The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden

      Figure 2.1 – The kudu is a large member of the antelope family. It lives in southern and eastern Africa. The long horns, found only on the male, average 1.2 metres long, make two or three complete twists of a spiral and diverge slightly. The kudu’s striking appearance has made it an animal of special affection and respect amongst local human inhabitants.

      You awoke with a start and, looking up, you saw a male kudu, its noble horns spiralling upward in the moonlight, standing stock still about ten feet from you. After a pause that seemed to be an eternity, it turned and walked slowly away. You rushed back to camp and woke the chief. Soon everyone was roused, and you told them about your vision, for you were convinced that what you saw and heard was as real as the dry grass under your feet.

      There was much discussion after you recounted your dream. The chief’s first wife was alarmed. She was convinced that it was suicidal to downgrade the all-powerful Earth Goddess to inferior status, and several others chimed in in strong agreement. There was even a suggestion that you were the incarnation of an evil spirit and should be banished or worse. But the chief quieted the discussion. He pointed out that obeisance to the Earth Goddess had been of little help of late, and that the tribe was in desperate circumstances. He suggested that the group heed the instructions and conduct a three-day trial to see if rain came. He even went so far as to praise you for your efforts on the tribe’s behalf. After three days, he suggested, the group would reconvene to judge the success of the experiment. If it failed to rain as promised by the Sun God, it would be obvious that the tribe should look elsewhere for solutions to its desperate problems.

      Your pleasure at this success, and the huge increase in your status in the tribe, was tinged with a nagging fear. If rain did not result, you realized that you would be in some danger.

      In the event, it was a near-run thing. Rain did finally come, but late at night on the fourth day. Late enough for you to have experienced the righteous resentment of the chief’s wife, and to hear her suggestions for the painful manner in which you should be disposed of to satisfy the angry Earth Goddess. But, after all, the rain arrived early enough to save your skin. Indeed, the rains continued for long enough to restore the water supply and to bring back the animals. Your reputation was made, and it spread to neighbouring tribes. The chief was able to negotiate treaties of friendship and co-operation with some of these, which made it possible to devote more resources to the worship of the sun and moon, a religious exercise of which you were now the chief practitioner, assisted by medicine men and women from the other tribes, and, later, by one of your children.

      You were lucky. During your lifetime, the drought was never again as bad as it had been on that fateful day when you convinced the tribe to shift to sun and moon worship, while still paying obeisance to the Earth Goddess. Whenever the drought threatened, if prayers and sacrifices seemed to have no effect, you grew adept at finding earthly reasons for the failure. Perhaps someone in the tribe had jinxed the prayers, or perhaps the Sun God was otherwise occupied or the Moon Goddess had run off with someone else.

      Through all the years, you never lost your interest in better understanding the world about you, for, in an all too real sense, your survival depended on knowing more than others. You kept looking for new ways to convince people to take you seriously, for the task of invoking rain or of predicting events of any kind beyond the sunrise and the changing of the seasons was fraught with error.

      Somewhere along the line, you came up with the idea of promising immortality. Everyone was aware that they were going to die, and no one really wanted to die. Indeed, most would go to extreme lengths to stay alive. Why not promise those who adhered strictly to your religion the chance of an afterlife? At first, the chance for immortality was offered only to the priest class and the chiefs. You noted how effective it was in convincing the chiefs to do some things you wanted them to do, and it virtually guaranteed ready access to consultations with your own chief.

      Some years later, when times were bad, and the people were restive, you had another revelatory dream, in which it became clear to you that every member of the tribe could enjoy everlasting life in the hereafter provided he or she met certain basic criteria. The criteria, which you reviewed with the chief and your council of priests, included obedience to religious authority and respect for one’s father and mother. The concepts of sin and morality were developed some time later by other members of your priestly class.

      – Peter, all this is very well, but you haven’t yet told me how you or any of your ancestors thought you had come about. I thought I asked for your creation myth, not how religions got started!

      – Quite true. You did ask for my creation myth. But you have to realize that for most religions the story of creation is not the central focus. The main goal of religion was to provide adherents, particularly group leaders, with a safer and a better life. For the early religions, this was a particularly difficult task as humankind knew very little about the world around them. Even the source of rain was a mystery.

      As time went on, and scientific understanding increased, new religions better tailored to existing knowledge and the changing needs of increasingly organized societies came into being.

      I plan to provide you with enough background on our universe and ourselves that you will be able to discern for yourself the most probable roots of our creation. It would spoil the fun to tell you now!

      – Okay for now, but please keep in mind that I am not here for fun. I simply want to understand humans as best I can.

      In that regard, I note that your invented religious leader had very simplistic religious rules for members of her tribe. The list doesn’t begin to compare with the rules of contemporary religions that I have been hearing about in some of my conversations with others. Are you implying that robbery, adultery, brutality, fraud and lying (to mention but a few categories of current thinking on sinful behaviour that I hear about) were all tolerated?

      – Very likely. Remember that the groups were small, so the chief would generally set the rules without the need or desire for religious sanctions to back up his orders. Murder could seriously affect the success of the hunt and the requirement for the critical numbers needed for self-defence, so a religious sanction against it would likely have been introduced early in the evolution of religion. The sanction of course would probably have only held for other members of the same group. The murder of humans who were members of other groups was much more likely to have been permitted, and doubtless was actively encouraged in some cases.

      Anthropologists have documented many quite recent primitive societies where deception, lying and cheating are or were the norm. They may not have been pleasant societies to live in, but they worked well enough to permit the tribe to survive. For example, in Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict describes the lifestyle of the Dobu Islanders of eastern New Guinea. She writes that “the social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium upon ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognised virtues of their society.”[1] The Dobuan society was actually matriarchal, perhaps an exception to a widely held belief that if only women were running affairs, things would be a lot better!

      The life of our early forebears was almost certainly nasty, brutish and short, just as the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously suggested it was.

      I prepared this imaginary tale because I think it illustrates well how the pursuit of science likely got its start. Our forebears simply observed that there were a lot of survival-affecting things going on that they did not understand. These were largely understood to be acts of God or of gods, so they quite sensibly tried to find her or them and address them in the hopes of getting some help. Since no gods were observed walking on Earth, a study of the heavens seemed to be the next best place to look for them.

      This was a very sensible approach to take. Over time, it led to some fascinating discoveries, as you will see. After all, it does not take a genius to realize that many of the phenomena that matter to survival are regulated by or come from the sky. Daylight and warmth come from the sun, night light almost entirely from the moon, while thunder and rain and wind all seem to be “heaven sent”. It was also natural