Customer Reviews

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

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The front cover of Barbara King's "Evolving God" proclaims that this is a "provocative view on the origins of religion." Perhaps, but this is not a deliberately provocative book. "Evolving God" is a gentle, respectful, and above all thoughtful book that searches for the origins of the religious impulse. King finds this in what she calls belongingness, "mattering to someone who matters to you," a trait found in contemporary humans but also in our human and non-human primate ancestors.

King's is a scientific and evolutionary account of the origins of religion, but one that is more nuanced and ultimately more satisfying than either the current trend of 'gene-based' accounts, or of those like Dawkins, who insists that science must necessarily lead us to regard religion with scorn -- a highly unscientific view, if we are ever to understand the undeniable fact that humans are deeply spiritual creatures.

Rather than pitting science against religion, King deftly uses the knowledge that science uncovers to reveal the evolution of the religious imagination. "Evolving God" should be read by all who seek to understand how and why humans came to have such an abiding interest in the spiritual, whether it is expressed through participation in organized religion or a profound sense of awe in the mystery of life. Highly recommended!

Barbara King makes a valiant effort to bring religion within the framework of human evolution. She's not the first to attempt this, but her primate research has placed her in an enviable position to achieve more than previous efforts. Her thesis rests on our similarity with most other primate species. We are a social creature, with outlook and behaviour depending on our relationships with our immediate fellows. Apes, she notes, express deep empathy, they mourn lost family members, just as we do. Apes interact in subtle ways, from eye contact, expressions and postures. "Body language" in many cases substitutes for the verbal skills we enjoy. Assessing these traits in a scientific manner permits us, she argues, to also assess that most bizarre of human behaviours - the religious one.

Religion, King asserts, is deeply rooted in what she terms "meaning-making". In a social species with good community identity, this creates "belongingness", a rather cumbersome term spanning self and group awareness, empathy, and a sense of common goals and values. Even the other apes, she argues, display similar characteristics. Gorillas, chimpanzees and, to a very limited extent even monkeys develop a sense of this belongingness. "Meaning-making" derives from "belongingness" by adding human forms of expression to what we inherited from our ape ancestors. Rightly inferring that modern ape behaviours have deep roots, perhaps as far back as our last common ancestor, King examines the paths humans took in their migrations and the behaviours they might have carried with them.

The best part of the book follows with fine depictions of the origins and wanderings of our ancestors over the globe. Examples of early hominin fossils are located and explained well, although few of the palaeontologists are mentioned. Starting with the emergence of primates 70 million years ago, she explains their distinctions from other mammals: grasping hand, binocular vision, large brains and a long duration given to upbringing. Each is further elucidated by their social implications. Grasping hands, for example, allowed infants to tightly bond with the mother who carried them about while foraging. All these features became "greater than the sum of their parts" as these creatures moved over the land. Most important, King insists on recognising that development was continuous - there is no "missing link" when a particular species, bearing unique traits replaced any other. Many varieties lived concurrently, but all likely exhibited aspects of those behaviour patterns we see in the apes. Not until symbolism, seen in various hominin species, including the Neanderthal, emerged in the form of burial artefacts, does a truly new feature appear. Related to those grave goods must be the notion of an "afterlife", she contends.

The issue of "evolving god", implied by the title, actually receives short shrift in King's account. Part of the reason for the lack, of course, is the paucity of information. Gods, tenuous at best, leave neither fossil artefacts - until humans began making images of them - nor expressions of changes in human behaviour. The one point at which this omission might have been more closely addressed, the cave paintings in Western Europe, are described with awe by King, then misinterpreted entirely. She attributes the painting to hunting ritual, a proposal long ago dismissed. Although she introduces David Lewis-Williams, she omits entirely his analysis of the paintings. Right or wrong, Lewis-Williams' idea would have contributed much to her theme of evolving human ideas of gods. She repeats the error in her dealings with "shamanism", a badly conceived term at best. The practices of shamans in "meaning-making" in a community might have enhanced her presentation, but as a primatologist, she apparently has no familiarity with such human activities. Why the author would ignore so much that might have contributed to her concept remains an enigma.

Worst of all is King's fixation with Dean Hamer's recent book, "The God Gene". King is obsessed with demolishing any genetic foundation for the human generation of "God, gods and spirits" - a phrase she repeats so often the reader is soon prepared to rip it from the pages. Hamer, who is taken seriously by nobody but himself and the media, has been refuted by better commentators than King. Yet, he asked many of the right questions, and if King truly seeks an evolutionary foundation for the human idea of gods, she might have entertained his notions more willingly. In deference to her US readers, King further launches an assault on such figures as Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett. She denounces them both as "out-right hostile" to religion. However valid that may be, it's irrelevant to her concept of gods being the product of evolutionary forces. Although she bemoans the prevalence of "belief" among her fellow countrymen, she has failed to demonstrate that gods are a mental contrivance for social purposes. Until that situation is fully addressed, which King fails miserably to do, the situation in her nation will only worsen. King starts her book well, keeping her speculations under control and balanced with good information. She would have done better, however, to focus more on the supportive data instead of going off on irrelevant tangents. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

On reading Evolving God I was filled with a great sense of enthusiasm and hope. Here is an author and a scientist who created a work that ordinary people can get their head around and understand. It offers a workable solution for those who want to have an intelligent faith stance but don't see it in the Fundamentalism that grips American life. The work brings together a way of considering the commonality that all religion shares and offers a clear basis for uniting instead of dividing communions. Here we have a clear and compelling call for the consideration of the real purpose and meaning of religion in the present time. This is a powerful statement of hope in a time filled with doom sayers and purveyors of dispair. By sharing her insights though her observations of animals over an extensive period of study Barbara King shows us how behavior makes all the difference. Religion is not about memorizing religious truth or doctrine but rather is about specific deeds of compassion, acts which demonstrate our belongingness and developing an ethic of respect for all life. This is a readable and thoughtful book that should be required reading for all those who want to become religious leaders. It needs to have wide spread exposure to Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Buddist and other major religious movements and their seminaries, institutes, Ashrams, Intellectual Centers of learning. This book will be very helpful over the course of the years ahead to discussions between religious leaders. It is one you won't want to pass up.

The author identifies herself as an anthropologist who has studied apes in Africa, with the main goal of understanding humans better.

This book is at bottom an extremely sloppy, vague argument about why human beings are religious. All around this nearly empty argument, the book has quite a bit of interesting, well-written, correct analyses and descriptions. There are nice debunkings of intelligent design, as well as nice balancing criticisms of claims that science precludes religion. This reader was appreciating the book, mostly, on the first read-through and had to make an effort to identify his initially vague sense that something was wrong in the basic argument.

The author quite reasonably notes that human beings (as well as apes) crave "belongingness" which she defines as "mattering to someone who matters to you." She then asks "How did humans go from craving belongingness to relating in profound and deep ways to God, gods, or spirits?" (p. 3). The alert reader might immediately think, who says we went from there to there? The author has assumed what she spends the book trying to prove, i.e. that religion and spirituality have evolved (her word) from this need for "belongingness." "An earthly need for belongingness led to the human religious imagination and thus to the other-worldly realm of relating with Gods, gods, and spirits" (p.7).

Chapter 1 sets the issue, and Chapters 2 through 6 present us with lots of lovely description of belongingness in apes and humans. She leaves us in no doubt - did we ever have any? - that we are social animals.

In Chapters 7 and 8 she addresses the issue whether all this belongingness is or is not the source of human religion/spirituality, which according to the author "evolved" from it. She does this not by adducing facts that support the allegation, but rather by attacking two alternative theories: one that the religious/spiritual nature of humans is an expression of our genes, and the other that it is the expression of our society's memes.

She first trashes Hamer's The God Gene - not too difficult a task - but she does it by exaggerating its weaknesses. She then goes on to attack - not quite trash - Boyer's Religion Explained. One major weakness of both is, she tells us, that they "...give short shrift to belongingness" (p. 201). She exaggerates and makes a straw man out of researchers who find certain parts of the brain involved in certain processes. She disagrees with Boyer's statement that "evolution does not create specific behaviors, it creates mental organization that makes people behave in certain ways..." on p.204, even though she herself said the same thing on page 199. She exaggerates the degree to which both Hamer and Boyer claim much for nature and not enough for nurture, and shoots down the straw men she has created.

Having taken some shots at genes in Chapter 7, in Chapter 8 the author shifts the attack to the idea that religions and spirituality might be memes. She deals with Dennett's recent Breaking the Spell, and several of Dawkin's recent writings although not with his recent famous screed The God Delusion, which evidently was published too late to be considered here. She links the concept of memes to Dennett, not mentioning that Dawkins coined and first used the term in the second edition of The Selfish Gene. She neglects many other interesting discussions of this point of view. Bottom line, her arguments against the proposition (it may not be a testable theory) that religion/spirituality are sets of memes that have been selected and propagated according to Darwinian principles - i.e. they appeared, and we have them today, in evolved forms, because they survived -- are extremely weak, partial, and not at all to the point.

Hamer, Boyer, Dennett, Dawkins, and many others may in fact all be wrong. But King does very little to persuade us of that. Worse, the attacks on these other points of view are the only support that she adds to her bald assertions that we got religion from our need for belongingness. She offers no explanation at all for the mechanism(s) through which this alleged process took place. Many other common and (at least) not obviously nonsensical stories about possible origins of religion are not even mentioned - e.g. that religion evolved as a superior method of enforcing rules for cooperation that were necessary in prehistoric small hunter-gatherer groups; that one of the reason religion is still with us is that it provides a living for priests who exploit our insecurities and need for explanations (not belongingness), etc. etc. She may be right - or, better, her thesis may be so fuzzy that it can't be considered to be either right or wrong. But all she does is allege it, wrapped up in some lovely descriptions of apes caring for each other and humans following herd behavior in some psychology experiments.

Joel Bergsman

joel@bergsman.org

16 March 2008

The author has a sensitive view of the evolution of belongingness in apes and monkeys as an example of potential evolution of same in humanoids and humans. It is refreshing to see the potential fundamentals behind human morality and ethics, the need to belong to a social community with shared traditions, the root of religion.

I enjoyed reading the book and mentally exploring the paths the author has led me on.

I was skeptical about this book and I almost canceled my order. But after having read it, I will be forever grateful that I didn't. From now on Barbara King's questions and musings about the origins and purposes of religion will always be present when I am considering the matter. This book is so insightful about a subject so often mistreated by people of insufficient scholarship. "Evolving God" is a delightful book. My highest recommendation.

King's "Evolving God" contributes to an increasing consensus in science on the naturalistic origins and evolution of religion. However, it does not contribute much.

The bulk of the book is a rehearsal of current knowledge of human evolution. For anyone interested in a readable presentation of human evolution, that will be of some value. But most of this main section has little specifically to say about religion, since we do not find anything vaguely like religion until at best Neandertals, in the last hundred thousand years or so.

King's point about "belongingess" is a worthwhile one, but she does very little with it. Yes, humans need to belong, as do all social species, and she is right to find the roots of religion in our primate ancestry. She even refers to some of the primary research on the subject, especially Frans de Waal and Pascal Boyer. However, she does not advance their insights at all, and she does not even use them to particularly effective ends.

Her theory of religion is quite weak, since religion may have roots in "belongingness," but it certainly is not limited to it. She also does not explain why human belongingness takes specifically "religious" form nor why it takes such a diversity of religious forms. She does not even have a substantial definition of religion.

Finally, she tries hard to be pleasant and popular in her treatment of religion, but by doing so she contorts herself into nonsense. She says that religion is not true but also that it is not false--which is sheer nonsense. A factual claim (about "God, gods, or spirits") cannot be both not true and not false. She refers to religion as "imagination," but of course that which we imagine but which does not really exist is false. Religion is interesting, and it is important, but it is false. Besides, her attempt to embrace all religions with that "God, gods, or spirits" phrase proves the poverty of her approach--no Christian would accept "gods or spirits" as real alongside their God. And her equation of religion and spirituality and mysticism is simply wrong: each is a distinct thing, and a thinker who cannot make appropriate distinctions makes all of her thoughts suspicious.

If you want to learn about the evolution of religion, go to the original sources she cites. She is a nice enough introduction, but she adds little or nothing to the current understanding.

This author weaves a story of how man went from apes to angels. It is an interesting and seductive story -- even when not entirely compelling. There are two broad threads woven together here into an evolutionary braid. Both strains terminate at religion: First, the author abstracts, based on conclusions from her own research on ape social and emotional behavior, a theory of how it could have happened that human emotional development could have evolved from clan cravings for belongingness, into communities, and from there on to proto-religious awe and worship. Second, she asks the "Big questions" of biological anthropology: about how evolutionary history may have developed from empathy, to "meaning making," to language and symbolic forms of expression, on to "rule-following," and from there on to imagination and consciousness.

In this "taking stock of," and "tracing out of" our emotional pre-history, all of the bases were covered with surprisingly well-presented and well connected logic. However, a great deal of it was necessarily left in the "hypothetico-speculative" realm, resting on the relatively weak foundation of one person's research, and on an undue reliance on a reading of the "tea leaves" of scant and porous fossils findings, some of which literally spanned hundreds of millennia.

For me, therein lies the rub: Given that we cannot yet read the minds of apes no matter how well the research might be performed, how much weight can we actually place on correlations between "ape research" and "a reading of" scant fossil records? Obviously making the inferential leap from personal observations to behavioral meanings evolving over eons, is a large and precarious leap to make, indeed.

But even more important is the fact that there was no reason for this author to operate in isolation to everyone else. There is a thriving community of equally compelling theories coming from the other side of this analytic equation: that is to say from the Neuro-Science and Genetics side. And here I refer specifically to those scientists like Julian Jaynes' in his seminal book "The Development of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," or more recently to Daniel C. Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," and everything in between -- including Andrew Newberg, et. al., "Why God Won't Go Away," all of whom argue in their own respective ways, that the "will toward religion" is, at least to some extent, built into the architecture of the brain.

Thus, it might well be that viewing the problem from this alternative theoretical direction, could make "ape research" superfluous, or more likely, collaborative - since fear and awe of the unknown, plus brain architecture could alone completely account for another paradigm of man's will to religion."

That these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive makes it all the more surprising that alternative approaches were not mentioned in this manuscript. To me it would matter little that the author did not embrace any of these alternative explanations. It would seem that just in the interest of thoroughness, and improving future prospects for theoretical convergence, one would have expected them to have been cited and discussed, if only in passing. The fact that they were not, leaves a sour taste in my mouth for a book that is otherwise quite exciting.

Three stars

I bought this book because I'm interested in both evolutionary psychology and the psychology of religion, and because I'd listened to, and enjoyed, some of Dr. King's lectures.

All sorts of human behavior can be understood through the lens of evolutionary science, and religion is a common human behavior, so it seems reasonable to conclude that religion is also an adaptive mechanism. The question is: to what is the religious organism adapting? In other words, why should natural selection favor a religious organism over an irreligious one? What evolutionary advantage does faith provide?

It's an intriguing question, and this book is an attempt to answer it. It's a pretty unsatisfying attempt, though. King's thesis lacks scientific rigor, relies on dubious assumptions, and at times even seems to confuse metaphor with fact. In the end, it's more of a feel-good book than a real scientific argument.

Worth reading if you're interested in the subject, but look out for King's loose treatment of reasoning.

It is probably unfair to expect any single book (especially one as brief as this) to be able to adequately cover the background material pertinent to this topic. Even so, the author does not do a very good job of bringing to bare the evidence that supports her idea that religion grew out of a need to belong. She presents bits and pieces of research from the fields of human evolution, primate behavior, and cultural anthropology but the material is not tied together well and for the most part does not relate directly to her thesis. In this respect, the book is not very well focused. Meanwhile, there is a vast literature on the evolution of morality that the book ignores despite the fact that religion and the codification of morality go hand in hand. It would also seem natural to discuss the relationship between the sense of belonging and other possibly innate behaviors such as nationalism (and the willing submission to authority), and the relationship between nationalism, xenophobia and religion (which also seem to go hand in hand). The genetic argument for morality, altruism, and so forth, are given short shrift. The author admits that it is difficult to form testable hypotheses in this area and her book is testament to that supposition because time and again speculation is based on speculation and evidence is cherry-picked to support her ideas. In short, I do not mean to imply that this is a bad book but if you have already read a number of books on primate behavior, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and so on, you probably won't learn anything new from Evolving God. It might be a good first read for someone who has no prior knowledge of physical and behavioral evolution but it is too superficial and unfocused otherwise.