Religion in Human Evolution: It Is More About What You Do Than What You Believe
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A Conversation with Robert Bellah
Your recent book, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, if I see it correctly, is a world history of religion in its early phases, directed against a biologically founded critique of religion and against all Western triumphalism. It is based on an understanding of religion as a complex of human experiences, symbols, rituals, and myths and shows how the traditions were created that still nourish us today, for example, in ancient Judaism, in India, and in China. I propose that we take that characterization as a guideline for our conversation today. I’ll start with the first aspect. Would you elaborate on the biological foundation of religion?
I wanted to give the largest possible framework for my study of religion in human evolution, and that largest framework is cosmological and biological. So I start with the Big Bang. I don’t even start with the beginning of life. I do feel that religion, to use Clifford Geertz’s terms, is concerned with the general order of existence. It is primarily a way of acting in the world, but it also involves a concern for knowing in the world. Remember the first sentence of Aristotle’sMetaphysics: “all men by nature desire to know.” At this point, knowing requires that we take seriously what science has discovered. I argue, as you know, that science is different from religion; I follow a rather pluralist notion of various spheres that is rooted ultimately in William James, a methodological and even a metaphysical pluralist.
I’m not saying that science can answer religious questions. But I am saying that in order to understand who we are today in this world, we need to know where we came from all the way back. And we are animals—we are biological creatures—and furthermore, we could not exist for a minute on this earth without a great many other biological creatures. So there is a practical intent of reminding us that we depend on the entire biosphere and that any kind of human triumphalism is unwarranted and, indeed, possibly suicidal, if we forget how much we need a great variety of other creatures.
So this is where we have come from, and we are biological creatures, so that influences our understanding of what religion is.