Darwinists and Modernists are wrong about the origins of religion: here’s why

(LifeSiteNews) — In every part of the world, and in every period of history, mankind has practiced what is called “religion.” Religion is a fact of human life. There must be a reason why this so.

Since the “Enlightenment,” scholars have argued that religion has its origins in ignorance and fear and that, as man’s knowledge and mastery increases, religion will become obsolete and disappear.

But is this theory supported by the evidence?

Religion and the needs of man

In the previous installment of this series, we concluded that the universality of religion is a fact which demands explanation.

Religion has been at the heart of social and individual life for millennia and still is for much of the population of the world. The vast majority of human beings have believed in the existence of supernatural beings who must be worshipped and obeyed. Such a striking fact must have a proportionate cause.

For most of these centuries, religion has been an unquestioned part of life for most people. They have lived and died practicing the religion of the community into which they were born. The existence of realities beyond the immediate grasp of the senses has been taken for granted.

During the “Enlightenment,” these assumptions began to be questioned. Enlightenment thinkers argued that religious beliefs arose because man lacked knowledge of the real causes of the phenomena observed in the world, especially those which were unusual or threatening.

The ideas of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) were extremely influential. In his Natural History of Religion, Hume contrasted what he considered the primitive and superstitious religions of early man, with the more advanced and philosophical theism of his day. He argued that “human society” had undergone development “from its crude beginnings to a state of greater perfection,” and that this was reflected in man’s religious beliefs.

Hume considered fear and ignorance to lie at the origin of the belief in divine powers. He wrote:

[T]he only passions that can be supposed to work on such barbarians are the ordinary affections of human life: the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the last, men look with trembling curiosity into the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity.

READ: How Pope Pius XI defended the history of Genesis, special creation of St. Adam

Hume argued that “polytheism or idolatry must have been the first and most ancient religion of mankind” and that monotheism followed later.

He thought it was impossible that people who were less technologically advanced and also, in his opinion, less intellectually advanced, could have possessed knowledge of the higher principles of religion. “Shall we assert,” he wrote, “that in more ancient times, before the knowledge of letters or the discovery of any art or science, men entertained the principles of pure theism?”

The idea that religion developed from primitive forms to higher forms became dominant in the 19th century.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of the philosophy of positivism, held that human societies move through three stages in their search for understanding. In the first, “the theological stage,” phenomena are primarily explained by supernatural causes. In the second, “metaphysical stage,” men turn to abstract philosophical explanations. The final stage is the “positive stage” in which man recognizes that answers must be sought by means of the scientific method.

Comte considered that the positive method could, and should, be applied to every area of inquiry, including religion. He thought that mankind was moving toward a new “religion of humanity” and even created a “positivist calendar,” which named months and days after prominent historical figures, to replace the liturgical calendar which celebrated the Christian mysteries and honored the saints.

The influence of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution

The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) gave further impetus to this approach. During the second half of the 19th century, evolutionary ideas extended far beyond the science of biology and had enormous impact on disciplines as varied as philosophy, history, economics, and politics. Every aspect of human life was increasingly viewed as evolving toward a more perfect state.

Scholars with this mindset regarded monotheism as the result of a long process, and many looked forward to an age when mankind would leave supernatural religion behind altogether. The needs that religion fulfilled would in the future, they thought, be met by scientific explanations and increasing material abundance.

The following are some examples of influential post-Darwin thinkers:

• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) thought that belief in ghosts, and the worship of ancestors, was the origin of belief in gods.
• B. Tylor (1832-1917) thought religion had developed from animism, by which he meant the belief that spiritual beings controlled or affected material things, including man’s life in this world and the next. Tylor argued that it was from this foundation that polytheism and, eventually, monotheism, developed.
• James George Frazer (1854 -1941), in his influential work The Golden Bough, argued that religion originated in a superstitious belief in magic, and would in its turn be displaced by science.

All these theories, and others like them, shared the same central conviction: mankind began with primitive superstitious forms of religion and then these developed into more philosophical forms evolved.

The heresy of Modernism

The evolutionary approach to religion was also held by the proponents of the heresy of Modernism.

The Modernist believes that the origin of religion is to be found in the internal movements of the human heart. In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope St. Pius X explained that the Modernist holds that:

[Religion] is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment.

Therefore, since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine.

We can see that the Modernists, like Darwinian and Enlightenment thinkers before them, viewed religion as originating in human needs and experiences, rather than in man’s reasoned response to the world he encounters. And, like the earlier theorists, this led them to posit that religious beliefs are always evolving and that every aspect of Catholic doctrine and religious practice has developed over time. St. Pius X continued:

It is thus that the religious sense, which through the agency of vital immanence emerges from the lurking-places of the subconsciousness, is the germ of all religion, and the explanation of everything that has been or ever will be in any religion.

This sense, which was at first only rudimentary and almost formless, under the influence of that mysterious principle from which it originated, gradually matured with the progress of human life, of which, as has been said, it is a certain form.

This, then, is the origin of all, even of supernatural religion. For religions are mere developments of this religious sense. Nor is the Catholic religion an exception; it is quite on a level with the rest; for it was engendered by the process of vital immanence, and by no other way.

READ: Pope Pius XI refuted Darwinism 100 years ago, but his lessons have not been learned

This passage exposes the similarities between Modernism and the earlier evolutionary theories. They all assume that religion evolved from primitive to more advanced forms.

But what if this assumption is simply wrong?

The first religions were not primitive or superstitious

Evolutionary approaches to religion soon began to be challenged. By the mid-20th century many scholars working in the fields of ethnology, anthropology, and prehistory, concluded that these theories were not supported by the evidence available.

They rejected the imposition of a priori assumptions based on theories from the natural sciences. They insisted instead that the question was historical and was best approached through the careful study of early religions, and of the beliefs and traditions of indigenous societies that retained a connection to the earliest religions.

This approach left the assumptions of the evolutionists in tatters. The evidence simply did not show progressive evolution from primitive to higher notions among the world’s religions. Today, these crude 19th century theories are not regarded as credible by scholars.

Many of the ethnologists working in the first half of the 20th century actually reversed aspects of the evolutionary schema arguing, for example, that monotheism preceded polytheism.

Wilhem Schmidt, in his book The Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories (1931), engaged critically with the theories outlined above. He surveyed the earliest religions and concluded that their earliest forms were monotheistic. He argued that even in later polytheistic stages, evidence of an original belief in one creator God could still be seen. Many of these religions believed in one “high God,” above all the other gods, who was the ultimate source of all things.

This generation of ethnologists also challenged the notion that higher moral codes were a feature of later religions, while early religions were primitive and superstitious. They argued that, in fact, the earliest religions were closely conformed to the natural law, being based, for example, on monogamous marriage.

For example, in 1950 the Viennese ethnologist Wilhelm Koppers wrote:

It has now been for several decades the leading, we might almost say the common, opinion of specialists dealing with the question, that primitive promiscuity or group marriage must be rejected and a normal monogamous family life substituted for the earliest stage of man’s history.

He continued:

Rapidly increasing knowledge of field data, especially those that ethnologists have recently collected in quantity among the most primitive tribes, has excluded the possibility of any other interpretation.

Some scholars also noted similarities between the very earliest myths and the book of Genesis. Many indigenous peoples, in disparate parts of the world, shared the belief in the existence of a good God who had created a good world. This God had created two original human beings, a man and woman, from whom all other human beings were descended. Man had then, in the earliest times, committed a terrible offence which caused God to withdraw from man, and death and other evils then came into the world.

Schmidt noted that the earlier the people, the more they emphasized that this original fault was moral. He wrote:

These [beliefs] cannot be ignored by anybody who wishes to arrive at a proper understanding and interpretation of later forms. It is precisely in these oldest versions that the sharp distinction between what is physically and what is morally evil comes out most clearly. Generally those old and primitive peoples conceive moral evil, guilt or sin, as primary, and physical ills, of which death and the diseases leading to it are considered the greatest, as proceeding from the moral lapse. They also all agree that death was unknown in the days before sin made its appearance.

He continued:

These theories are fascinating but what concerns us here is that man has always been religious, and religion has not developed with man from lower to higher forms, but has from the beginning of discernible human history been of a “higher” type: treating of the existence of one God, of mankind’s relationship with that God, or the reality of a moral order, and the consequences of rebelling against that order.

READ: Pope Pius XI exposed the scientific and theological weakness of Darwin’s theory

The conclusions of scholars like Schmidt aroused the hostility of proponents of evolutionary origins who accused them of being biased because of their religious beliefs.

Koppers strongly rejected this insinuation and defended the scientific manner in which Schmidt and other scholars carried out their work. He noted the evolutionist school was deeply threatened by their conclusions, arguing that, if even a small number of early societies were monotheistic, it would rule out the evolutionary theory. He wrote:

This discovery of an ethical belief in a Supreme Spirit among the oldest and most primitive races, is the one that deals the heaviest blow to the hypothesis of religious evolution.

For:

Under no circumstances, can this and the other relevant facts be made to support the opposite thesis underlying the popular theories of evolutionist historians of religion, namely, that the notion of one Supreme Spirit is the last link in a long chain of development. Yet from the evolutionist point of view this is the only possible assumption.

There are still many unanswered questions about the history of religion, and debates about its earliest forms continue. The views of Catholic ethnologists like Schmidt have been challenged in their turn. But the idea of the progressive evolution of religion is no longer held by specialists in the field.

In 1965, the renowned anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote what has been called “the ultimate critique of evolutionist theories of religion.”

He concluded:

I find all the theories we shall examine together no more than plausible and even, as they have been propounded, unacceptable in that they contain contradictions and other logical inadequacies, or in that they cannot, as stated, be proved either true or false, or finally, and most to the point, in that ethnographic evidence invalidates them.

Since the 1960s, crude 19th century theories about the development of religion have been abandoned.

Today there is no clear consensus among scholars about the origins of religion, indeed the question is not one which gets much attention.

However, thanks to the pioneering research of scholars like Schmidt it is no longer possible to assume that “higher” religious beliefs like monotheism are the result of a longer process of evolution. As Koppers wrote, back in 1952:

[The evolutionist school has] in the course of time constructed numerous series in all of which, no matter how they differ in other respects, a personal God appears as the final link in the chain. It is by the continued application of this line of thought that man has come to be regarded as the creator of the deity and has finally usurped God’s place. Twenty years ago it was still possible to publish a pamphlet with the title, How God was Created – by man, it goes without saying.

Today, however, the most primitive races of the earth raise up their voices, as it were, crying in unanimous protest: You are on a wrong track. Your mental experiments (or rather hypotheses) won’t work. The belief in a Father God, handed down by our forebears from time immemorial, cannot possibly be regarded as a final stage in human development. He must rather be the starting-point, as is shown in our creation myths: in the beginning there was God the Creator.

READ: Pope Pius XI firmly rejected Catholic support for theistic evolution in the 20th century

In our day, the evolutionary myth has not been banished from the popular mind, but it is no less untenable.

If religion has not developed over time from crude and primitive beliefs rooted in ignorance and fear, we must look elsewhere for an explanation for the universality of religious belief.

We will resume our search in the next installment of this series.