TIMELINE: Man's Conception of God

TIMELINE: Man's Conception of God

According to Reza Aslan, the origin of the religious impulse is “the result of something [very] primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are... embodied souls.” Aslan thus rejects the idea by philosophers and psychologists (Edward Burnett Tylor, Max Müller, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Carl G. Jung) that religion is a product of evolution or, say, natural selection due to its inherent benefits (in fact, religion is a constant source of division and war, he points out), and the idea (propounded by Justin Barrett) that religion is merely a "neurological phenomenon" -- a result of the kind of nervous system we have developed. 

To sum up in broad strokes, these are what Aslan observes to be the major developments in the history of how we humans perceive God:

- Belief in the soul

- Worship of ancestors

- Creation of spirits

- Formation of gods and pantheons

- Construction of temples and shrines

- Establishment of myths and rituals

- Monotheism (the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and most especially, Islam)

- Ditheism

- Trinitarianism (Christianity and Catholicism)

- Pantheism

 

Let me summarize one reviewer's (Randy Rosenthal) attempt at summarizing these developments in some detail:

- 176 thousand years ago - Neanderthal caves with circular stone altars 

- Around 40 thousand years ago - mythogramic caves in which our earliest ancestors made paintings that can be considered scripture. They initially painted mysterious dots, followed by palm prints, animals, 

- Around 18000 BCE - the first depiction of a god — The Lord of Beasts

- At the end of the last Ice Age, between 14 thousand and 12 thousand years ago  - “the Temple of Eden,” Göbekli Tepe was built, a temple complex on a hilltop near Urfa, in modern Turkey (at least six thousand years before Stonehenge, and seven thousand before the first Egyptian pyramid)

- Devotional sites such as the Göbekli Tepe predate the development of agriculture and the birth of civilization, indicating that the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era was due to the birth of organized religion instead of being due to agriculture.

- Around 8000 BCE - emergence of manism, the ancestor worship  

- Birth of polytheism in Mesopotamian Sumer. 

- Around 4500 BCE - The invention of writing seems to have occurred in Sumerian city of Uruk , and by 2600 BCE humans could write down what gods were like for the first time; the gods (ilu) the Sumerians described were quite human-like

- The Mesopotamians eventually worshipped a pantheon of more than three thousand deities, with idols for each. 

- Similar developments occurred in Egypt, India, and Greece, where gods were always described in human terms. They fought over petty jealousies, had family problems, displayed good and bad moods, and “could be all-knowing or just plain stupid.”

- Some of these religious systems can be described as monolatry, the worship of one god with acknowledgment that many other gods exist. 

- Yet the dominant form of spiritual expression under ancient monarchies was henotheism, the belief that “one all-powerful, all-encompassing ‘High God’ who acted as the chief deity over a pantheon of lower gods who were equally worthy of worship.” 

- Around 1353 BCE - Monotheism, “the sole worship of one god and the negation of all other gods,” for the first time occurred Egypt, when Akhenaten raised the sun god Aten to the status of sole god. To enforce his monotheistic religion, Akhenaten released “nothing short of a pogrom against the gods of Egypt,” with armies marching from city to city, smashing the idols of other gods, and even erasing their names from documents. Yet when Akhenaten died, his monotheistic movement died with him. 

- Sometime between 1500 and 500 BCE (Aslan settles on 1100 BCE) - an Iranian priest named Zarathustra Spitama became the world’s first prophet when he received revelations from Ahura Mazda, a term that means “the Wise Lord,” but refers to a god with no name, since he was the sole god of the universe. Zarathustra was the first to promote a dualistic, heaven-and-hell theology, and to reduce other divinities to “angels” and “demons.” Yet the monotheism of Zoroastrianism was short lived. It was revived in the sixth century BCE, but... 

- 6th century BCE - the magi of Cyrus the Great transformed the one god into two — one good and one evil.

- around 1200 BCE - The Israelites had arrived on the scene, and the early Hebrews incorrigibly worshipped other gods, such as Baal and the goddesses Asherah, Anat, and Astarte. These are clan members of El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, who “was often depicted as a bull or calf.” 

- The Bible uses several names to refer to God, the main two being Elohim, which, despite being a plural form, is usually translated simply as “God,” and YHWH, which is traditionally read as Adonai and translated as “LORD.” In Genesis 4:1, Eve says she has “gained a male child with the help of YHWH,” [1] implying that the name was known from the beginning. But officially, Yahweh first revealed his name to Moses in Exodus 3:15, claiming he was the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom he was known as El Shadday. Most believers understand these different names refer to the same god. There are two possible places in the Bible, however, where it appears Yahweh is not only distinct from Elohim, but also inferior to him: Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32:7-9. 

- Biblical patriarchs [Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob] did not worship a Midianite desert deity called Yahweh. They worshipped an altogether different god — a Canaanite deity they knew as El.”  (plural: Elohim)

- The story of how monotheism — after centuries of failure and rejection — finally and permanently took root in human spirituality begins when the god of Abraham, El, and the god of Moses, Yahweh, gradually merged to become the sole, singular deity that we now know as God.

- True monotheism (monotheism as we know it) only solidified during the Babylonian Exile. Perhaps surprisingly, the first expression of unambiguous monotheism in the Bible occurs in Isaiah 44:6, from the second part of the Book of Isaiah, otherwise known as Deutero-Isaiah, which was composed after the fall of Jerusalem, in 587 BCE. Here Yahweh declares, “I am the first and the last; besides me there are no gods.” It’s not that he is greatest among gods, but there are no other gods. Finally, after thousands of years and two misfires, we have true monotheism. 

- But about five hundred years later, this extraordinary development in the history of religion was “overturned […] by an upstart sect of apocalyptic Jews calling themselves Christians.” 

- With the idea of Jesus being God made flesh, early Christians had to account for some pretty tricky theology. How can God be both Jesus and God? Moreover, how can Yahweh — the jealous deity who gleefully calls for the slaughter of anyone who fails to worship him — be the same God of love and forgiveness who Jesus calls Father? 

- Around the time the Gospel of John was being written, 100 CE, Marcion proposed a two-god theory known as ditheism. There must be two gods: the cruel creator God of the Hebrew Bible known as Yahweh, and the loving, merciful God who has always existed but revealed himself to the world for the first time in the form of Jesus the Christ. 

- Ditheism was eventually rejected in favor of Trinitarianism, and God became Three. Tertullian coined the word Trinity, and the Fathers of the Church clarified the matter: God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of which existed at the beginning of time and share the same measure of divinity. 

- In seventh century Arabia, a 40-year-old shepherd turned merchant turned prophet named Muhammad received revelations from a god he called Allah, the only ancient Arabian god who seems to have never been represented by an idol. Muhammad identified this god with Yahweh and Elohim, saying it was really Allah all along. He devoted the rest of his life to replacing Zoroastrian dualism and Christian trinitarianism with the “Jewish view of God as One,” thereby making Islam the culmination of monotheism. 

- The rise of the Sufis and their pantheistic conception of God: interpenetrating the universe, God is all, and all is God. 

- Conclusion: since we project our humanity onto God, we are God. Each one of us.