https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...ea-of-gods
KEY POINTS: Spirituality may be a specific processing capability that developed following a change in the brain's wiring. This may have happened about 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens demonstrated changes in burial practice. Changes in specific brain regions may have evolved to encourage altruistic behaviors that benefit others... (
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Nobody knows. There are atheist assumptions built into the question though. Did the human mind invent the idea of gods or did existing gods reveal themselves to us?
I'll go with the idea that humans invented gods, though probably not knowingly or intentionally. But my guess is that gods have always been there, for as long as we have had social instincts and conceptual cognition. That means long before the rise of anatomically modern humans. Homo erectus probably had gods.
My idea is that humans come 'hard-wired' we might say, to interact with others of our kind. Our language ability is most obvious, but think also of our ability to 'mind-read' others and attribute mental states to them that render their actions meaningful and purposeful.
We do this effortlessly and we enjoy doing it. Teenagers love to hang out with their friends, interacting linguistically and psychologically. Those are both exceedingly complex data processing tasks that are still poorly understood by linguists and psychologists. Compare that with learning algebra, which most teens find very difficult, despite it being a vastly simpler task. (There's a theory about autism trapped in there trying to get out.)
OK, we find interacting with others of our kind much easier than dealing with abstractions. The former probably arose much earlier in evolutionary terms. (Dogs are social, but poor at abstractions.)
All this suggests that when confronted with things that might call for an abstract scientific explanation, a loud thundering lightning storm perhaps, early humans might have found it easiest to think in terms of passions and purposes. What they felt that they saw was the anger of a super-human personality, perhaps.
Why does something (anything) happen? Because whatever personality is animating it wanted it to happen, for reasons of its own. And animism is born, out of something very much like personalistic pareidolia.
Quote:Did the human mind invent the idea of gods or did existing gods reveal themselves to us?
Precisely. Not to go all "Chariot of the Gods" or anything, I believe prehistoric humans DID have encounters with the anomalous, the supernatural, the transcendent, whatever you want to call it. If it's goin on today then it surely must've been goin on back then. The belief in spirits is estimated to have originated about 40,000 yrs ago as well, and burial practices testify to this. It's as old if not older than any religion, and is found in every ancient culture in our history on our planet. The idea of spirits needing to be appeased or warded off would naturally evolve in time as civilization developed into monarchies with rulers who were originally equated with gods. If there's a world of spirits then there must be kings or queens of such beings, entailing the idea of gods and goddesses. That there would already be a brain circuit in place for such experiences implies that humans had long had an experience of "mana" or the uncanny for millions of years before. We all know animals have a keen sense for unseen presences. Horses for example are especially skittish. Perhaps that's what evolved into the god circuit---a cognitive extrapolation from the primal more instinctual sensitivity to spirits.