Christians
Out of context: Reply #84
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- miesvan0
Lewis- Willians...
Religion is one possible explanation, not for natural phenomena, but for highly complex experiences that the human brain generates. It does so in such a way that a whole range of further explanations (for natural events, death and so forth) becomes available. Moreover, religion makes possible powerful social and political hierarchies not based on sex or brute strength. The persistence of the neurology of the brain through time ensures that the "origin" of religion is always with us.
This explains what he means by the phrase "origin-as-process", and his reason for thinking that the stock analysis of earlier
anthropology - that religion evolves from animism through totemism to polytheism and thence monotheism - is incorrect. He has an interesting point here. Polytheism persists in both actual and disguised forms: actual in the Hindu pantheon; disguised in the "Trinity" or in any religion, including Islam and Judaism, that admits the existence of angels and demons (and, in the former at least, a populated afterlife) along with the deity.Lewis-Williams does not leave matters at the level of analysis. In a long and thoughtful concluding chapter entitled "God's Empire Strikes Back", he considers the current tensions and conflicts generated by the revived debate about religion. He concludes that there is no future in attempting reconciliation between theistic and non-theistic world-views, and that our hope must be that Darwin will be proved right eventually, that science will finally cut the taproot of religion. He ends by quoting Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne: "In reality, the only contribution that science can make to
the ideas of religion is atheism."