Abstract
The word “religion” refers to a wide range of phenomena ranging from Tibetan Buddhism to the Prosperity Gospel. As a result, religion has accrued a “bewildering variety of definitions”. This essay, rather than asking the ontological question – “What kind of thing is religion?” – looks at religion epistemologically, asking what religion enables people to know. The resulting exploration suggests that religion is part of the process by which human groups come to know and adapt to the powerful, often-mysterious forces that produce awe and terror. By looking at how societies at different levels of social complexity have responded to the crises produced by these forces, the author suggests that the habits of mind that would become science and philosophy, as well as religion, evolved as the way those societies have adapted to existential crises, especially in times of rapid, widespread change.
Highlights
How should students of Big History approach religion? It sounds like a simple question, but little about religion is simple, even defining the word, as Wilfred Cantrell Smith pointed out a half century ago
The changes in brain structure that resulted in these new emotions appear to have made a suite of characteristics that we think of as human possible, including affection, responsibility, and the need for belonging (Hayden, 1993). With this wider palette of emotions, our hominin ancestors would likely have adapted primate ritualized behavior to develop proto-rituals that would have become more sophisticated with the emergence of new species, especially Neanderthals (Hayden, 2003)
As we’ve seen, myth and ritual can serve functions ranging from the personal to the interpersonal to the societal
Summary
How should students of Big History approach religion? It sounds like a simple question, but little about religion is simple, even defining the word, as Wilfred Cantrell Smith pointed out a half century ago. Until the Reformation, Western Europeans thought of religion as an attitude, a sense of inner piety that informed behavior (Harrison, 2015) This dominant way of thinking doesn’t create serious problems for scholars who are examining Western religions today. I want to present the beginnings of an alternate model of religion avoiding this fragmentation and confusion by exploring religion as part of an evolutionary process. Creating such a model is a task I cannot hope to complete alone. With all this in mind, let’s begin with the hypothesis I intend to develop and examine as an alternative understanding of religion
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