The individual who has a religious experience passes through several stages in which the enigmatic presence that she or he at first recognizes, in an emotional and intuitive way, becomes a subject for speculation, a mystery to investigate, a knot of significance to unravel.
In some cases, the presence will be recognized as a powerful insight, or the realization of a momentous truth, interior to the mind of the individual but experienced by virtue of his or her mind being uplifted or expanded beyond the normal bounds of human physicality. A person for whom the presence remains interior and abstract may go on to become a philosopher or a prophet or a spiritual teacher, if moved sufficiently by the nature of his or her revelation. Yet she or he may not necessarily impute a divine origin to the wisdom gained.
But in many other cases, the presence will eventually come to be regarded as a mind that can be engaged in some form of communication. In these cases we find the origin of beliefs in numinous or divine entities, the gods and similar spiritual creatures of religions and of mythological tales.
In this latter course, the first step is the ascription of mindfulness to the presence that initiates the experience, whether it is a powerful force that inspires awe and reverence, or the “oceanic” feeling of unity with the world that brings peace. The presence is felt mostly via sensory modalities and somewhat through internal reflection, in the beginning. At some point the individual comes to believe that this presence is another mind, although it may, in many cases, appear vast and incomprehensible. Perhaps it is a discrete entity, a wholly separate mind, or perhaps it is a “higher mind” that one's own consciousness is somehow a part of, but in either case the process of trying to retain and make sense of the experience uses this perception of a mindful presence to recruit innate capabilities whose function is to allow each of us to recognize, understand, and interact with others.
One such capability, crucial for us as social beings, is called the “theory of mind”. Theory of mind is a capability that has presumably been selected for, in evolutionary terms, to allow humans to interact socially in a more effective way, since it lets one person infer what another person may be feeling or thinking in the present, as well as what another person might feel or how they might react if some future state came to pass. Even infants show some evidence of being able to apply this, and a case can be made for its presence in some non-human animals (humans often attempt to infer the mental state of animals as well).
Theory of mind is not an intellectual exercise, however. It is strongly concerned with utility. Of necessity it involves empathy, but rarely in a purely selfless way. The small child wants to know what a playmate or family member is thinking and feeling, and what sort of behavior that person might manifest in various future scenarios, in order to avoid harm and gain benefit. The adult has similar motives with respect to other adults that might directly or indirectly present a threat or, conversely, help provide a desired resource. So the utility aspect of theory of mind would indicate it conveys a social advantage with some survival benefit.
Attempting to apply it to the divine or to any lesser but still numinous presence is problematic, however. With one's parent or sibling or pet dog, one can recall previous behaviors and process cues as to what the other one may be feeling almost instantaneously. Encounters with the divine are relatively uncommon and often ambiguous, even for the most devout believers, so the evidence from which one draws inferences is at best sparse and difficult to interpret. Perhaps the only types of encounters which come with a built-in hook for interpretation are perceived contacts with spirits of the dead, ancestors or other deceased family or community members who are known to the person having the experience. Even here, with many such experiences occurring in “altered states” of mind, the intent of the perceived spirit may be unclear—as it is far more likely to be in an encounter with a force of nature or any other type of non-human entity.
In the face of this problem, some individuals will be content (or resigned) to accept the basic unknowability of the divine mind, while others will begin to construct a mental concept of the sort of “person” they believe they have encountered in an experience of the sacred or the spiritual. For the latter group, the most common strategy is to take the attributes and character of the “person” in large part from the immediate context of the original experience. To the extent that their culture or social group has an existing set of contexts that can be applied, individuals also bring these to the effort. To a great extent the theory of mind has to work with this imaginary person as a stand-in for the mindful presence that was first perceived.
To many people, this sounds like an overly polite description of the following scenario: a primitive or unsophisticated person experiences a startling natural phenomenon or has a strange indescribable feeling, and, by too imaginatively anthropomorphizing that impersonal thing/feeling into a human-like entity or causative agent, arrives at a so-called god with all the petty motives and foibles of a human being, and ever afterwards seeks to propitiate or gain favor from this imaginary supernatural human, usually by coming up with rules and restrictions on behavior that enforce conformity and social order among fellow adherents.
The development of cults and religions too often ends in beliefs and practices that make this scenario depressingly plausible. But there are problems with taking it as the universal explanation.
First, people have startling experiences and strange feelings without necessarily imputing a religious origin to them. The “idiot theory” of religion would lead one to believe that there is some regrettable evolutionary advantage to religious belief that predisposes humans to invent it out of whatever flimsy evidence is at hand. But people are remarkably adept at putting aside or suspending judgment on all sorts of odd and disturbing experiences, particularly those that have no context suggesting a practical use or a culturally appropriate response. In modern and somewhat secular societies, for instance, many people will say that they have had experiences of “extra-sensory perception” or “psychic phenomena”, but most will dismiss the experiences without much thought, since there is no accepted social context into which these experiences can be integrated, and no practical use to which they can be put. Rarely do they effect a significant change in a person's existing religiosity.
Second, while there are exceptions, humans (including children) generally can indulge in imagination and fantasy but remain aware that they are doing just that, and that the faces in the clouds and the shadowy figure in the dark corner are not real. It is true that some individuals are born actors/performers and will carry on the game of make-believe when everyone else has tired of it, but in small societies of the type almost universal in human prehistory the character of such individuals is well known. There are particular experiences that give rise to religious feelings and they are highly meaningful and (despite occurring with some consistency throughout human history) relatively unusual, not generic excuses that natural selection can seize upon to “make people behave” or “increase clan loyalty and social stability” or whatever other advantageous outcome one can dream up. One could argue that any speculation about or ascription of characteristics to a new or otherwise mysterious entity involves fantasizing, but that is fantasizing in the sense of developing provisional knowledge or explanations, the “fictive response”—so common that it hardly seems to have any special applicability to the development of religion.
Third, we need to consider the extent to which anthropomorphizing overlaps with theory of mind. Anthropomorphizing requires a fairly developed idea of what “human” means and what separates humans from other animals, both of which at least in part depend on socially constructed definitions. To apply theory of mind, we merely need to perceive the presence of a mindful entity, which would include human and non-human minds having some resemblance to our own. The recognition of mindfulness is more basic and crosses cultures both primitive and advanced (although it may also be deficient in some individuals, with troubling social consequences).
If we look at a number of early religious practices, among hunter-gatherers or in civilizations in Egypt, India and the Americas, gods often have forms that are part animal and part human, or wholly animal forms, or forms that are purely phenomenal such as mountain peaks or rainbows; priests and shamans may equally disguise their own forms with costumes incorporating plants or animal hides. The cultural construction of humanity here has not defined the human category as wholly separate and distinct from other mindful entities (such as animals) or even from ambiguous natural phenomena. Indeed, in the small societies of prehistory, the neighboring tribe of humans may be considered as a type of animal by comparison with the “real” humans of one's own community— and one can still find many instances of this attitude in the “groupthink” of contemporary warmongers, demagogues and bigots.
As in the story of the blind men and the elephant, people try to incorporate elements of their experience in creating a mental picture of what an entity looks like, in the case of religious experiences by using the attributes of one or more other entities that they already recognize as mindful and which have some association with what has been experienced. And, despite the affection (or, sometimes, animosity) that causes them to do so, people also anthropomorphize animals, plants and inanimate objects—without seriously believing that they actually are human or equivalent to humans. One can see the act of anthropomorphizing as modifying the divine image and narratives about the divine, as it obviously does to a great extent in most extant religious traditions, but not as a universal critical factor in the very earliest stages of religious belief.
Fourth, when we consider the role of natural selection in religiosity, in other words, in the genetic propensity to have religious experiences, we need to consider what benefit it has for the individual's propagation of his or her genes. There is a different type of natural selection, which one might characterize as memetic rather than genetic, that applies to religions as cultural products. The beliefs and practices developed by a person who has had a religious experience can have a high degree of variability, producing a solitary “religion” that lives and dies with the individual, or spawning a mass social movement that draws in billions of believers over thousands of years. Within the memetic context of religions, we can see some basis for the “Just So Stories” that are invented to explain why humans have religious experiences, but what they are really explaining is why some religions, once developed by an individual or small group, expand and propagate throughout societies and across historical eras. In general, we can say that religions most often survive and propagate when they provide some cultural and psychological space for the believer to explore his or her religious impulses and existential concerns, while at the same time adapting themselves to the political and economic imperatives of each society's ruling elite. As J. M. Robertson says, “It is civilization that determines the tone of religion and not the other way.” For “civilization” we could just as well say “cultural context”.
We can see currently that many religions support the existing social order and promote obedience to established law and living peaceably with one's neighbors—the various rules and commandments to this effect are numerous and overlap considerably across most extant major religions. On the other hand, some religions, or dissenting sects within the established religions of the first type, critique the social order and try to reform or even overthrow it in favor of a more utopian model. In neither case is being a committed follower of the religion necessarily to the benefit of an individual's survival and ability to produce offspring. A religion promoting conformity and internal order may provide a stable society living in peace, but in may also support or even encourage the rulers of the society to expend their human capital on external wars of conquest without fear of dissent. A more radical religion may promote a community of fervent believers, but it can also shed copious quantities of blood in terrorism or civil war. In any case, the particulars of a religion are heavily modified by the particulars of the society in which it grows, while the genetic propensity for religious experience, if we agree that such a thing exists, precedes any particular religion and precedes all religions now extant. In electrical brain stimulation experiments, scientists are able to elicit experiences in their test subjects that closely resemble components of the religious experience, so it seems reasonable that some heritable traits are involved, but the best one can say at this point is that there is no obvious survival disadvantage incurred by those with religious impulses and sentiments. Yet there is no compelling explanation for the initial occurrence of the propensity for religious experience in human beings. The evolutionary history that has given rise to this propensity goes back well over one hundred thousand years, and even looking at modern day hunter-gatherers and isolated tribes scarcely touches upon the possible social arrangements and exigencies of life that humans could have experienced in that extended period of time, so explanations based on particular forms of society familiar to us are likely to be superficial and unconvincing.
In the case of present-day religions, which are almost all based on written doctrines and narratives (almost to the point of elevating scriptures above gods), the defining characteristics of these religions are based on an invention (writing) which came relatively late in the course of human evolution. Some highly educated but not very thoughtful critics of religion seem to conflate religion in a general sense with scripture-based religions in their most bloodthirsty manifestations, but there is much more variety to religion than this, and one can find utopian secular movements with their own “scriptures” (Communism being the foremost example) that have shed just as much blood. Callousness, cruelty and bloodthirstiness can be found in much of humanity, religious and irreligious alike: seemingly inborn and compulsive in some individuals, learned or recruited in many others, and shunned by a rare few. In small groups these traits are expressed in outbreaks of gang fighting, murderous tribal raiding, bullying, abuse, and scapegoating. In large hierarchical societies where the ruling class has become entrenched and insulated from the concerns of the masses, cruelty becomes institutionalized in external wars, internal suppression of dissent via police state tactics, long imprisonments, spectacles of ritualized public violence, and the constant threat of social ostracism and economic ruin. Clearly there have been religious institutions and leaders that have enthusiastically justified and promoted the practice of violence against humans and other living creatures, but there have also been others condemning violence and promoting pacifism. As stated before, cultural context plays a major role in shaping and modifying the expression of a basic impulse whose origins predate written history.
The critics mentioned just above are fond of labeling religion a threat to the overall survival of humanity. Yet most of the widely recognized existential threats that humanity faces (nuclear war, global climate degradation, poisoning of the environment in general and our food and water supplies in particular, and overuse of—and extreme dependence on—finite energy resources) are the result of science and technology being used to achieve and then try to sustain population overshoot—the type of “boom” which in nature is sure to be followed by a “bust”. It's our cleverness and motivation to avoid a materialistic (not spiritual) “day of reckoning” that makes the reckoning we face so threatening to our continued survival.
If anything, the current scriptural religions can be seen as a sharp reaction to the shock of being able to externalize human memory functions and the fictive impulse into texts—texts that can become the “voice” of authority long after the original “speaker” is dead; texts that can be reinterpreted via annotation or translation, texts that can be tampered with as needed to reinforce their authority and enhance their prestige. And control over the canon of texts becomes imperative for authoritarian forces. The oral transmission of stories and knowledge was never subject to centralized control on such a scale. A second shock followed the initial one with the invention of the printing press, allowing mass production of texts. So these religions are in a sense products of technology as much as expressions of religiosity. The technologies of radio and television added another somewhat less dramatic twist to the story, with the “radio priests” and televangelists having their time in the spotlight. With our current explosion of Internet media and “cloud” technology for offloading our memories and life histories, it may be only a matter of time before new religions or variants of the existing ones are created to take advantage of this technology, perhaps “cloud-based” religions rather than scripture-based religions. That is, assuming that we and our current technological environment can survive the various existential threats mentioned above.
Religion is a source of power, in that it energizes believers to undertake a variety of human activities, ranging from those quieter and more private (like contemplation, prayer, or meditation) to those that are more contentious and public (proselytizing, conducting rituals, or helping less fortunate members of the community). Some religions foster one style more than others do, and for the religions which promote public action, there is a risk of the religion's power being parasitized or corrupted by self-serving forces both within the formal body of believers and outside it in the surrounding society. The problem is not unique to religious institutions—any institution or collective entity empowered by masses of people can face the same issue, whether it be corrupt governments, crooked police departments, dishonest charities, deceptive mass media, fraudulent scientists, or cheating financial organizations. People with criminal intent and people with an authoritarian mindset are often on the lookout for institutions in society where power is concentrated, so they can hijack that power for their own ends, which are often antithetical to the purposes of the institutions or collectives that are targeted. This is one of the dangers which the founders of the United States recognized and tried to mitigate by diffusing power among three branches of government (unfortunately this proved insufficient as the nation grew in size and in military and economic power). In the worst cases this corruption becomes, like certain viruses in the body, an integral part of the institution and its professed beliefs. As in many other areas of society, initial advantages in power, wealth or privileged information tend to concentrate even more in the hands of the advantaged, unless actively resisted by the broader society. And resistance is most likely to be opposed by those of an authoritarian bent. There were certainly powerful bishops in the early Christian church, but there was no pope until the bishop of Rome became powerful enough to claim that title for himself (and retroactively apply it to his predecessors); consequences included the Medici and Borgia popes. Communism was supposedly a revolution of the proletariat for equality and fairness, but in short order became a cult of personality surrounding autocrats like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Numerous communes founded with noble intentions were later destroyed or turned into authoritarian cults by power-hungry leaders. In religious organizations, the process of corruption usually involves a small cadre of insiders making themselves the “voice of God”. Their human words and teachings are made canonical.
This process may not even require consciously evil intent on the part of those who put their own words in God's mouth—merely a belief in the superiority of their own ideas and interpretations and a desire to have the last word in arguments about doctrine. The Old Testament God who said “I am who I am” and adjures the Israelites to “have no other gods before me” makes no claim to being the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent single God who is the logical perfection of every attribute. The latter claim was made by Christian philosophers and church fathers steeped in Greek rhetoric, and has become accepted by most heterodox Christians. Is God infinite? Of course, because infinitude is greater and better than finitude. Is God omnipotent? Yes, because having infinite power is greater and better than having finite power. These answers all presume a system of values that dictate the judgment being made, but they are human value judgments based on human values—not even necessarily universal human values. After all, would you really want yourself to be present everywhere, know everything that happens (and has happened and will happen), and want infinite power that allows you to do a number of logically contradictory things without any issues? Even worse, if the logical perfection of every quality applies, would God be all suffering or all numb to suffering? The first would be nightmarish and the second terrifying. The God who speaks to Moses is almost explicitly one of many gods, a tribal deity who is the special patron of the Israelites and one whose concerns center on the human behaviors of the Israelites. Although the commandments given to Moses by this God say not to murder and not to steal, these refer to an Israelite tribal context, since this God encourages the Israelites to destroy other tribes, murder the men and boys and enslave the women and girls, and the smoke of this destruction is said to be pleasing to this God. So it's clear that later theologians have not only put words in God's mouth, but they've changed the most basic facts of his existence in their doctrines. Although Buddha makes no claims to divinity, a similar process of constant reinterpretation and refinement of his story and his supposed sayings has produced different Buddhas who do and don't partake of divinity in some way, and who exist in a purely secular or highly magical context depending on the strand of Buddhism one follows.
In many religions, the divine mind is described as being uniquely concerned with humans. As mentioned, the particular humans may not be everyone either, as in the way the commandments against murder and theft are really only important within the Israelite tribe. Restricting the boundaries of what humanity is to one's own tribe or any similar subgroup is often the pretext for bigotry and various atrocities, up to and including genocide, which becomes easier when you characterize the outsiders as savages, vermin, insects, diseased animals, etc. While we cannot know if there is an infinite God (John Stuart Mill argued quite persuasively for a finite one), we do believe based on the latest science that the universe is finite. But finite in the sense of still almost unimaginably large—as many as a trillion galaxies in a recent survey. The question is, why would a God who was able to create this immense universe be uniquely concerned with human behavior, even using the most expansive definition of humanity? If one tries to say that God's special concern may apply to all conscious and sentient creatures, are we not back in the territory of shifting the boundaries to be congruent with our concerns? Should we look for evidence of divine commandments for bonobos and dolphins? What about elephants and ravens? And who knows what creatures might fit our expanded definitions if we could see the lifeforms on the hundreds of billions of other worlds that probably host life.
The task of the the theologian is therefore fraught with almost unsupportable difficulties. To know the divine mind, absorb whatever wisdom one can take from it, and try to further characterize it, becomes virtually impossible with a universal God. But this proves a limit on the value of theology rather than a limit on the value of the divine as experienced by believers. With a tribal patron god, one can say much about the god's values and what it requires of its flock, because those things will generally align with the social good of the tribe (although not necessarily with the good of any other living creature). With the God of a trillion galaxies, whatever one says is likely to be self-evidently absurd. In both cases one is likely to be forcing the deity to speak with a human voice— often the voice of the interpreter, unsurprisingly—and so the interpreter must be subject to judgment for his or her words, for their wisdom or the lack thereof.