Religion and Evolution.

Religion and Evolution. From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, is a world history of religion in its early phases, directed against a biologically founded critique of religion and against all western and scientific triumphalism. It is based on an understanding of religion as a complex of human experiences, symbols, rituals, and myths and shows how the traditions were created that still nourish us today, for example, in ancient Judaism. If we elaborate on the biological foundation of religion by giving it a larger frame work it can encompass the cosmological and biological. For the study of religion in human evolution, let us start with the Big Bang, the beginning of life. I do feel that religion is concerned with the general order of existence. It is primarily a way of acting in the world, but it also involves a concern for knowing in the world. Remember the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “all men by nature desire to know.” But in order to understand who we are today in this world, we need to know where we came from all the way back. And we are animals—we are biological creatures—and furthermore, we could not exist for a minute on this earth without a great many other biological creatures. We depend on the entire biosphere and we need a great variety of other creatures. So this is where we have come from, and we are biological creatures, so that influences our understanding of what religion is. The reality that we have something in common with the rest of the biological world has never been forgotten by human beings. A few arrogant intellectuals want to make an iron curtain between the human consciousness and every other kind of animal, but children know. Their games are full of animals. And in a great many houses, we have dogs and cats, and we treat them quite nicely usually. So instinctively we know we’re related to the rest of the animal world. We don’t remember that we’re also related to the single-celled creatures that we call bacteria; we’re very afraid of them because a few of them do us damage, but really we rely on them more than we think. The biggest danger religion is facing is that some natural scientists and their sympathizers are trying to turn the evolution story into another kind of religion. This might imply that our deepest moral insights are not going to come from other spheres.-Robert Bellah-