Posted by Penny_Louise on Mon 18 May 09, 4:21 PM to Penny_Louise's blog.
In the beginning, sentience was created.
Arguably, before there was sentience, there was nothing, because experience is everything. When did you last see a cow watching a sunset?
I've explored the concept that sentience arose in early human species with the ability to manipulate our own mental images, to understand them through language, to tell and to listen to stories.
I suppose the inevitable next stage was belief. If someone can tell a story, and someone else can listen to it, visualise and virtually experience it, can that person be made to think that the experience they have been 'fed' is real? That the place, person or situation being described does exist, when in fact, they have no evidence gained through their own experience that this is really so?
The answer, of course, is that someone will be ready to believe what they are told, if that story is credible. The issue, then, becomes one of credibility. Not 'Can this be true?', but 'Is the person telling me this telling me the truth?' A small step from there to then simply accepting what a trusted person tells you. 'It is true because this person wouldn't tell me a lie'. 'Everything this person tells me will be true'.
So a story may be incredible, but is lent credibility by the story-teller. And therein lies the foundation of belief systems. Human beings are capable of accepting, as truth, something which defies their common senses, something that doesn't fit into their own experienced understanding of reality, because they are more ready to accept someone else's story than their own. If that someone else is a respected person.
This is the basis of legend, of course, and legend is the means by which knowledge is passed through generations, and is the key to complex beings living in complex societies and adapting to environments in a way that no simple beings ever could. The legend of the wind that comes every hundred years, the tidal wave that comes every two hundred years, the ferocious animals or tribes that have to be guarded against, that have never been seen by many of the people in that society. The legend of the last tree cut down, the despoiled earth, the famine. The legend of the moon rituals, the worship of the seasons, the sun and the stars.
Worship? Who said worship?
Because, of course, for legend to work, it has to be unquestioned. Someone who has never seen a tidal wave has to still go to a lot of trouble to not build or farm below a ridiculously high tide line. Someone who has never experienced a volcanic eruption has to still not build below a volcano, someone who has never experienced famine still has to store far more food than they have ever needed to store, with seed too. This wouldn't be done if the legend was questioned, and the early humans who did a lot of questioning would not survive when catastrophe hit. The last of our genetic evolution was used on breeding in a tendency to believe what we are told by trusted figures.
Our primary trusted figures are our parents, of course. But their influence is not long lasting: teenagers kick over the traces, and with them, any knowledge their parents gave them as yet not ratified by their own experience. Parents can start the process, but they have to hand over the holding of knowledge to others who can retain respect.
In early societies, this could have been village elders. I guess their power is fragile, though, in an aggressively evolving society: their strength is that misfortunes they tell of come to pass, which is a lose-lose situation. Either the elders are proved right, and the village gets flattened by an earthquake, or they are not proved right and lose their credibility.
An authority less easy to question and less easy to disprove was needed, and clearly, religion fits this bill. There's no feedback mechanism, it cannot be disproved. The penalties for disbelieving are huge: life in hell (but this itself, a penalty requiring belief in the first place, shows the predilection we do have for belief). The reward for believing is huge, too, life ever-after in heaven.
It's backed up by a phenomena if the human brain: in a near-death experience, when the cortex of the brain becomes oxygen starved, we experience pleasant memories, simply by the electro-chemical process of oxygen deficiency, hypoxia. These memories are often going to be loved ones who have died, and 'nice' places we know. Those surviving hypoxia are apt to come back telling of meetings in a wonderful place with long-lost dear relatives, and the circumstances of their 'return' is going to be hailed as a miracle anyway, as they will have appeared to die and come back to life.
The tale then gets told of a heavenly place where good people go after death. Add in an image of a beneficent god who looks after these folks, and expectation will be created to place 'god' in 'heaven'. And of course, in any of those who have been conditioned in this way who then go on to have their own hypoxic accident, they will 'see' their exact own image o expectation of god in their own image of heaven, and tell all and sundry about it when they come back. Again and again, from a respected position of hero worship.
Given this trick of the brain, religion was inevitable, and possibly it was only through this trick that we, the emergent sentient species, did in fact find enough authoritative stability to encapsulate and protect knowledge and it's application.
To be continued.....
Edited Fri 5 Jun 09, 6:38 PM by Penny_Louise
