While I understand that the supreme being for any given religion precedes and supersedes the reality of humankind and the world, I am wondering when such a notion first occurred to our ancient hominid ancestors. I have been scanning the internet to try to locate the oldest religion and I found a list of “The 8 oldest religions”:
Taoism Circa 500 BCE
Confucianism Circa 600 BCE
Jainism Circa 600 BCE
Buddhism Circa 600 BCE
Shinto Circa 700 BCE
Zoroastrianism Circa 1,500 BCE
Judaism Circa 2,000 BCE
Hinduism Circa 7,000 BCE
Hinduism is interesting. I read that Hinduism is monotheistic because it worships one god. However, I also read that it has the feel of being polytheistic because this one god, Brahman, takes on many diversely unique manifestations which are worshiped. Having one god with many unique manifestations, Hinduism elicits a feeling of being henotheistic (worshiping one god while not denying the existence of other gods). I took a comparative religion class as an undergraduate college student in which I learned that many if not all ancient religions were polytheistic worshiping a group of deities. Monotheism was a later development.
Native inhabitants of the North American continent before European contact believed that the trees and the animals all had spirits, as did the sun, moon and sky. I am not sure that these native Americans practiced what would be considered a “true religion” but they certainly had an abundance of spiritualism infused throughout their culture. For me in my long bipedal journey to this point in the history of my life, religion is a subset of the superset, spiritualism, of which monotheism, polytheism and henotheism are also subsets.
Exactly when our ancient hominid ancestors started practicing some form of spiritualism is unknown to me, but I did come across a statement that highlights the universality of spiritualism and its practice in the lives of our hominid ancestors: “There is no culture recorded in human history which has not practiced some form of religion.” Spirituality appears to be a pervasive human tendency. Agnostics are doubters. Atheists are nonbelievers and then there are the humanist. Humanists are individuals who believe that human beings have the power to solve the problems of humankind and the power to make this life and the world a much better place in which to live. Humanists believe in the power of the human being over the power of some divine being.
I have come to understand that, given the above information, I am a monotheistic believer in the Great Spirit who embraces the henotheism of the spirituality I have come to understand as prevalent in Native American spiritualism while being a spiritualist who is a strong believer in humanism that understands the power of scientific thought and practice. So, for me, being such an individual, I am a believer that, since we, humans, are collectively Nature reflecting upon its Self, all human reflections concerning spiritualism are representative of humanity’s quest to clearly understand our existence in our current reality and the history of our evolutionary past that brought us to our present. Narratives exploring and attempting to explain creation is or was the first step in the process. There are many narratives which describe creation differently. Wikipedia’s article, “List of Creation myths” outlines the contents of this article as follows. I have put in parentheses along side of each basic type of creation myth a count of the various myths discussed in each.
Contents
1 Basic type
1.1 Creation from chaos (16)
1.2 Earth diver (6)
1.3 Emergence (4)
1.4 Ex (out of nothing) (8)
1.5 World Parent (8)
1.6 Divine twins (1)
2 Regional
2.1 Africa (10)
2.2 Americas
2.2.1 Mesoamerica (3)
2.2.2 Mid North America (9)
2.2.3 South America (3)
2.3 Asia
2.3.1 Central Asia (3)
2.3.2 East Asia (9)
2.3.3 Indian subcontinent (10)
2.4 Europe (4)
2.5 Middle East (7)
2.6 Pacific Islands/Oceanic (5)
3 In mythopoeia
4 References
If you add up the number of myths in each section there are 43 creation myths under the heading of basic types and 53 under the heading of regional creation myths. There is variety in humankind’s attempt to express understanding about the act of creation. Which creation narrative (myth) is accurate? How important is accuracy concerning how our reality came into being? What is knowable about the act of creation? What is not? Can we understand something without knowledge about that something? If so, then how so? We have entered the area addressed by the second half of my mantra “But remember Wonder and Mystery are forever and always present.” However, it is equally important that the individual must see that Wonder and Mystery “for what it is nothing more, nothing less.” We have a paradox. Embracing the wonderful and the mysterious is the aspiration of spiritualism and religion. Religion as a subset of spiritualism asserts its uniqueness by asserting the distinction between that which is sacred over what is secular. The distinction between the various religions is how each handles aspects of what is perceived as sacred and the prescriptions of how to worship that which is perceived as sacred.
My understanding of religion in contrast to spiritualism is more about organizational structure than the human relationship to the wonderful and the mysterious. A clear distinction was offered during my Comparative Religion class that characterized religions into those that had a sacred book like The Christian Bible, or The Quran for Islam, or The Vedas and The Upanishads for Hinduism and those religions that do not have such sacred texts.
My experience of being raised in a devout Roman Catholic family clearly trained me to know that the Bible was the word of God and not a story to explain how to live and behave. The Bible is God’s words teaching us and not the words of ordinary men. When learning Greek culture and literature, it was equally clear that I was learning about their mythology which was by no means as sacred as The Bible and the teachings of Jesus. It was clear to me in my formative years before college that the Roman Catholic Church was The Way to Heaven, The Way to God. I was persuaded, if not brainwashed, that no other path would take me to a heavenly reward.
Individuals ultimately choose what is considered sacred and worthy of holy homage. Hindus are not Christians but Hindus believe that Hinduism is as sacred as Christianity and, to a Hindu, Hinduism is full of sacred ceremonies. This is true of all followers of all religions. Additionally, each, and perhaps every, religion has a priestly or holy caste of individuals that govern the practices of the followers.
My personal experience has removed any allegiance to any given priestly or “holy” cast of individuals as the conduit through which the word of god or the sacred is revealed. I believe each and every individual is personally responsible to come to terms with the sacred through the expansion of his or her consciousness via formal and informal education as opposed to instruction in preconceived prescribed dictates from the priestly cast of anointed or appointed “holy” men and women. This is not to say that the individual cannot embrace the perceptions, understanding, reflections and practices of other individuals questing to come to terms with the Wonder and Mystery of reality. On the contrary, I believe that seeking a wide variety of perceptions from learned men from as many diverse understandings of the Wonder and Mystery of reality has served me well. I believe others would be equally served well with a similar pursuit.
On my journey to understand the sacred, the holy, the enlightened or the mystery of our existence, I was befriended by several priests while I practiced the faith of the Roman Catholic Church. During one of my many, many conversations with one of these priests, I became acquainted with Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274). I learned that Thomas Aquinas wrote three volumes (although my Great Books of the Western World puts his writings into two volumes, 16 and 17). I was told that, after finishing his treatise, Aquinas believed that there was so much more to be learned and expressed that he believed his writing to be extremely insignificant. He decided to destroy his work but somehow someone stole his manuscripts and that is why we still have his important work.
I am uncertain about the truth of the alleged theft but the explanation about the Uncaused Cause of the First Cause (UCFC) has stayed with me from that conversation to this day. I was instructed that Aquinas traced the origin of god through a cause-effect chain. For every effect there is a cause of that effect. Aquinas explained that if you trace the cause-effect chain backward from one effect to its cause, which would be the effect of some other cause, then the individual will ultimately arrive at a cause that will not be the effect of a precipitating cause. This cause is the Uncaused Cause of the First Cause (UCFC) of the cause-effect chain that produced the universe and thus produced us.
UCFC (The Uncaused Cause of the First Cause gives rise to -> the first cause (which becomes) -> the first effect (which becomes the cause of the) -> next effect (which is the cause of the -> next effect (which causes the) -> next effect (which causes the) -> next effect . . . which progresses ultimately to. . . . .-> us & our reality.
The UCFC, according to Aquinas is the God of the Roman Catholic Church. This made perfect sense to me then and it still makes sense to me now because there has to be some cause that began the cause-effect chain that has brought about the current state of reality. What is equally clear to me is that hominids have long since endeavored to understand the exact nature of the initial cause, the true nature of the UCFC.
The vast array of unique creation narratives demonstrates: 1) there is disagreements concerning the nature of that initial cause and 2) hominids express their understanding of that cause in the terms of the culture which produces that expression and 3) The collective consciousness of humanity has changed over time with new discoveries that altered old beliefs with new understanding such as Earth is round and not flat or that the atom is not the smallest, indivisible unit of matter. There exists subatomic particles smaller than the electron, proton or neutron.
With new knowledge and new understanding, the individual’s worldview adjusts to integrate those new discoveries. Worldviews develop and expand as consciousness develops and expands. So it is that Stephen Hawking (1942 – 2018) wrote A Brief History In Time (© 1988). In 1981, Stephen Hawking was invited to participate in a conference at the Vatican on cosmology. Please consider Hawking’s reflection below concerning his presentation at that conference:
He [the Pope] told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big band, but we should not inquire into the Big Bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference — the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death! (A Brief History In Time. Page 116.)
Galileo was called before the inquisition in 1633 and was found guilty of heresy for supporting and teaching that Earth moved around the sun and was not the center of the universe (the Copernican system). Galileo was threatened with torture and placed under house arrest until his death in 1642. In 1992 the Vatican formally cleared Galileo of heresy. This was “the shared fate” that Stephen Hawking wished to avoid.
When rereading segments of A Brief History of Time, my mind wondered back to my essay about language sets, especially when rereading the chapter, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe.” It is noteworthy that in this chapter Hawking explains what is known but, also, what is not known about the origin and fate of the universe. My knowledge about Quantum Mechanics (QM) is quite sparse but I am very delighted that QM has the uncertainty principle which to my understanding defines what is not known about what is known. It is quite delightful to me that science found it necessary to define what is not known as well as defining what is known. Somehow, in the core of my consciousness, I believe that the uncertainty principle will be forever a crucial aspect of human understanding.
The quest to understand is the motivation behind science and religion. While seeking to understand, both science and religion have areas of the unknowable. Science via Quantum Mechanics has the uncertainty principle while religions have beliefs that are mysteries that cannot be understood by human intelligence. Scientific investigation to my thinking is quite similar to religious revelation. Both are attempts to describe the forces that populate the world of humans — albeit, the language set to describe what is understood is quite different.
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra was recommended to me by an acquaintance who indicated that if Western science and Eastern mysticism were both pushed to their respective limits one would arrive at a common point of convergence. While I have not intellectually traversed such a path, I am not surprised by such a statement because before there was modern science or before the proliferation of the diverse religions of humankind, there was the engagement in philosophical pursuits. Philosophers were the founding thinkers from which came our scientists and religious leaders. In todays world individuals can choose to explore higher education in the sciences or in philosophy or in theology (religious studies). It is the superset of philosophy that branched into the subsets of science and theology (religious studies) leaving philosophy as a set unto itself. With this branching came the development of specific language sets particular to each branch followed and to the various subsets of each branch. The unification of all of these divergent paths is the reality which we all inhabit.
There is no other reality apart from our reality. Are there other universes apart form our universe? Are there dimensions other than our dimension? Are there rigid boundaries that isolate each universe and each dimension from the others (if they exist)? Until otherwise proven, my consciousness surmises that if there are multiple universes and/or multiple dimensions, then there, also, must be some real entity in which all exists. Reality by definition is in fact what actually exists. Our reality if it is not The Reality, is, none the less, part of The Reality. Science and religion seek to describe The Reality, which is colloquially expressed by humans as “reality.”
I am now thinking of the images produced by fractals, beautiful images that have a pattern that replicates itself from the macroscopic to the microscopic. Use your internet browser and type in “fractals” and then look for a video clip that will take you on a very cool visual ride from the macroscopic to the microscopic of any given fractal image. Having viewed several of those images myself, I have mused upon the possibility that the mathematical formula representing our universe might just be a fractal. When seeking to understand our reality, I surmise that reality is interconnected. Reality is not disjointed or fragmented. If god exists, then that god must exist, if that god is real. This existence or nonexistence is not dependent upon what any individual thinks or believes. If that god is imaginary and not real, then that god, in fact, does not exist. Under these conditions, that god is a matter of belief. Belief is a word that possesses a connotation laced with religious overtones. The scientific word equivalent to “believes” would be “theorizes.” The objects of belief may be real or may not be real. A theory may survive the test of time or not. The theory that Earth is round was visually proven with the first photo of Earth taken from space. The mathematical proof of the roundness of Earth was proven thousands of years before we had visual proof. The theory that the earth was flat was disproven. Remarkably, I understand that there still exists some humans that promote the belief that Earth is flat.