Symbols in an early age - II

The Neanderthals lived in the world, quite directly. It is unlikely that they were less intelligent than we are. On the contrary, there are some signs of elaborate culture. For instance, they buried their dead. Thay made flutes out of bone. Some seem to have had some sort of coming of age ritual where they had to wrestle a bear.

But as I said, they lived in the world directly. As Sheeve notes, when a Neanderthal saw the power of the river in the spring, they likely did not feel compelled to name the river god and go carve a talisman of it - they looked at the river and saw and felt the river god.

Human religious inclinations evolved slowly from such things. There are traces of it even when Genesis is set down. A careful read of Genesis lets you see that even those who set it down had difficulty conceiving of God as making something from nothing, which is the way we might think of it today.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.

It is as if the instruments that set down Genesis felt compelled to grant God the raw materials with which to make the world as we know it - not quite nothing, but the "formless wasteland."

It isn't hard to understand why they would conceive it that way: things that a human being causes to exist come into being by being shaped into that form from something else. People had asked the question, how did the world come to be? And their ability to think symbolically allowed them to wonder if a being or beings on a scale as different from us as we are from ants could somehow be responsible.

Over time, the Jewish people would comprehend God to be less and less an anthropomorphism as an all powerful being, and more and more another kind of being altogether. This becomes most apparent in the Book of Job, one of the most intelligent attempts to make God's inscrutability in the face of disaster seem almost reasonable.

But all of this is to say that our coming to believe in God (or gods) is not a product of our primitive mind. Spirituality in the form of awe and wonder may have germinated earlier in human history. But a refined understanding of what leads us to spirituality is the very recent development of our ability to be symbolic.

The same mental powers that permit Stephen hawking to turn over formulas in his mind that explain a time he has never visited are at work in theology. But they approach it from a different angle....

To be concluded...