I think that there is a great deal of confusion when we talk of religion. This is due to the intermixing of two quite different aspects of the word -- that is, whether we are talking of the religious impulse or whether we are talking of organised religions and their theologies. I think that David Sloan Wilson comes very close to the truth in the following where the writer of the article quoted in my last posting wrote

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His [David Sloan Wilson's] most recent book, Darwin's Cathedral, takes a serious shot at explaining religious belief in this way. It is, he says, a biological and cultural adaptation to build cooperation. This does not mean religious emotions are about cooperation.

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I believe that the religious impulse is a mystery that is at as least a deep a level as our genes and that it is involved with the origin of life itself in the particular nature of our universe with its unique set of physical constants and what we call "laws". This set-up allows -- or, probably, instigates -- life, wherever there is the slightest opportunity for it to happen. It is certainly very mysterious that life started on earth at the very instant (on an evolutionary time scale) that conditions allowed.

What strikes me as being highly significant is that I, and many of the friends I've spoken to, feel an overwhelming sense of wonder when we look at the stars. I think that many of us are deeply deprived in these days of light pollution in the cities where we cannot see the multitude of stars above us. I will never forget the experience I had in the Australian rain forest in Queensland on a night-time walk when, coming to a clearing in the dense canopy above, I suddenly saw the stars. They were so bright and clear that they seemed only to be an arm's length away, but yet impossibly distant. I also have the same feeling -- though less so -- when I look at distant mountains. I will never forget the shock of seeing the Himalayas when the morning mist cleared one day in Nepal. They were a hundred miles away but seemed only yards. I have the same feeling, though a gentler one, when I am walking in the rolling countryside around here in the west country, when coming upon a valley before me with distant hills and woods.

I think that there's a discrepancy, or an anomaly, of time that's involved in this sense of wonder. A discrepancy between the time it takes a photon of light to come from a distant object and the immediacy of the relationship between me and the object -- even though in the case of a distant star, the object might not even exist now, having disappeared millions of years ago. Quantum physics tells us that where two particles have a relationship then they are capable of affecting one another wherever they may be with a time lag that might be instantaneous but is certainly shorter than that of the speed of light. It is this sort of discrepancy between the relationship of the deep information within the universe and the finite velocity with which the mechanical world operates -- the world in which we are transfixed while alive.

This makes me a believer of some sort although, theologically, I am an agnostic, for want of a better word. However, I believe that it is this primary sense of wonder, closely allied to curiosity, that has given rise to both organised religion and science. They are both attempts at formulating more detailed explanations of what we observe and what might lie beyond. Equally, they are both capable of being distorted by baser instincts and manipulated by individuals with needs for power over others.

Both science and religion probably arose gradually and in parallel as our frontal lobes evolved and were able to handle the perceptual abstractions that our rear cortex was making and putting them together in novel ways. The signs of both are infrequent for several scores of thousands of years of early man. They seem so slight to us but were all-important to our ancestors. In the case of science we see some of the early artefacts and tools, each innovation being separated by thousands of years. In the case of religion, we see the arrangements of bodies in their graves, the placing of flowers and later, and increasingly, the deposition of precious ornaments and worldy goods with the body.

Many of the early byproducts of science were weapons and tended to be appropriated by individuals with aspirations of secular status and power, while the myths and legends of religion tended to be developed by other aspirants to power who used more subtle methods to control others. Both early science and religion were in the nature of collections of disparate pieces of knowledge and belief without any attempt to harmonise them into unified systems. The first 'scientific' hominid who devised the first spear to replace the piece of sharpened rock that was hurled at a prey (or an enemy) was not thinking in terms of ballistics and guidance systems. It was just an idea and it worked. It was a huge step forward, nevertheless. But when, over scores of thousands of years, the spear became the sprung spear (the atlatl) and then the bow-and-arrow, and then the crossbow then perhaps scientist man was beginning to think very dimly in terms of underlying principles. As to religious belief, then it seems to be universally true that all ancient religions involved a multiplicity of gods or spirits, each responsible for particular causations. Monotheism took thousands of years to come about.

We really only begin to see much tangible evidence of both science and religion when mankind started to leave his hunter-gatherer ways of life and built the first cities at around 12,000-10,000BC. We see evidence of a multiplicity of tools, and we see portrayals of gods in paintings and pottery And we also see evidence there of two different types of community starting to form within the city-states, those of the city-chief and the city-priest respectively. By the time we reach the flowering of city-states in Sumerian and Egyptian times, both types of organisation were fairly fully developed, each with their own immediate followers, although both had political power over the general population. No doubt they clashed often -- as the evidence from Egypt suggests -- but no doubt they operated in cahoots for most of the time in order to control and tithe the citizens in their respective ways.

Of the two main systems within the cities, the secular leadership would have been the more unstable. The fact of regression to the mean means that leadership abilities of dynasties inevitably weaken. Within two or three generations a king of outstanding intelligence would have been replaced by descendants of ordinary talents, vulnerable to be overthrown by a new aspirant. In the case of the religious system, where power had to depend on mental ability and imagination to control the population rather than physical threat, the priesthood would always attract the more intellectually gifted and where there wasn't likely to be a peaceful succession from one high-priest to another, then an aspirant would be more inclined to start another religion and worship another god rather than use force, which he probably didn't possess anyway.

By about 2,000BC in various centres of civilisation -- in the Middle East, India and China -- it is likely that the most intellectually creative in any population had begun to separate themselves as a sort of super-craftsman class, used by both the secular and the religious control systems. The secular kings would have wanted better weapons with which to defeat his enemies; the priest would have wanted some dependable knowledge of natural events in the skies or the tides or the flooding of rivers in order to appear to be in touch with the gods and able to forecast the future and guide the populace. But, because they are, by normal laws of distribution, scarce within any population, the intellectuals didn't have any power system of their own, only as much as they could influence the main political systems individually. However, their time was to come -- and in spades!

By the time we reach about 500BC the city-states were large and complex and nearing the end of their lifetime for the most part (empires were just around the corner!). This appears to be a time of great crisis in various regions. There were too many problems of administration, too many problems with neighbouring cities, too many problems in concerving their agricultural systems, too many problems of trade, and so on. Also, there were too many gods to give them clear guidance any longer! The Hebrews had already overthrown the multiplicity of gods that they absorbed in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and worshipped one only. Even then, clear guidance was often hard to come by, and during this era the psalmists sang poignantly about being forsaken by their god.

There were parallel crises elsewhere, too, all at much the same time -- around 500BC -- because they had all reached much the same level of complexity and simply couldn't govern themselves adequately any longer. And in some of those regions they went even further than the Hebrews. Instead of reducing the number of gods to one, they began to throw them out completely!

In Greece, they invented a new term -- the 'psyche' -- meaning the individual mind of man. It would be logical thought and rationality that must guide them from then onwards. The philosophers began to make a laughing stock of the Olympian gods that the ordinary people believed in -- though Socrates went a little too far too quickly and had to drink hemlock! In India, Siddharta Gautama founded Buddhism, a religion of contemplation without a god and, although this didn't replace the many gods of Hinduism in India itself, it flourished in many other parts of Asia. In China, Kung-fu-dz (the man of the Kung family who is given honour), or Confucius, founded a 'religion' of secular order and respect for authority -- and entirely without thought of the existence gods.

These were cataclysmic changes in the mind of man and society, and all of the new philosophical strains that started then are still very much active today, 2,500 years later. The monotheism of the Hebrews has mutated into many other branches of monotheistic religions. Buddhism is still influential in Asia. Modern China is governed in pretty well the same way as the Confucianism of old. The science and rationality of the Greeks, once again by definition necessarily confined to an intellectual minority of the population, has had a risky and chequered history, sometimes given freedom, sometimes persecuted by both secular authorities and religions. However, science has been very much in the ascendant for the past two hundred years alongside the rise of the European industrial revolution -- so much so that, as modern times become almost ungovernably complex again, as at around 500BC, science is now being increasingly attacked, particularly by the rapidly growing fundamentalist wings of both the main monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam.

According to the article quoted in "079. Human nature is a sandwich" David Sloan Wilson considers religion as important because

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.... it encourages collective action. The emotions that religions build on, and the conduct they encourage, tend to bind groups and build cooperation. The worship of a common god, he believes, is really the worship of a common good, to whom everyone in the tribe or religion must defer.

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There is some truth is this because religions are the only form of organised humanity which has still retained a structure dependant on the local community -- something that most people miss badly but which is not encouraged by our present economic system and certainly not by the highly centralised, very powerful secular governances of today. As times become harder with the decline of cheap fossil fuels, and as modern living becomes even more complex and stressful, then religions, particularly the intellectually superficial fundamentalist ones, will undoubtedly offer a great deal because they are notionally open to all. Indeed, on present evidence, they are already growing at a fast rate and must be destined to grow larger still.

However, the fact is, whether the fundamentalist religions like it or not, if humanity is to survive then it is going to be increasingly dependant on science and technology. And, because of the curiosity of our frontal lobes, this is now almost as deeply embedded in human nature as our need for belonging to local community. If mankind gives up on science then it gives up in large measure to being human also. Something that many fundamentalist religionists will find difficult, if not impossible, to understand -- never mind agree with -- is that some areas of science such as astronomy, genetics and quantum physics are the only adequate source these days of the most profound sense of religious wonder and awe that we are capable of feeling. The fundamentalist religions can only touch on the edge of this.

For this reason, I think that the state of tension between the fundamentalist religions and modern science and technology will grow in the coming decades. They'll be increasingly at war with each other. Just how widespread and destructive this war will be depends only on one thing -- how much energy will be available per capita in our developed economies in the coming decades. I think it will be as raw and brutal as that. But, as I'm sure many biological scientists understand already, if humanity is going to survive in some countries, or some regions, or some enclaves, and if mankind is going to have a happy and satisfying life as well as being able to survive on a sustainable basis, then it had better start organising the structure of society along much more decentralised lines that are more compatible with tens of millions of years of evolution of social mammals, primates, hominids and then ourselves.