. The problem here has to do with the question of the origin of mankind: did we arise from a distinct lineage or was the Neandertal on our family line? Whichever the case, the Neandertals that were around previous to the modern form of Homo sapiens will have to be content for now with being named after a valley in Germany (the Neander Valley). The term ‘Homo sapiens' is essentially derived from the infinitive latin, sapere, or ‘to be wise’. And while in some introductory textbooks the Neandertal is categorized as being part of the Homo sapiens genus (homo sapiens neandertalensis),[1] according to Tattersall, the criteria for including something into the genus ‘homo sapiens’ should be a strict one. For him Homo sapiens means that a group must have “high intelligence, language, aesthetic sensibilities, and the mastery of complex technologies.”[2]

Yet if we consider these closely, it is not difficult to impute them onto homo neandertalensis, for what is meant by these words depends very much on who is in charge of the criteria. The sense of this can be put in the form of a question: who has the power to control what is meant by certain words? For example, intelligence today has a tremendous range of meaning. This is one of the reasons why the notion of the bell curve, along with so called I.Q. tests, were so heavily disputed against by those like the late Stephen Jay Gould. As far as language is concerned, what constitutes language is not so easily distinguished. Hand gestures that signify certain behaviors, objects, along with a kind of grammar, that is, a set of rules intrinsic to using the hand gestures could be thought as a kind of primitive language. We don’t need to go that far given that we know that Neandertal people had vocal tracts that are like ours. Given that they had such a structure and the fact that they had sufficient amount of things to talk about, it would be strange to say that the verdict is still out on whether or not they were able to speak intelligibly to one another. Aesthetic sensibility is another term that defies description. Who is to say what art is much less what beauty is but the society in which such descriptions are dependent upon the common sense of that society? And as far as mastery of complex technology goes, while Neandertals did not have the same kinds of tools as Homo sapiens, who at one point coexisted with Neandertals before their disappearance, the skill they used to craft these tools was quite complex, the mastery of which was most likely a requirement in order to make an adequate tool. This is nothing to say of the necessity of having certain kinds of tool-making methodology that likewise has a direct connection to the interest in making certain tools. One might argue that the tools Homo sapiens made, although perhaps of greater utility to us given their design, were not a necessary development given the skill of tool-making overall; in other words, caution should be used if one were to say that the tools that Homo sapiens designed were an ‘advancement’ generally. Thus, it won’t do to say that Neandertals were underdeveloped in making tools, that is, weren’t masters of complex technologies in comparison to the abilities of Homo sapiens. The latter’s tools, for example their weapons, were of efficient design with respect to killing capacity, a capacity which they were interested in their weapons having. A number of Neandertal weapons, one notices, are not of the same fashion as those of the Homo sapiens. But perhaps they may not have had the need in making such weapons. For example, it is yet not certain that they were big game hunters; one view is that they were scavengers. If so, the kinds of tools they made were effective enough for what they needed. And even if it is discovered definitively one day that Neandertals did hunt big game (which they most likely had), it can still be shown that the tools they had were adequate due to their physical makeup as well as in relation to the kind of animal they were hunting. According to anthropologist Michael Park, “The Neandertals were stocky, muscular, powerful people. This is seen even in the bones of Neandertal children, so it is assumed to be a result of inheritance, not simply of a hard-working lifestyle.”[3] If one does not need to have sophisticated weaponry to do certain work, one might ask what is supposed to act as the inspiration to make a better model tool? What is to count for the criteria of 'better' here? All kinds of valid answers might be given. But the answer that will not do to give is because they were not intelligent enough. We know that the intelligence of the Neandertal cannot be in question: they have sophisticated tools. Although the kind of sophistication does not match up with that of the Homo sapiens it is not a question of ability but perhaps of necessity. Now of course, it was later discovered that the Neandertals did develop more sophisticated tools to the point where it is difficult to discern the Homo sapiens’ tools from that of the Neandertals’. But this is not to say that such developments were necessary ones. All manner of reasons could be given for this happening, for example, exchange of ideas which comes from possible trade, living in a community, changing environment from climate fluctuation and migration, and so forth.

The strengths of these suppositions and confusions about Neandertals plays a weighty role in the story of religious studies. We find certain anthropological studies at times making logical leaps that don’t have any basis in reality and, consequently, they are transferred over to the study of religions; take for example the work done by past researchers like Frazer and Pritchard and compare them with what contemporary scholars like Dawkins and Dennett are doing. But perhaps these latter are far outside the field, even though they criticize belief in religion from a scientific vantage point. But there are descriptions of religious practices from within the field of religious studies that continue to make certain leaps without much substantiation other than what appears to be the case to certain anthropologists.

We can compare what the anthropologist says and what the scholar of religious studies says in order to see that, while the religious studies scholar gives more charity to the findings, she will more likely limit herself to the conclusions of anthropologists. The examples I’ll look at are still within the reference of genus homo neandertalensis and Homo sapiens, although more closely related to religious practices. The following is Park’s view, in relation to Neandertal burials and whether or not these contribute to the idea of them having a belief in the afterlife:

There is some debate, however, over whether or not these Neandertal burials had ritual significance. Did they represent belief in an afterlife or reverence for the physical remains of the deceased, or were the people simply disposing of a corpse, as seems to have been the case much earlier at Sima de los Huesos? The inclusion of animal bones in the graves may have been the result of the bones of both Neandertals and other animals being dragged by predators and scavengers into caves at the same time and subsequently buried by natural processes. The pollen found in a Neandertal grave at Shanidar, Iraq, may not have been from flowers placed in the gave but may have been brought in by burrowing rodents, carried in by water, or blowing in by wind at the time of burial. The jury is still out on this issue. But we know the Neandertals did sometimes bury their dead, for whatever reason.[4]

Now while it perhaps is professionally healthy for the respective scholar in relation to the field of anthropology to display ambivalence, even a kind of skepticism, as to what a certain practice might mean, here as it relates to the burial practices of Neandertals in terms of perhaps believing in the afterlife, the religious studies scholar is less worried, but still cautious. Bradley Hawkins says, for example:

The origins of religion in human history remain a deep mystery. There are, however, some tantalizing hints to be found in the archaeological record, for example the very fact that there have been purposeful burials of human remains. Even among the Neanderthals we find that the dead were interred with flowers [notice: he does not mention pollen grains but full blown flowers] and artifacts, suggesting that those left behind may have believed that the dead had gone on to some other existence, but beyond the suggestion of this possibility we cannot go.[5]

This bears directly on Shamanism and the possible origins of religion. It was discovered nine years later, according to some sources, that the variety of flowers discovered had properties that were curative in value. This suggests that there may have been a shamanic religion already in place in the period the Neandertals were living in. Nevertheless, this is not to say that all religious studies scholars tread softly in the face of such evidence when making certain claim or describing certain practices and their possible meanings. Ake Hultkrantz, for example, is much more bold in his assertions when he writes:

Neanderthal people buried their dead with proper ceremonies, and seem to have believed in some kind of life after death. In the cave of Shanidar, northern Iraq, a dead person was buried under a heap of stones, resting on a bed of many flowers. At Techik Tach in Turkestan, a child was buried surrounded by five pairs of horns of the mountain goat, apparently placed in a circle. A cave at Monte Circeo in Italy contains a human skull within a small circle of stones; here is one of the so called ‘skull burials’ that continue throughout the Paleolithic period.[6]

I do not here want to go into the various reasons why the anthropologist will not readily admit there is something to this notion of belief in the afterlife with respect to the Neandertal’s worldview or completely disavow himself from that claim. I will say that this reluctance contributes to confusions that arise in religious studies when looking at religious practices in general. What I mean here is that there seems to be an internal need for empirical evidence in order to say that something is a fact, which, of course, is a very scientific way of approaching the matter. The problem is that although scientific analysis is an established, powerful method of looking at the world, it is not the only way and it is by no means the best way in an absolute sense. It is the best way of looking at the world if the interest of looking at the world is based on a scientific perspective. However, if looking at the world is based upon another conception of the world, say perhaps, a spiritual one, then science is not the best way. Another way of looking at the world is as objectively as possible, which is the realm of pure description. This is perhaps more difficult because it requires the observer to be as unbiased in his description as possible. The problem is that no matter how unbiased one attempts to be, we are biased by way of our subjective vantage points. In other words, we all interpret things through our inherited beliefs, our upbringing, our language.

While this presents a difficulty, we should not feel frozen by this dilemma. Much of the reason has to do with the fact that we are all still part of human communities. It is still possible, therefore, to understand, at least on some level, the practices of vastly differing communities or cultures. The important point to realize is that while we may find commonalities between our community and theirs, there are also differences which must be made plain that are just as important as the commonalities. The confusion is in assuming, consciously or unconsciously, that the similarities will somehow outweigh the differences. The mistake here is bringing to an observed community a set of assumptions which may or may not cohere with the community’s practices which are under consideration. This usually happens when one thinks that what’s important to him or her is important to all people regardless of culture or creed. Instead, in order to give a more accurate account one must look to what the practices of a said community are.

While religious studies scholars will advocate this position, what is the usual case is the opposite of what is supported. For example, after speaking about Shamanism as a possible point of origin for Asian religions, Hawkins goes on to deal with the shamanic religious perspective, which has to do the way the spiritual interacts with the material. He says:

Shamanic religion may be said to be more of a worldview than a formal religion. Its essential nature flows from a belief that all things are, in some sense, imbued with a life force and, to a limited extent, consciousness. Thus the world of the shamanic peoples is one inhabited by myriad spirits who can affect people’s lives for good or ill. This worldview is, in a sense, scientific stemming from shamanic peoples’ understanding of the concept of cause and effect: if something happens for which there is no visible cause, such as an illness or bad luck, it must necessarily follow that there is an invisible agent that is causing the visible disturbance, and that there are consequently whole worlds invisible to the average person.

I will not say that a scientific understanding is not important. But it is only important with respect to what it is that is trying to be explained. What it fails to account for is the meaning a practice has in the life an individual and community. But this very act of failing to account for the meaning is not that the meaning is somehow misplaced or ignored. It is often confused with being something it is not. For example, in certain Filipino healers’ medicinal practices, sleight of hand is used to apparently fool the patient into thinking s/he has been cured.[7] The researcher than concludes that, obviously, the healer and the patient think that the object of the sleight of hand – essentially, that which was ailing the patient – was physically taken out. I do not deny that some of these healers have taken advantage of many people financially. But what can also not be denied is that in many cases, cures have been affected (just as in many cases they have not). What is difficult to separate here is the sense of causal connection. But is the person affecting the cure and the one being affected by the cure think in the same way as a Western observer who is thinking in terms of a scientific paradigm?

A similar interpretation is given when talking about Shamanistic practices with respect to the use of entheogens, that is, any plant derived substance that is used to bring on a spiritual experience. Some think that this experience to be exactly the same as a hallucination. In other words, the plant has certain physical, chemical properties which stimulate certain brain structures to react in a certain way. One characteristic of the reaction is that we hallucinate.

The language of causation is difficult to escape because we deal in terms of empirical objects all the time and it is found in every culture. What is important to distinguish, however, is the relevance certain peoples put on conceptions of reality. Who is to say that the person going to the shaman or healer does not already know that there is sleight of hand or that certain plants are going to be used and those plants cause visions. One should keep in mind that these people also witness when the shaman or medicine doctors fail to deliver. With regards to the cases that do not end in successful operations, it turns out that it is not necessarily so that the people stop going. The opposite is true - people from the same village continue to go to the shaman or medicine doctor. Yet they know about causation, physical objects, and to a certain degree, technology. Are they so ignorant that they do not see what we see? To say ‘yes’ or to say that they have not yet advanced scientifically enough is to miss these people’s important religious response to the practice and perhaps confuse it with the mechanistic, scientific response, which at times may come up with very wrong conclusions with respect to the meaning a person of faith puts on a particular practice. In this case what is missed has to do with the question of faith. This is one reason why it is called not just healing, but faith healing. It has a religious component that cannot be explored by science. And it will not do to say that they are stupid people or too provincial to know the difference. If we observe, these people know about the wider world of, for example, transportation technology – they know that they have to put gasoline in trucks in order to make them run, plant seeds and water the soil to grow crops, use an axe to chop wood and use tools to build houses, etc. They recognize that there is a difference. What needs to be reflected on for us is the nature of that difference. Whatever it is, however, what must be recognized, at least in some cases, is not an empirical difference, but a difference in kind. One example: it is like comparing apples and oranges and asking which one is better. An even more radical yet poignant example is comparing apples and wrenches and asking which one is better. The answer: it depends on what you want to do or are trying to get at.

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[1] See Harry Nelson and Robert Jurmain, Introduction to Physical Anthropology (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1988), 537f.

[2] I Tattersall, “What do we mean by human –and why does it matter?” Evolutionary Anthropology 3 (4): 114.

[3] Michael Alan Park, Biological Anthropology (Boston: McGraw-Hill Mayfield, 2002), 290.

[4] Ibid., 295.

[5] Bradley Hawkins, Asian Religions (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 6.

[6] Ake Hultkrantz, “Religion Before History,” Introduction to World Religions, edited by Christopher Partridge (Mnneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 41.

[7] See James McClenon, Wonderous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion, 8-7. [Read

Is this God? Hume, intelligent design, and what about that little thing called ‘faith.’

While a kind of temptation exists to accept emergent theory of divine mind wholesale due to its explanatory power, there is a sense where certain difficulties arise. Now while proponents of this theory may agree with me saying that more work needs to be done to smooth out various conceptual details, I do not think that the difficulties they have in mind are the same as those which I will point out.

There may be holes in the theory on its physical, superficial level. That is, there may be physical phenomena that have not been accounted for by emergence theory because more data needs to by examined or because physical evidence is lacking at the moment due to our current technological level. For example, generally speaking, superstring theory posits that there exist these nth dimensional strings that are thought to vibrate the physical world into existence. If one thinks of the universe as a kind of body, superstrings could be said to be the universe's genetic code. Here the question might be in regard to the role emergence theory plays.

While gaps like these may be important to the overall explanatory power of the theory, it is not the kind of gap which I want to indicate as problematic. The difficulty has more to do with the kinds of questions one can ask given what we know about the world. In this sense, it is a grammatical problem. In other words, if the world is said to be this way, the way illustrated given an emergence perspective, what kind of sense can we derive from it regarding the nature or existence of God?

A similar examination is carried out by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. There Philo points out that one can believe it sensible to designate God as the originator of what is thought to be order in the world. But if one takes that perspective, an equal perspective is to say that things happen as they do in a natural way without any cosmic intelligence working behind the scenes. Why would it be more sensible to say that intelligent design makes more sense than random occurrence? What criteria can be brought to bear? In fact, if we take my old philosophy teacher’s method of critical analysis, there is nothing to show that there is anything like a deity behind any order given the lack of evidence.

In Emergence theory, however, it is proposed that there is evidence given the evolutionary feature working in the backdrop. While random events do take place, it is these same random features that ultimately give rise to novel ones with sophisticated attributes, sophisticated enough at one point, to call that something consciousness. In turn, the aggregates of consciousness later give rise, in an emergent way, to divine consciousness. The evidence is one of inference, but inference based upon scientific, well documented theories of evolutionary development as well as philosophical deduction.

The grammatical problem, and what is meant here by grammatical is logical, is that the sense of ‘divine consciousness’ is in question. What is this divine consciousness? What Clayton in his work on emergence theory seems to suggest is that it is supposed to be the explanation of God. If so, a more serious question can be asked: Is this what we mean by God? God is an aggregate of people coming together, cohabiting, dealing, discussing, fighting, playing, and so on, with each other to the point where, on some level, God arises as an emergent property? This is what believers worship and atheists deny? If true, God here is no more than an extension of the human capacities and understanding. And while in one sense God transcends humanity, God is still in another sense subject to it and comprehensible by it. God in this view becomes a kind of analogy of human intelligence and paradigm. And God, in this sense, is not the God of the believers; the one who is worshiped in the life of believers because this God has in a sense arisen from the very natural processes thought to be originally put into play by God. Hume is not silenced here if this is where the matter ends. Indeed, for him, the matter has returned full circle, for his alter ego, Philo, says:

If the whole of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it afford no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no farther than to the human intelligence; and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections which lie against it? Some astonishment indeed will naturally arise from the greatness of the object: Some melancholy from its obscurity: Some contempt of human reason, that it can give no solution more satisfactory with regard to so extraordinary and magnificent a question.[1]

What has been eliminated here is the sense of faith. Its replacement, evolution, is much more instrumental and hygienic, perhaps even more exact, although its exactitude comes at the price of error. Through evolution, be it of physical examples or ideas, God has arisen, unpredictably yet intelligibly, despite the thoughts and conceptions religious traditions have devised of God and despite the brutality that was wrought in God’s name (here are the necessary ‘errors’ that must crop up evolutionarily in history). Without discussion of the moral difficulties that this brings up, the logical difficulties that this poses cannot be dismissed. Here Hume’s question can be revisited and posed with some force. If it is sensible to call this emergent property 'God', then it is just as sensible to say it is not God. All one can say is that science has found what it has found, and what it has found is not necessarily God.

Science, in whatever form one chooses, has one feature particular to it which faith does not. Scientific methodology has implicit in its structure, or mode of inquiry, a falsifiable component. Something is considered theory until a better theory can replace it. Belief in God does not have this same feature. A believer does not hold his/her belief in God in suspense until something better comes along. And while a believer may fall from faith, it is not at all the same thing as a theory falling out of favor with the scientific community. Yet there is a tendency that seems to run rampant in the west that God can be verifiably proven. But what is also true is that it takes more than historical evidence to make a believer into a non-believer. To think otherwise is to question the foundation of that believer’s religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the believer is not like a scientist looking at certain evidence, testing a theory to see if evidential accounts support it, and if the evidences do not fit, s/he is ready to discard the old theory for a new, better theory. On the contrary, as Wittgenstein says in the believer's regard, “Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn't in the slightest influence me.”[2] Some might say of the believer who founds his faith and those of others on scientifically oriented terms that he has finally discarded all those childhood fantasies and that he has gained the ability to see the world for what it really is given the wonders of science. Yet Kierkegaard would see this as a loss, not a gain. In one place he says says:

No, when an old person has outgrown the childish and the youthful, ordinary language calls this, maturity and a gain. But willfully ever to have outgrown the childish and Eternal is spoken of as falling away from God and as perdition; and only the life of the ungodly “shall be as the snail that melts, as it goes” (Psalm 58:8).[3]

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[1] David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129.

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 56.

[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1948), 38.

From Religious Naivete to God and the Emergence of Deity

When I first came to philosophy, I started in a World Religions class, which actually was considered a philosophy of religion class. I noticed that there was something different about the class, about what was being discussed. It had to do with what we thought we knew, what we took to be true about the world and false. We questioned pretty much everything that I could think of at the time, but most importantly, we questioned our own beliefs, which many of us thought were iron clad. The professor was quite energetic and lively about the subject. He was very critical about the attitude of our time. People, he said, took more time becoming informed about out their car – the color, the kind of tires, rims, kind of engine, etc – and picking it out then figuring out their beliefs about things, more specifically what religion they were following or willing to follow. By contrast, he felt that it was more important to know the latter than the former given the more real impact it could have on one’s life.

He wanted to shock us into understanding what he was talking about. He constantly pitted us against philosophical quandaries regarding our beliefs about things that would puzzle us and even make a number of us offended. One of my most memorable moments was the first time he told us to bring our bibles. He asked us to open up to the Gospels, Matthew first, and then proceeded to lead us through as many blatant, so called, ‘contradictions’ as he could fit into the hour (with class discussion of course, or what could better be described as class controversy).

Now, I said he wanted to shock us. I cannot really speak for the rest of the class, but I know I was shocked. I am not going to go into the reaction I had after class that day. I will say that I have come to realize the reason for his shock tactic. I believe it was in order to pry open our eyes from a kind of sleepy naiveté. In many ways, however, I think that the way he went about doing this was a bit irresponsible. Regardless, his chief motive was to teach us how to do philosophy, and his method is the same method that is being employed in much of philosophy of religion today to the denial of certain philosophers within the discipline.

Now, I have stated that I believe the way he introduced this method to be irresponsible. This belief does not just stop at his introduction of the method, but extends to the method itself. Why? Because this method gives primacy to a certain way of looking at the world which is mistakenly thought to be the best, if not the only way in some cases, of looking at the world. And the fact of the matter is that, for us, it is difficult to pry ourselves from seeing the world in this way or stop ourselves from being tempted by this view because we are so couched in its context, its paradigm, if you will. He called it critical analysis, which is another way of saying ‘empirical analysis’. Here, one looks to evidential causes to explain respective effects. If there is no evidence, one should not try to speculate on causes beyond what are believed to be possible causes. Here experience plays an important role as does a kind of common sense in a particular field. This latter is important insofar as the kind of criteria one can bring to bear on the subject under scrutiny with regards to speculating on possible causes. For example, if a cow is found bloodless in a field, it is more desirable, and plausible, by a rational community to posit an animal killed the cow and drank the blood than it is to say aliens took the cow up in their spaceship and drained the cow of its blood and then left it in the field when they were finished. The place one finds this kind of analysis mostly is in the sciences. Science, today, has become, in many ways, the religion of the masses in so far as it is a way of looking at the world.

But why go this route? Why is empirical verification so important? Apart from the fact that our interests as a community are invested on such a methodology given its instrumentality, as a consequence, it is due primarily to the enlightenment period. Descartes provoked many to ask certain questions about the world and self that ordinarily one would not think of asking. Later, Hume reinvigorated an old argument of philosophy and so today philosophers and philosophers of religion are still trying to combat skepticism – even though they think the matter closed. The fact is that if it were closed we would not have so many metaphysical theories floating around about the world, self, and knowledge. Even within the realm of psychology the question of what knowledge is is still being debated. In philosophy, one examination led to what were thought to be ‘sense-data’ the characteristics of which can be identified in its descendant, qualia. Nevertheless, these concepts all hook up with the idea of sensation. We can only be sure of our own sensations. The problem is that there is skepticism over whether our sensations connect up with a world apart from our sensations. In other words, is what we see, hear, touch, etc., really what we see, hear, and touch? Is the world outside as we perceive it also what we take to be on the inside? The idea here is supposed to be that we need a more precise language to talk about such things in philosophy (thus terms like 'sense data' and 'qualia') – as if the language we possess is not qualified.

So, in relation to religion, if we cannot even be sure of everyday physical objects how can we be sure of God’s existence? After all, asks the epistemologist, can God be perceived? To add to this epistemological mess, we have ways of proving and disproving God arising from the rational tradition. There is for example the discussion of the logical problem of evil and the problem of God. Here the conclusions that arise are less in God’s favor than perhaps hoped by the believer. On the other hand, what can also be included here is Paley’s example of the watch, and Wisdom’s garden example, both of which might be used to infer God’s passing in the world of physical objects and, therefore, his existence. But because of the shaky arguments both for and against the existence of God that arise from either arguments brought to light by our hero Hume, something new, something more concrete must be introduced. Here we end up once again in the realm of empirical verification and a scientific, naturalistic worldview.

Scientific explanation is yet one more foundational way to physically justify God’s existence. What is worrisome to me philosophically is that the majority of people who hear about this stuff, knowingly or unknowingly, are eating it up. This is because, as I said before, we are entrenched in the paradigm of science and it is not so much because we are a scientific culture – this description has its place – but instead we have bought into the idea of scientism. Here is what one leading philosopher/slash theologian says:

The exponential growth of scientific knowledge, perhaps more than any other single factor, has transformed our sense of who we are and what kind of a world we inhabit. Given science’s astounding success, it is natural to assume that the growth of scientific knowledge will be limitless, that in the end nothing will lie outside its purview.[1]

In all fairness to this scholar, he does say that what he is arguing for steers a middle course between an embracing response to this perspective and a negative one, which I will summarily illustrate shortly. But regardless, for now, one overall important criticism that at least one tradition of philosophy poses has to do with the prior question in relation to the necessity of an empirical proof of God’s existence. But let me go back and quickly outline this new argument that has been proposed as a possible foundation for God’s existence from a theoretical perspective.

Emergence

The new argument is based on an old development of the idea that from an aggregate of simple units – or properties – of a certain kind emerges not only an organized complexity, but also a new property or novel property. This novel property, despite it having emerged from the aggregates, cannot be reducible to them. This is because it cannot be predicted from putting the units or simples of the aggregate together that the property in question would emerge. The additional hypothesis here is that not only can it not be predicted, but that the novel, emergent property can actually effect the aggregates that brought about the unpredictable emergent property. This is called downward or top-down causation.

This notion is controversial. The reason is that because throughout history causation is usually thought of as bottom-up an not top-down. An example: a bunch of atoms came together to form molecules to form the organelles of a cell to form multiple cellular bodies (organs) to form an elephant. It is thought, that an elephant cannot effect the atoms, but the atoms can effect the elephant. But in emergent theory, the elephant can effect the atom. A very rough example can help to illustrate. When the elephant moves it causes the atom to move to a different location; therefore, top-down causation.

One important powerful mind that can be said contributed, at least philosophically, to the notion of emergence theory is Hegel. His system of emergence of novel models in history is best expressed in his commonly illustrated triangular model of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. For example, some abstract feature appears in history which is then quickly confronted by some antithetical feature. In their confrontation, however, what arises from the fusion or ‘synthesis’ of the two is a new thesis, which will then continue on and confront some other antithetical feature, and so on.

The next part of emergence can be compared with the notion of projection one finds in the work of Feuerbach. He is important as a point of comparison for our purposes because he worked out the idea that God is just a projection of individuals’ hopes, dreams, fears, in other words, inner-self. But although an analogy can be drawn between Feuerbach’s projection theory, it is a limited one as analogies go. While one can say that God is projected from an individual, it is a notion, if that is appropriate, that is predictable from our thoughts given our experiences. In addition, we, at least at the time he was talking about this subject, are not aggregates but individuals. It just so happens that we find ourselves in a society and there are like-minded individuals who will also project the notion of God.

A third important aspect to emergence theory is evolutionary theory. In summary form, evolutionary theory posits that given a certain environment, certain forms will be better suited to live in that environment. Since nature does not stand still, or rather, given that organisms will continue to try to continue as a species, they will continue to reproduce and adapt their environment, be it consciously and/or unconsciously. What is meant here is that during reproduction new, unpredictable forms will arise that will be better equipped to deal with their environment. If we apply this model not just to biological organisms but also to ideas, then after trial and error of certain ideas, a final, unpredictable idea can arise as the most fit to exist in a world of ideas.

A natural consequence of emergence theory is the emergence of a divine, transcendent mind or being. Given that we are aggregates of individuals coming together to form a community – that is, making decisions, going to school, getting jobs, securing a future for a younger generation, and so forth – and when taken as a whole, in a historical milieu, the natural consequence of conceiving of a deity arises. One might infer from this process and ultimate product the existence of God, who either emerges presently or is in the process of becoming given the progress of history, change, and its aggregates.

This is a very general overview of how the notion of emergent properties, which is based on science, can be used to give an explanation, more specifically, an empirical explanation of God. A more thorough picture would take more time. I feel that it is a little unfair because I might have left out some important subtleties that may sway discussion of the subject one way or the other. But I also believe that enough has been introduced to evaluate the philosophical implications, difficulties, strengths, etc of the theory.

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[1] Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 204.