The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
Whenever I read interesting articles in magazines or newspapers, I tend to tear them out and put them into my “OLD Philosopher” file. Because I have not written any lengthy essays for several weeks, I went to my file to find an article to serve as the launching pad for this particular essay.
It came from my all-time favorite news magazine, The Economist, (March 23, 2029, p. 74). Its title is Big People, Big Gods. It is about a lengthy anthropological study by Professor Harvey Whitehouse and his associates at Oxford University. The study was first publicized in the March issue of Nature.
In the opening paragraph, the writer said, “A ‘Big God’ – a supernatural ‘eye in the sky’ who cares whether people do right by others – is a feature of most of the world’s top religions. But it was not always so. Anthropological research suggests that the gods who watch over small societies tend to demand only that deference to them. Big Gods come later.”
Let us all initially be clear about one thing. What is being discussed here is not really whether gods are little or big, but rather how people in various-sized societies perceived their gods. People in small societies believed in small gods, because their cultures were small. People in later (and thus larger) societies believed in larger gods, because the cultures which they had created were more diverse and complex.
The writer did not attempt to refer to how people initially came to believe in gods (plural) or in a “Big God” (singular) to begin with. Suffice it to say that anthropological studies have suggested that virtually all societies everywhere in the world through all of recorded history and pre-history adhered to some form of religion and deities or deity. Individual humans might not believe in God or in gods, but most people in substantially-sized groups always were devoted to deities in one way or another.
The fascinating notion in the Oxford research is that small societies in the early period of human habitation on the earth tended to have “small” gods: tribal or ethnic deities who were interested only in those particular societies. No one perceived any of these gods to be a universal God for everyone everywhere.
But how did anyone come to believe in any gods in the first place? Did the gods lead them to believe in the gods, or did they believe in the gods and thus the gods were ushered into “existence,” at least in their minds?
The Bible presupposes a universal God who existed before the creation of the cosmos, or, in other words, before what we now call the Big Bang. Contemporary Jews, Christians and Muslims would claim that God was the initiator of the Big Bang. That God, whom the ancient Hebrews called Adonoy (the Lord), is the only true God there is, they insisted.
The Hebrews lived among other nations who were polytheists. The Israelites declared that the gods of all their neighbors were impostors. It was not a very charitable view, but we might quietly agree they were correct. Yahweh (that was God’s official name for the Hebrews, but His name was so holy they never pronounced it out loud) is the sole deity, they said. He is the Universal Creator God, they declared in their collection of holy writings, the Bible.
The Whitehouse study accumulated data from 400 societies that existed at various times during the past 10,000 years. The academics concluded that once a society amassed a million people or so, it was able to make an historical great leap forward in agriculture, technology, and so on. And when that happened, it often took on Big Gods.
But did enlarged deities evolve because those deities revealed themselves to these advanced societies, or did the people’s thinking evolve into conceiving enlarged gods? The individual answer to that question likely depends on whether any particular people believe in God at all and whether they believe God chooses to reveal Himself to us, or whether we choose to declare that we believe there is a God and therefore we try to explain what kind of God He is. Corporately, however, Israelites, Indians, Greco-Romans, and Arabs all came to believe in gods or a God whom they perceived to be A or The Big God.
In primitive, small societies, the writer says, people do not imagine that they need a supernatural policeman. Everyone knows everyone else, and they all know what they should do. But as societies get bigger and more complex, and particularly as they absorbed people from other cultures and societies, they perceived that a larger deity is needed to keep their society running smoothly.
The Economist writer expresses this notion as follows: “If this theory is correct, it raises another question: which comes first, a Big God that permits a big society, or a big society that requires a Big God?”
To my recollection, Prof. Garnett never addressed that question in my Philosophy of Religion class in college, and it certainly was never discussed in any of my classes by any of my seminary professors. Furthermore, that is a typically academic and secular question. It is an atypical question for organized religion. Some might even imagine that the very asking of the question is a threat to organized religion.
But how did the ancient Hebrews come to believe in the Big God they called Adonoy and the God Yahweh, whose name they never spoke aloud? And why did they come to align themselves as an entire society to that God, and to their particular concept of God?
Secular scholars work with a freedom that religious scholars do not possess. Anthropologists and sociologists do not need to do their research within the boundaries of theological and religious orthodoxy. They can examine explore issues wherever their interests lead them. Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other religious scholars intuitively conclude that they are not free to question how their religions sprang into being, but only to talk about what their religions espouse.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam exist, according to each of those religions, because God chose to reveal Himself to humanity in very particular ways. Humans did not advance to a certain level and therefore they decided they needed an advanced God; God waited until they had advanced to a certain level, and then He revealed Himself to them. But no one, except Nature and The Economist, would ever express it that way.
On the other hand, might relatively advanced people in relatively advanced societies have created in their minds a God who was sufficiently advanced to suit them? Or, as the major religions all declare, did God reveal Himself to us as the Supreme Being to whom we can conscientiously devote ourselves? Which is it?
Are the findings of the Oxford study antithetical to the revelations which the three western religions as well as Hinduism claim that God (or the gods in the case of Hinduism) gave to certain human beings? The patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets were conduits of God’s revelations, according to the Jews. Jesus of Nazareth, was the primary New Testament luminary as God’s conduit but secondary leaders were Saul of Tarsus and other people mentioned in the New Testament, according to Christians. Muhammad was the primary conduit for Muslims. These religions do not result, it is strongly claimed, because particular societies had advanced to certain stages which made Big Gods possible.
However, is the “Big people, big gods” title of The Economist article really a threat to religion as it is normally understood? Is such an idea truly a threat to religion?
Or is it possible, as the magazine article indirectly may or may not be suggesting, that God had to wait until particular peoples had sufficiently advanced in order for them to be able to comprehend the genuine nature of El Shaddai, “God Almighty” or “God of the mountains”? Could the God who truly is God have revealed Himself to a people who still were fundamentally primitive, tribal, and very small in number, or did the Jews --- or the Greeks --- or the Romans or Indians or Arabs --- need to move forward far enough as a people for God to be able successfully to make Himself known to them? Is the Creator God capable of making Himself known only to fairly advanced peoples in fairly large and advanced societies?
In other words, does the social essence explained by anthropology and sociology need to come into play for world religions to come into existence? Were particular building blocks of human history a requirement for widespread numbers of people to affirm a Big God?
It may seem that what I am writing here is far too diffuse, or even obtuse, to be understood. (I could say “fuzzy” instead of diffuse, and “blurry” for obtuse, but I hope you know what I mean by these two words.)
No one can be certain that God exists. The best we can do is to trust that He exists, to have faith that He exists, to believe that He exists. However, even assuming that God does exist, no human concept of God can possibly encapsulate the essence of God. I take this to mean that God is bigger than the biggest Big-God concept anyone has ever tried to elucidate or explain.
Having read about Professor Whitehouse and his colleagues, it nevertheless seems reasonable that a Big God concept could evolve only after societies had evolved that were big enough both to understand and to require a Big God concept. Tribal gods eventually lost widespread appeal. Multiple small gods for multiple small tasks would simply no longer suffice for the people of Israel or the Greco-Roman world or the Arabs of the enormous Arabian Peninsula.
The ideas briefly presented in the two-column Economist article opened a whole new realm of thought for me. I had always accepted the notion that God had always existed before the creation of the universe and the planet Earth, but it never occurred to me that the God who IS God could not become known to humans until we had advanced to a certain social level. This revolutionary thesis means that God had to cool His divine heels until we were ready to hear Him. There had to be enough of us, and we had to be advanced enough, for Him to succeed in making His true nature known to us.
For me that is an entirely new idea. And it would not have entered my cranium unless those Oxford scholars had made their findings known in the journal Nature (which I do not read), and unless The Economist (which I do read) had picked up the story.
The apostle Paul coined a fascinating phrase. “In the fulness of time,” he said, God sent Jesus into the world. It didn’t happen until the time was right, and ripe, and ready. The Big God notion of God could not come to fruition until there were societies big enough and mature enough to grasp that God is bigger than big societies. If God really is God, they reasoned, God has to be larger than just us, and He has to be concerned with peoples other than just us.
It took truly big societies to proclaim that big idea. The Big God is bigger than we are, and that includes the totality of all of us. He is bigger than the world. He is bigger than the ever-expanding universe (and we didn’t even know it continues to expand at an enormous rate until the last half of the twentieth century).
Think of it: The bigger the society, the bigger is their notion of God. The Big God of the nineteenth century is smaller than the Big God of the twentieth century, and the Big God of the twenty-first century is bigger than the Big God of the twentieth century. Obviously God is the “size” He always has been, but our concept of God expands as our civilization expands.
God is God, and by His nature He is bound to be “bigger” than any of us can imagine. Bur as our knowledge expands, our knowledge of God presumably also expands. He doesn’t expand, but our thought about Him expands. (Of course He is not really a He, but that is a subject into which I shall not delve in this particular essay.)
What I am trying to say here, and I am certain I am not saying it well, is that human social evolution was necessary for a relatively mature concept of God to emerge. And I am saying it only because those fine folks from Oxford University inspired me to say it. Without them, Nature and The Economist, I never would have conceptualized it, and I grateful to them.
Whether I (or they) are right is another matter altogether. That, now, is for you to think about.
- August 4, 2019
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.