By Mark Owen - © 2010
Chapter 2 - The origins of the GOD idea
'Histories make men wise.' - Francis Bacon: The Works of Francis Bacon.
WHEN little Mandy asks her mum that age-old question: 'Where did GOD come from?' she expresses a legitimate problem for theology. It is, in essence, the very same problem that confronts the atheist: the ultimate origin of all things. But neither the theologian nor the atheist has the answer to that puzzling question, although the theologian thinks he has. And science, although it may try hard to uncover the truth, has so far failed to come up with an explanation.
Who knows? Perhaps the human race will probably forever fail to find an answer for such an impossibly deep mystery.
I have already pointed out that a child enters the world completely devoid of the knowledge of GOD. Now I know many of my readers will not believe this statement but I ask the doubters: Does the baby in its cot show a predisposition to worship? I think not, unless perhaps it is thinking of GOD when it chortles away to itself!
Rather, as we have seen, an infant slowly absorbs from an early age, by a sort of process of osmosis, the ideas of religion, learning religious faith as it does the techniques of feeding, the interpretation of sights and sounds and of everything else entering its tiny world. Humans are, in fact, taught religion.
And right at this point we note that a curious fact emerges. The GOD discovered by the Arabian child is not quite the same as the one discovered by the American or Australian infant, nor that disclosed to the child emerging in Calcutta or New Delhi! Which only goes to prove that such knowledge is imposed from without and is in no sense part of the child's divinely-ordained mental equipment.
Whatever the pronouncements made to the contrary, a religious sentiment or predisposition is, emphatically, not the natural inclination of the newly-emerging human being. Attempts to prove such a contention have never been substantiated. But, then, religion, as we shall soon see, is forever making claims it cannot support with hard facts. Ask the religious magician to produce the real live rabbit he claims is in his hat and it is not there!
Rather than being the natural heritage of the new-born human, religion is, in truth, a freaky, quirky product of human evolution, nothing more, nothing less.
Note that I write 'human' evolution. There is no evidence that animals believe. In this respect they surely show greater sense than humans do. (Of course, the religious constituency has another explanation!) My own cats, in fact, rather than showing an inclination to worship a being greater than themselves, appear to think, if they think at all, that humans should rightly worship them, as indeed the perceptive Egyptians did.
From the sketchy clues we can study in the records of the distant past emergent humanity seemingly had no religion at first. Men and women and their hominid ancestors apparently lived happily without gods in the millions of years before anything vaguely approaching a religious sentiment began making its presence felt.
Eventually, we begin seeing a few sketchy clues. In the dim recesses of the human evolutionary story we may discern, in the records left to us in ancient mounds and grave sites and in the messages of primitive art, a crossover point, a broad and somewhat hazily-defined period (for there are no written records and such evidence as we have is at best sketchy) from which we may date the first stirrings of religious sentiment. Before that time there is no indication whatever of religion. After that time there is.
At first this impulse was probably quite rudimentary in nature, unformed, uncertain, exploratory, but once unleashed, it grew in leaps and bounds, carried forward by the imaginative powers of the human mind and the seemingly satisfying answers it supplied to the human dilemma - the reality of the self, and the puzzles - from whence we came, why we are here, where we are going.
And we note a key component in the process of the development of religion - the passing on of such knowledge from one generation to the next. The young must needs be taught, otherwise they know nothing of religion!
The next component in the development of religion is the human propensity for the storyteller to expand and elaborate the tale told. Remember those party games based on this human characteristic. A brief story whispered in someone's ear is pass on to the next player, on and on to the end, where the story emerges from the last player in a very different form to its beginnings. And we have a perfect historical example of this process in relatively modern times in the life of St Francis Xavier.
I am deeply indebted to Andrew Dickson White for much of an account of the expanding legends surrounding Xavier in his valuable study, A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology (1897, available in modern reprints). I will recount in some detail the fascinating mythology as unfolded by Mr White because it encapsulates the very process through which all religion evolves, expanding and becoming more complex as it goes.
Born in 1506, Xavier abandoned a promising career, travelled to the east, and worked in India and Japan in the service of the Church. After just twelve years of dedicated service, however, Xavier became ill and died, weakened no doubt by his strenuous activities. The year was 1552. Thus we have the basic facts of his life. Naturally such a significant life is treated by many biographers. And, indeed, there was a great deal of material to work on. Xavier himself wrote many letters and reports, as did other workers and observers during the period of his labours. The total is quite large.
Thirty-six years after his death a biography of the saint (as I shall describe him, although he had not yet been lifted to this exalted status) was included in a book called History of India, compiled by a Jesuit father. This book briefly mentions miracles but does not go into great detail. Then, in 1596, appeared a work by Father Tursellinus, The Life of Xavier. The number and variety of miracles had grown somewhat in this book. They included curing the sick, casting out devils, stilling the tempest, and raising the dead!
By 1622, seventy years after Xavier's death, when Cardinal Monte preached at the canonisation service in Rome, the list had grown even longer. Together with numerous lesser miracles, the Cardinal listed ten great wonders. Among these were the following: By the sign of the cross, Xavier had made seawater fresh, so that fellow-passengers and crew could drink it; on one occasion he was lifted bodily from the earth and transfigured before onlookers; to punish a blaspheming town he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders; a crucifix lost overboard from a ship, was restored to him on shore by a crab; and, after death, lamps placed before the saint's image, filled with holy water, burning as if filled with oil.
There followed, as with most saints, a long series of written 'lives'. As the years passed each new 'life' expanded greatly the store of the saint's miracle-working powers. As an example, in the 1596 book the story is told of Xavier needing some money. A friend, Vellio, gave him the key to his safe. Xavier took three hundred gold pieces, leaving the balance, 29,700 pieces. Vellio reproached Xavier for not taking more. Xavier whereupon told Vellio that because of his generous impulse the time of Vellio's death would be revealed to him, to afford him ample opportunity for repentance. In the version of the same story in 1622 (note, only 26 years later), Vellio opens the safe to find all the money there. It is a miraculous restitution! And to the message regarding Vellio's death is added a promise that the strongbox shall always be full of money. The story was expanded even further in later works. Note, in passing, the precise detail in each of these stories.
But probably the classic biography of St Francis Xavier was issued in 1682, one hundred and thirty years after the saint's death, by Father Dominic Bouhours. Not only did all the old miracles reappear in this work, but they were enormously multiplied and many new ones added. 'Miracles small and few in Tursellinus became great and many in Bouhours,' is the apt comment from Andrew Dickson White.
In the first work Xavier saves one person from drowning, in the second it is three people; in the first Xavier raises four persons from the dead (which figure, note, was already an advance on earlier accounts), in the second, the figure has jumped to no less than fourteen; in the first book, Xavier is transfigured twice, in the second five times, and so the list continues. Now it must be remembered that Bouhours was writing ninety years after Tursellinus and could not have had access to new sources. Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years and all those upon whom the miracles were worked were dead, as were their children and grandchildren.
But surely, one might ask, aren't some of these related in Xavier's own writings or in those of his contemporaries? But no, amazingly, not one word of miracle enters these accounts. Xavier himself makes no claim whatever to being a miracle-worker. The nearest we come to anything remotely like miracle is the mention by Xavier, on three occasions, of providential experiences, where he thought he saw the hand of GOD at work.
These were comments such as any missionary, Catholic or Protestant, might make in letters to the folks at home. One example: While travelling with an ambassador to Europe, a servant got into deep water and was in danger of being drowned. Earnest prayers were made by the ambassador and the man finally struggled from the stream. This is Xavier's own account. But the biographers were not content. Like over-enthusiastic tabloid editors, they ran the story with Xavier praying, not the ambassador, and informed the world that the saint had lifted horse and rider out of the stream by a supernatural act.
And lastly, shortly before his death stories began to circulate in which he was said to have brought about resurrections from the dead. At first it was affirmed that 'some people from Cape Comorin' said he had raised one person; then it was said there were two people; in time it became four. Finally, as we have seen, it swelled in number to fourteen! Not just fourteen 'people' but all given names, with locations and circumstances detailed! And, to cap all this off, there was even a story noised abroad to explain why the saint had not referred to his miracles in his own writings.
Religion, I believe, evolved in a not dissimilar manner to the legends surrounding Xavier and the various groups of humans evolved from the rudimentary impulse their own particular religions as they spread and conquered the earth.
Going back through time, a study of the development of Islam, for example, clearly shows how many of its tenets were derived or evolved from earlier religions, especially the Coptic Christian Church but also from the Hebrews. And Christianity, notwithstanding its strong links to the Jewish faith, draws on Greek and other elements. And both Christianity and Islam show influences from Zoroastrianism.
Like a spreading infection ever widening in its reach the primitive religious sentiment has expanded and developed into complex doctrinal systems. Mankind, at least the greater part of it, has successfully enslaved itself by its own creation! Each parasitic growth of religion reflects, as in a mirror, the society to which it attaches itself. It is now harsh, now gentle, now demanding, now sustaining, cruel or kind, as needs be according to time and place.
Self-destructive behaviour seems to be a common characteristic seen in human beings and religion is surely a self-destructive activity; for religion certainly destroys the selfhood of humanity. (It is, after all, claimed by his followers that Jesus of Nazareth demanded of his disciples that they should renounce self and follow him.).
We may well criticise Karl Marx for some of his economics but when he described religion, in effect, as the opiate of the people (the actual quote is: 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.') he was not far short of the mark.
Religion is a drug to which men and women continually return in times of stress and anxiety, as in wartime, famine and flood. Soldiers often show a willingness to turn to GOD on the battlefield and many a human, confronted with the prospect of death, is constrained to call upon the name of the Lord in his or her extremity, and FEAR. And it is a well-known habit of criminals to 'get religion' while in jail. (It looks good, too, when he or she enters the courtroom clutching a Bible.) But there's always a price to pay for the comfort afforded by faith.
