God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

Over time, primitive belief systems gave rise to the religions of the modern world, while our quest to understand the divine has led us to project ourselves on to our gods, endowing them with human traits and emotions. This ‘humanized’ God is a central feature in nearly every religious tradition. Whether we believe or not, the vast majority of us see God as a divine version of ourselves.

Studies have shown that young children, no matter where they are from or how religious they may be, have a difficult time distinguishing between humans and God in terms of action or agency. When asked to imagine God, they invariably describe a human being with superhuman abilities.

If I wanted to know what God was like, all I had to do was imagine the most perfect human being.

It turns out that this compulsion to humanize the divine is hardwired in our brains, which is why it has become a central feature in almost every religious tradition the world has known. The very process through which the concept of God arose in human evolution compels us, consciously or not, to fashion God in our own image. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, interconnected, ever-evolving, and remarkably cohesive effort to make sense of the divine by giving it our emotions and our personalities, by ascribing to it our traits and our desires, by providing it with our strengths and our weaknesses, even our own bodies—in short, by making God us. What I mean to say is that, more often than not, whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves: a human being but with superhuman powers.

Beyond the myths and rituals, the temples and cathedrals, the dos and don’ts that have, for millennia, separated humanity into different and often competing camps of belief, religion is little more than a “language” made up of symbols and metaphors that allows believers to communicate, to one another and to themselves, the ineffable experience of faith. It’s just that, throughout the history of religions, there has been one symbol that has stood out as universal and supreme—one grand metaphor for God from which practically every other symbol and metaphor in nearly all the world’s religions has been derived: us; the human being.

Think about the way believers so often describe God as good or loving, cruel or jealous, forgiving or kind. These are, of course, human attributes. Yet this insistence on using human emotions to describe something that is—whatever else it is—utterly nonhuman only further demonstrates our existential need to project our humanity onto God, to bestow upon God not just all that is worthy in human nature—our capacity for boundless love, our empathy and eagerness to show compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is vile in it: our aggression and greed, our bias and bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence. There are, as one can imagine, certain consequences to this natural impulse to humanize the divine. For when we endow God with human attributes, we essentially divinize those attributes, so that everything good or bad about our religions is merely a reflection of everything that is good or bad about us. Our desires become God’s desires, but without boundaries. Our actions become God’s actions, but without consequence. We create a superhuman being endowed with human traits, but without human limitations. We fashion our religions and cultures, our societies and governments, according to our own human urges, all the while convincing ourselves that those urges are God’s. That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love a...

There will be a life to come, of that Adam and Eve are certain. Why else bother with burial? They have no practical reason to bury the dead. It is far easier to expose the bodies, to let them decay out in the open or be stripped clean by the birds. Yet they insist on interring the bodies of their friends and family, on shielding them from the ravages of nature, on according them a measure of respect. They will, for example, deliberately pose the corpse, stretching it out or curling it into fetal position, orienting it toward the east to meet the rising sun.

Adam and Eve seem to know intuitively that they are embodied souls. It is a belief so primal and innate, so deep-rooted and widespread, that it must be considered nothing less than the hallmark of the human experience.

If the soul is separate from the body, it can survive the body. And if the soul survives the body, then the visible world must teem with the souls of everyone who has ever lived and died. For Adam and Eve, these souls are perceptible; they exist in numberless forms. Disembodied, they become spirits with the power to inhabit all things—the birds, the trees, the mountains, the sun, the moon. All of these pulse with life; they are animated. A day will come when these spirits will be fully humanized, given names and mythologies, transformed into supernatural beings, and worshiped and prayed to as gods.

Adam and Eve, are primitive only with regard to their tools and technology. Their brains are as large and developed as ours. They are capable of abstract thoughts and possess the language to share those thoughts with each other. They speak like us. They think like us. They imagine and create, communicate and reason like us. They are, quite simply, us: full and complete human beings.

As far as we can tell, fundamental to Adam and Eve’s belief system is the notion that the cosmos is tiered. The earth is a middle ground layered between the dome of the sky and the shallow bowl of the underworld. The upper realms can be reached only in dreams and altered states, and usually only by a shaman—someone who acts as an intermediary between the spiritual and material worlds. But the lower realms can be accessed by anyone, simply by burrowing deep into the earth—by crawling, sometimes for a mile or more, through caves and grottos to paint, etch, and sculpt their beliefs directly upon the rock wall, which acts as a “membrane” connecting their world to the world beyond.

Most painted caves are hard to reach and unfit for human habitation. Entering them is like passing through liminal space, like crossing a threshold between the visible and supersensible worlds. Some caves show evidence of prolonged activity, and others contain a sort of anteroom where archaeological evidence suggests worshippers may have gathered to eat and sleep. But these are not dwelling places; this is sacred space, which explains why the images found inside them are often placed at great distances from the cave’s entrance, requiring a perilous journey through labyrinthine passages to view.

It is not exactly correct to call these drawings “images.” They are, like the dots and the handprints, symbols reflecting our ancient ancestors’ animistic belief that all living things are interconnected, that they all share in the same universal spirit. It is for this reason that one rarely sees the animals’ environment depicted in these caves. Often, the beasts are drawn in a kinetic blur suggesting motion. But there is no grass or trees or shrubs or streams for them to move upon; there is no “ground” at all. The animals seem to float in space, upside down, at odd, impossible angles. They are hallucinatory, devoid of context, unreal.

The drawings are often tucked between pillars or otherwise placed in a position that allows them to be viewed only from certain angles and only by a handful of people at a time, indicating that the cave—not just the images projected upon it, but the cave itself—was intended to be part of the spiritual experience. The cave becomes a mythogram; it is meant to be read, the way one reads scripture.

The Lord of Beasts is not just one of the oldest gods in religious history; it is also one of the most widely transmitted.

In the Indus Valley, the Lord of Beasts has been associated with both the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and the Hindu deity Shiva, especially in his incarnation as Pashupati, or Lord of All Animals. Enkidu, the hirsute hero in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh—one of the world’s first written myths—is a Lord of Beasts figure, as is Hermes, and sometimes Pan, the half-goat, half-man god of nature, in Greek mythology.

What most scholars agree upon is that the religious impulse reaches deep into our Paleolithic past. But just how deep remains a matter of fierce debate. The Paleolithic era is formally divided into three periods: the Lower Paleolithic Period, between 2.5 million and 200,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first appeared on the scene; the Middle Paleolithic Period, between 200,000 and 40,000 years ago, when the first examples of cave paintings can be found; and the Upper Paleolithic Period, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, when we start to see the blossoming of full-fledged religious expression, including evidence of complex ritualistic behavior.

Early humans maintained certain beliefs about the nature of the universe and their place in it long before they began etching those beliefs onto the walls of their caves. Our ancestors, Adam and Eve, were not walking around in a nihilistic fog from which they suddenly snapped like prophets racked by revelation. Rather, Adam and Eve inherited their belief system much in the way they inherited their hunting prowess or their cognitive and linguistic skills: gradually, and over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of mental and spiritual evolution.

What remains undeniable is that religious belief is so widespread that it must be considered an elemental part of the human experience. We are Homo religiosus, not in our desire for creeds or institutions, nor in our commitments to specific gods and theologies, but in our existential striving toward transcendence: toward that which lies beyond the manifest world. If the propensity for religious belief is inherent in our species, then, scholars reasoned, it must be a product of human evolution. There must be some adaptive advantage to it. Otherwise there would be no reason for religion to exist.

Imagine Adam huddled in his mammoth fur, finishing his meal by the light of a dying fire. He falls asleep and, in his dreams, he travels to another world—a world at once real and unfamiliar, a world whose edges are soft with reverie. Say he runs into a dead relative in his dream—a father or sister. How, Tylor asked, would he interpret their continued presence? Would he not simply assume that they weren’t actually dead? That they exist in another realm as tangible and true as this one? Would Adam not then conclude that the souls of the dead could exist as spirits long after the destruction of the body? And, recognizing this, would he perhaps return to the grave of his father or sister and plead with their spirits to help him with the hunt, to make it stop raining, to heal his children? This, Tylor concluded, is how religion must have begun.

It is not what Adam envisions in his sleep, Müller suggested, but rather what he sees when he is awake that fuels his religious imagination. After all, Adam lives in a vast, incomprehensible world, teeming with mysteries he cannot possibly explain. He beholds oceans without end; he walks through forests so tall they scrape the sky, so old his ancestors told stories about them; he watches the sun forever chase the moon across the vault of heaven; and he knows that he had no role in creating these things. And so he assumes someone else—something else—must have created them for him.

Mana represents the impersonal, immaterial, supernatural force that, according to Marett, “takes abode in all inanimate and animate objects.” The recognition of mana’s presence in the oceans and trees, the sun and the moon, compelled ancient humans to begin worshiping those things—or rather, the thing within those things. Eventually, the impersonal mana evolved into personal souls. Each soul, released from a body, became a spirit. Some of those spirits passed into rocks or stones or bits of bone, transforming them into totems, talismans, and idols that were actively worshiped. Other spirits became individualized gods whom people could beseech for help, each serving a particular function (a god of rain, a god of the hunt, and so on).

Some scholars have argued that through ritual practice, certain feelings can be activated that could conceivably provide a primitive “believer” with the ability to, for example, control his fears and thus be more successful than a “nonbeliever” in hunting prey. But even if it were true that possessing supernatural beliefs could lead to physical or psychological benefits that increase evolutionary fitness (and that is highly doubtful), there is no reason to presume that not having such beliefs would decrease evolutionary fitness.

Dreams are not real. Mana is not real. Spirits are not real. What are real, Durkheim maintained, are the concrete actions of a community bound together by blood and kinship and working as one to adapt and survive in a hostile environment. The origins of the religious impulse, therefore, must be grounded in social life, in the rites and rituals that help a community form a collective consciousness.

Survival is no small thing, of course, so it makes sense that such everyday objects as spears or knives could gradually come to be regarded as sacred, not because of any inherent power they possess, but because of their usefulness. For Durkheim, a thing becomes sacred solely through the ways in which an individual acts upon it.

Durkheim’s theory that religion arose as a kind of social adhesive, a means of fostering cohesion and maintaining solidarity among primitive societies, remains the most widely held explanation for the origins of the religious impulse. Evolutionarily speaking, it makes a certain amount of sense to assume that by banding together around a common set of symbols and participating in a shared ritual experience, our ancient ancestors were able to enhance their collective viability and thus increase their chances of survival in a savagely competitive world. The trouble with this line of reasoning, however, is that there is nothing intrinsically unifying or cohesive about religion. Religion certainly has the power to bring disparate people together. But it is just as efficient a dividing force as it is a uniting one. Religion engenders both inclusion and exclusion. It spawns as much conflict in society as it does cohesion. It benefits some members of a community more than—and often at the expense of—others. It delegitimizes as much as it legitimizes.

Kinship is a stronger and far more primal tool for social cohesion in our human evolution. Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in small-scale communities—an extended family sharing a shelter. Their sense of solidarity was engendered first and foremost by birth and blood, not by symbols and rituals. To argue that religion arose in human evolution because it gave “believing” communities an adaptive advantage over “nonbelieving” communities would require the existence in religion of some uniquely cohesive power that it simply does not possess. There can be no doubt that its communal properties have allowed religion to survive throughout human history. But whether those communal properties helped religiously inclined humans to survive is questionable.

Religious belief, Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion, is “born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable.” Freud believed the religious impulse arose from an innate desire in primitive man to create a “father figure,” though a perfectly good and all-powerful one. Human beings worship gods for the same reason a child idolizes his father: We need love and protection; we want comfort from our deepest and darkest fears.

More than a century before Freud, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that “the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear.” A century after Freud, the French philosopher René Girard theorized that religion arose among primitive peoples to mitigate violence by focusing that violence upon a ritual sacrifice—a “scapegoat,” as he termed it. More generally, Freud’s assumption that religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” is merely an echo of his German predecessor Karl Marx, who famously called religion “the opiate of the people,” and Ludwig Feuerbach, who defined God as “the feeling of want,” which springs forth from our hearts.

A variation of Freud’s theory holds that religion’s primary purpose in human evolution is to motivate altruistic behavior, to control primitive populations and keep them from tearing each other apart. In other words, the only thing stopping Adam from rising from his seat by the fire, stabbing his neighbor in the chest, and taking his meat from him is his belief that the spirits of his ancestors are watching him. They act as divine lawgivers compelling him to act morally or risk punishment. By promising a reward in the afterlife, religion compels him to restrain or alter his actions in some manner and so mitigates the social effects of selfishness among individuals in a group.

The gods of the ancient world were rarely conceived of as “moral”; they were above the trifling concerns of human morality. The gods of Mesopotamia and Egypt were savage and brutal; their primary interest in human beings was as slaves to their whims. The Greek gods were capricious, vain, entitled beings who toyed with humanity for sport. Yahweh is a jealous god who regularly demands the wholesale slaughter of every man, woman, and child who does not worship him alone. Allah is a martial deity who prescribes an array of draconian punishments—in this life and the next—to those who oppose him. How are these gods, who are at best beyond morality and at worst simply immoral, supposed to serve as the source of moral behavior among humans?

Despite everything we think we know, the evidence indicates that religion does not make people good or bad. It does not naturally police behavior or foster cooperation in society. It does not enhance altruism any more or less effectively than any other social mechanism. It is no more or less powerful in creating moral behavior. It does not inherently drive cooperation in society. It does not increase advantage over competing groups. It does not necessarily soothe the mind or comfort the soul. It does not automatically lessen anxiety or improve reproductive success. It does not promote survival of the fittest.

Faced with the evolutionary puzzle that is the universality of supernatural beliefs, these scientists have come up with an innovative answer. Religion, they say, is not an evolutionary adaptation; religion is the accidental byproduct of some other preexisting evolutionary adaptation.

HADD leads us to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event: a distant sound in the woods, a flash of light in the sky, a tendril of fog slithering along the ground.

Our innate willingness to attribute human agency to natural phenomena can have clear evolutionary advantages.

The cognitive science of religion begins with a simple premise: Religion is first and foremost a neurological phenomenon. The religious impulse, in other words, is ultimately a function of complex electrochemical reactions in the brain.

Theory of Mind is an executive function of the brain that is activated the moment we attain the ability to view and understand other people the way we view and understand ourselves: as separate and distinct individuals who feel the same basic feelings, who think the same kinds of thoughts, who have the same essence as we do. Theory of Mind not only obliges us to think of others in the same terms we use to think of ourselves. It encourages us to use ourselves as the primary model for how we conceive of everyone else.

What’s surprising about Theory of Mind, however, is that it also compels me to perceive nonhumans who exhibit human traits in the same way that I perceive humans.

We know that essential to Eve’s consciousness of herself is the belief that she has a soul, and that her soul is separate from her body. Her body is present and tangible; her soul is invisible and immaterial. Put aside for a moment how Eve came up with this idea. What’s important is that because Eve believes she has a soul separate from her body, Theory of Mind leads her to believe that everyone else must have one as well. But because Theory of Mind makes Eve prone to view nonhumans who exhibit human traits in the same way she views actual humans, she is just as likely to attribute a soul to certain inanimate things.

we are more likely to absorb, retain, and share an idea if that idea is slightly anomalous. If an idea violates one or two basic, intuitive assumptions about a thing, it has a far stronger chance of being recalled and transmitted.

To make Eve’s experience of the tree something her entire community can accept as its own requires her to make only a slight alteration to the tree’s nature—one that is simple, easy to comprehend, easy to transmit, and, most important, useful.

If Eve tells Adam that her tree has the ability to speak, Adam would be more likely to find the anomalous tree useful. He would be more likely to believe in it himself. He would be more likely to tell members of their community about it, and they, too, would be more likely to find it useful and worth believing in. Together Adam and Eve might construct an entire mythology around the talking tree, along with accompanying rituals that spread to their group. These myths and rituals could then spread to other communities who might also find the idea of a talking tree to be useful and who might, as a consequence, adopt and adapt the concept to their own particular cultures.

Ontological categories like “human” and “animal” carry with them certain clearly defined expectations. Simply violate one or two of those expectations in a minimally counterintuitive way (a human who communicates with animals), then make the new creation useful (a human-animal hybrid that provides us with the food we need to survive), and what you have is a belief durable enough to evolve from its origins as an ancient mental abstraction, to the Sorcerer some 18,000 years ago, to the book of Genesis some 2,500 years ago, all the way to neopagans today. In this way, a specific god is born and remains active in human culture through the millennia.

For now, we are left with the intriguing theory, suggested by the cognitive science of religion, that human beings possess certain mental processes, developed through millions of years of evolution, that can, under the right circumstances, lead us to assign agency to inanimate objects, to endow those objects with a soul or spirit, and then to successfully transmit beliefs stemming from those objects to other cultures and other generations.

As persuasive as the cognitive theory of religion may be, it fails to answer our initial question: Why does Eve think she has a soul in the first place? HADD may explain why Eve stops in her tracks when she sees the tree and why she thinks it has a face. Theory of Mind may explain why she would ascribe her own soul to the tree, giving it an animating spirit and transforming it into an object of worship that could then be passed on to her community. These cognitive processes have the ability to fortify and encourage already held belief systems. But they cannot, by themselves, create belief. For Eve to make the colossal leap from detecting agency to formulating religious belief requires that she be already predisposed to such thinking. Otherwise, she would simply assume she had encountered an interesting-looking tree and move on.

belief in the soul may be humanity’s first belief. Indeed, if the cognitive theory of religion is correct, belief in the soul is what led to belief in God. The origin of the religious impulse, in other words, is not rooted in our quest for meaning or our fear of the unknown. It is not born of our involuntary reactions to the natural world. It is not an accidental consequence of the complex workings of our brains. It is the result of something far more primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls.

The significance of a myth rests not in any truth claims it makes but in its ability to convey a particular perception of the world. The function of a myth is not to explain how things are, but why things are the way they are.

Embedded in the myth of the Garden of Eden is a collective memory of an era long ago when human beings were free from toil and struggle, when there was no need to slog day and night over the land. An era, in other words, before the rise of agriculture, when our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve were, to put it less biblically, hunter-gatherers. And that is how the ancient city of Urfa has come to be regarded in the collective memory of its inhabitants as the location of the Garden of Eden. Believers will point to the fact that, like the biblical Eden, Urfa is nestled between four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates, and that it, too, is located in what the Bible terms “the east”—that is, west of ancient Assyria. However, the main reason so many people around the world believe that this city rests upon the ruins of Eden has less to do with Urfa’s location than it does with what lies just ten miles to the northeast, atop a high mountain ridge called Göbekli Tepe, or Potbellied Hill. For buried there, just beneath a man-made mound on the very tip of the highest peak overlooking a desolate plateau, are the remains of what is widely recognized to be the earliest religious temple ever constructed—“the Temple of Eden,” as Klaus Schmidt, the chief archaeologist of the site, playfully calls it.

What makes the temple truly extraordinary, however, is that it was built at the end of the last Ice Age, between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago.

there is no evidence that anyone ever lived at the site. No homes or hearths have been unearthed anywhere near Göbekli Tepe. There is no obvious water source; the nearest freshwater stream is located many miles away. The only possible explanation for the lack of amenities is that this was a sacred place designated exclusively for the performance of religious ceremonies.