When Did Mankind First Begin to Believe in a Godhead?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by joepistole, Apr 26, 2016.

  1. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I think we all know the role and importance religion has played in human societies. But when did mankind first begin to believe in God? And who were the first people to believe in God? How did it happen and why? Was it a sudden epiphany? Was a burning bush or some other divine event involved? Where is the earliest evidence of a human belief in a godhead? What was or is the earliest human religion?
     
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  3. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    I would say it happened as soon as our primate forebears had the capacity able to anticipate the future and reflect on the past.

    All younglings experience their parents as god-like at first. It's not a stretch to project that superior caring/guiding/punishing reverence beyond the tribe to all of nature.
     
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  5. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Native American believe in the Great Spirit. Since the native American carry their believe before European man come to this shire , and the early native come across the Bering strait about 14000 year ago , so we can estimate 14000 ++++ years man believed in God.
     
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  7. el es Registered Senior Member

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    Not that I have a good grasp of it, but this gets into that:

    The Golden Bough

    The Roots of Religion and Folklore

    James G. Frazer
     
  8. el es Registered Senior Member

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    Sympathetic magic, crop deities, and tribal leaders as gods were some of the early widespread roots of religion.
     
  9. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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  10. Baldeee Valued Senior Member

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    Other great apes are thought to be able to anticipate the future and reflect on the past, I believe, although to what extent I don't know.
    So I think it required more than that.
    To me that seems more the cause of the formation of the anthropomorphised God, but not necessarily of God itself.

    My thoughts are that it was perhaps a couple of things: first the ability to recognise patterns of behaviour in nature that we couldn't explain, and secondly the ability to perceive and question our own mortality.
    The first of these would give rise to superstition, and the second to the idea of us having been given purpose.
    Mix them in a pot for a while, put on simmer for a few generations and soon you end up with notions of there being just one ultimate power - with lesser deities either being merely aspects of or subservient to.

    As to when this may have happened: before records began.
    We have archaeological finds that suggest worship etc from before then but we can not know for sure what they actually believed until records began.

    Unfortunately some take the antiquity of the notion of God, and the pervasive nature of the notion, to be some form of evidence of the actuality of God, rather than just evidence of the power of the concept of God.
     
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  11. Hapsburg Hellenistic polytheist Valued Senior Member

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    The earliest markers of religion are not inscriptions or pictures, but the deliberate inhumation of corpses. That goes back as far as 200,000 BCE. The earliest definitive depiction of an anthropomorphic animal figure dates to 38,000 BCE, from an Upper Palaeolithic culture. The same culture produced a woman with exaggerated breasts and belly, similar in type to the much later (but more famous) Venus of Willendorf. We do not know if these depict deities or spiritual figures, but it is possible. If so, they would be the earliest. Presumably, then, the development of belief in spiritual entities with discrete names, forms, and characters would have occurred at some point prior, implying also that there may have been a coterminous or previous development of belief in an animistic or numinous class of spirits.

    But a lot of that is simply conjecture. We have no clear evidence that these are the case. Nor is there any evidence that animism necessarily pre-dates theism. As I mentioned in your other thread about the evolution of religion, the idea that there is a linear progression from magic to totemism to animism to polytheism to monotheism to modern science, from "primitive" culture to "advanced" civilisation, is rooted in some very colonialist and chauvinistic attitudes endemic to the late 19th and early 20th centuries..
     
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    What does "God" mean? How is 'God' distinguished from gods? I'm assuming that 'God' means a Judeo-Christian-Islamic style monotheistic deity.

    My impression is that most of the earliest cultures that we have information about were polytheist. The Sumerians, the ancient Chinese, the Egyptians. Perhaps even the early Hebrews, who seem to have emphasized their group loyalty to what appears to have been their tribal patron-god Yahweh, without necessarily denying that other alien gods existed as well. They might have only gradually decided that all other gods were evil, and finally, non-existent. Even relatively late, in early Christian times certainly, there was a widespread belief in demons, derived from the Greco-Roman daemons, minor deities, who the early Christians increasingly imagined as being evil and most emphatically not things to worship. So I'm inclined to say that the history of the West shows a rather gradual adoption of monotheism.

    Then there's the 'anthropological' approach, based on evolutionary ideas and on the idea that surviving 'primitive' peoples were hold-overs from the stone age (which they certainly were in terms of their technologies). So the idea took root in the 19th century that (true or not) these cultures offered a window into the earlier stages of human life in paleolithic and early neolithic times. It seems that many/most of the world's 'indigenous' 'tribal' cultures were polytheist as well, and in many cases animist. They imagined themselves surrounded by supernatural power, which might in some cases be personalized as gods and withdrawn into the sky, but in other cases might manifest as supernatural power in seemingly mundane objects. There was great interest in the 19th century in tracing the 'evolution' of religion in a single line through various stages, from primitive to most advanced (usually identified with Christianity). Many theories proposing to do this were advanced.

    But Christianity still had a strong influence on the 19th century, and more traditional Christian academics assumed that Adam and Eve were monotheists, as were Noah and his descendants. That suggested that polytheism was a later degeneration (as they saw it) of what had been an original monotheism. The myth of Babel is often cited here. (Muslims still believe this and believe that Islam is that original monotheism, reestablished.) So there was a variety of Christian anthropologist in the 19th century that set out to document the survival of this supposed primitive monotheism among tribal peoples. African tribes feature strongly in this work, in part because Belgian Catholics scoured the Congo for evidences, and in part because many African tribes do have myths of a single high god remotely distant in the sky, with many lesser gods and ancestral spirits beneath that are the objects of day to day religosity. Of course, this single high god isn't necessarily analogous to Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism and might instead be based on the idea of the tribe of gods having its own tribal chieftain just as human tribes do. But many of the Africans did seemingly attribute initial creation (often by procreation, as with a tribal ancestor) to that highest god, so these peoples could still be forceably crammed into the anthropologists' Biblical presuppositions.

    The problem with the anthropological approach is that so much of the early work on this stuff was distorted by the presuppositions of anthropologists who were trying to acquire evidence for their own pet theories, that it's hard to know how much of their work can be taken at face value today.
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2016
  13. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Typically, God is represented as a higher power worthy of worship. There can be one or there can be many. Man's belief in a higher power (i.e. God) has changed over time. The question is why? I suspect the answer is multifaceted. There wasn't just one cause or one reason. I suspect technology played a huge role. Increased travel, trade, and socialization played a role in that foreign traditions appeared to have been copied from one religion to another.

    So this notion that God and religion are fixed and unchanging simply isn't true. Now homosexuals are openly accepted in some religions where a few years ago they were shunned and shamed. Religion is a changing, the question is, what will religion look like in a few decades or a century from now? Where is religion going? One thing is for certain, it will change. I'd like to see where Islam is a few decades from now or a century from now.
     
  14. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    I think you'd have more success trying to find when lack of belief in God occurred.

    Jan.
     
  15. Baldeee Valued Senior Member

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    In Europe and Asia it is thought to have been c2,500 or more years ago.
    Jainism is also roughly that age, if not older, and it explicitly rejects a creator God, instead considering the universe to be eternal.
    No doubt you'll argue that they merely consider different aspects of the same God:
    "Ooh, they think it's eternal; well, an aspect of God is being eternal; hence they believe in God."

    And then you have the Charvaka school (c.2,700+ years old) which is decidedly atheistic, anti-religious and materialistic.
    Unfortunately it died out c.12-15th century, I assume in the face of theistic pressures, and possibly due to the development of the sciences effectively taking over in a non-religious manner.

    But it is quite clear that for a philosophical school of materialism to be systematised in such a way, the notion and following of materialism would not have been novel at that time.

    I would think that for as long as Man has had the freedom-from-persecution to express a non-belief in God that he has done so in some form or other.
     
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  16. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed, Baldeee, as an explicit rejection of a certain belief it is simply a reaction to theism, so theism must have come before someone needed to contemplate the lack of God. Before theism it was likely not even considered.

    If I introduce a new "belief" (e.g. Janism: the belief that Jan alone holds the key to world peace and eternal happiness for Mankind) then until that belief is first uttered there would be no need to even consider the Ajanist position (weak or strong variety).
    Until the formation of Janism the human population could be said to be Ajanist, not necessarily of the weak variety but simply for not having considered the possibility, and thus not at that time believing it to be true.

    As such, prior to theism it seems reasonable to conclude that the human race was default agnostic atheist, albeit likely in an unconsidered way. This certainly seems more reasonable to me than the notion that humanity always believed, or that belief in God is somehow inherent. Pattern-recognition, perhaps, but not belief in a God.
     
  17. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Religion might change but the relationship of man with God and vice versa will not change . Religion is like a club there are moral laws but they add some other human rules to acomodate the society , like in case of homosexuals .
     
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  18. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    en.wikipedia.org
    Religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to what an anthropologist has called "an order of existence".


    Jan.
     
  19. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    How then do you explain the rise of atheism? Back in the day; when humans lived in smaller societies; when technology wasn't as advanced; I have a hunch a belief in a godhead was much more prevalent.
     
  20. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Have you ever watched a small child talk to their invisible friend? This behavior stems from their imagination in conjunction with a projection from their unconscious mind. They see, what is not physically there, because it is being projected like a movie through their mind's eye. It is not exactly a hallucination, but is done with active imagination.

    To the child, the invisible friend exists outside himself. Outside is where animal man expects everything to be. However, it is really a projection from their unconscious mind; inside. This is natural but is typically repressed as the child gets older. It is socially taboo to talk to yourself after a certain age. However, these dynamics within the psyche, remain, with the projection structured by culture as religion.

    Less you become as children, is connected to the imagination of the child; innocent acceptance of the inner voice.

    The ability of the human psyche to differentiate into the child and his invisible friend, requires two centers of conscious. Religion appears when the secondary center evolved. Animals only have a primary. The pre-humans who had human DNA, only had a primary. Modern humans have the primary of the animal, as well as the secondary; ego center.

    The secondary seems to appear around the time of civilization, and would be evident by the loss of natural animal instincts and the rise of inventions that extend nature. Civilization caused humans to stop thousands of years of hunting, gathering and migrating with animals in exchange for being fixed in location. Once the secondary appeared, the natural instincts from the primary become obscured, because the secondary begins to take over as the center of the conscious mind.

    The symbolism of Adam and Eve, who eat of the tree of knowledge, is implicit of the secondary forming. It choses learned knowledge over the natural instincts of the pre-humans. You don't have to teach the cat to hunt because this is programmed in their primary. The loss of paradise is analogous to the loss of pre-human instinct; primary support. Now the cat can't hunt properly but needs to be taught.

    With the secondary, choices become based on learned knowledge and procedures; farming, which are less efficient than nature. The result was a potential begins to build between the primary and secondary. This potential, due to loss of instinct, is what causes the projection to appear from the primary. The gods are the projection, while religion is about a return back to the primary; invisible friend or spirit guides help one find game. But one is forever separated, because you can't get rid of the secondary. In Buddhism one tries to get rid of the ego; secondary, which is all an illusion of culture.

    The analogy is the small child; secondary, will follow the advice of his parents; primary. Once the child become a teen, they begin to separate from their parents, who are still looking out for their best long term interests. But the child wants to makes their own choices, which may get then in trouble. The parents allow them to separate, but if things get bad, they intercede with the hope the child will find the higher path, again. But often the child departs again and again.

    Religion is about the Father and Mother of the psyche; primary, helping the secondary, with keys paths becoming conscious in certain people, who share with all. From this the major religions appear. The primary is about collective human nature so if one finds the way it can work for many if not all.

    In Revelations, the entire drama is a psycho-drama to help restore the connection. When it is over, God lives among his people, of the primary becomes conscious and instinct is restored; paradise.
     
  21. Hapsburg Hellenistic polytheist Valued Senior Member

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    In the modern world, it would be a direct consequence of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason. Skepticism of extraordinary claims of all types leads inexorably to a skepticism of theism. Not to say that atheism is the sole purview of rationalists, or that all rationalists are atheists; but its provenance is a consequence of reason and skepticism. This is a good thing; regardless of your (or my) personal views of religion or deity, the widespread use of reason, logic, and the scientific method is an enormous step in human progress.
     
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  22. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    I agree with with you . Our rationale can lead us to become an unbeliever if we choose to take route . and if we choose to explore nature with open mind we can believe in creation by a God
     
  23. Baldeee Valued Senior Member

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    I choose to explore nature with an open mind, and I remain an unbeliever.

    Your excluded middle is pretty clear to see, as is your apparent bias.
     

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