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“Death creates an economy that makes life precious. One of the ways of naming that preciousness is friendship.”
Stanley Hauerwas

Man made religion?

Review: Rodney Stark – Discovering God – the origins of the great religions and the evolution of belief (HarperOne, New York, USA, 2007)

Simon Smart

  ‘The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.’
Christopher Hitchens1
 

Does God exist or did we make him up? Is the idea of a God or gods merely wishful thinking, a source of much needed comfort, or a contrived explanation for natural phenomena that in the modern scientific age we no longer need? Or, have some of the world’s religions glimpsed the creator? Whatever answer one might feel inclined to give, Rodney Stark’s latest book, Discovering God – the origins of the great religions and the evolution of belief, offers much that is worthy of discussion and debate.

Stark addresses this foundational question by examining the formation and growth of the world’s great religions. A highly respected sociologist, Stark, who taught at the University of Washington for over thirty years, and now at Baylor University in Texas, has spent decades studying comparative religion, and assessing the contributions - good and bad - of the world’s great faiths.		  
   
  
Stark writes in a field currently dominated by biologists and evolutionary psychologists whom he says are ‘unable to restrain their militant atheism.’ This contempt for the beliefs of their subjects, Stark laments, is hardly a scholarly virtue. Not a professed believer himself, Stark nonetheless takes seriously both the deeply held convictions of religious adherents, and surprisingly, the possibility of ‘revelation’ as one of a number of explanations of the evolution of belief. This somewhat novel approach might cause his peers to raise an eyebrow, but in countenancing the possibility of authentic revelation in at least some of the world’s religions, Stark makes a unique offering in this field.

In the 1980s Stark wrote that God was a mere invention, but he appears to have shifted from that position. When discussing ‘revelations’ here, he allows that they could be merely psychological phenomena; or the voice of God. The book can therefore be read as, either the evolution and history of human images of God, or the evolution of human capacity to comprehend God.

This is Stark’s major contribution: he presents a highly readable, yet formidable history of human belief in an objective and measured tone. His argument is not clouded by either the antagonism of the atheist, or the fervency of the committed believer. As such it has wide appeal.

The book is essentially a journey through the earliest forms of stone-age belief in the supernatural, through to the evolving and varied forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with much in between. Stark makes much of the so-called axial age - the sixth century BCE that gave rise to an astonishing number of religious founders and innovators from Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu (Taoism), Zoroaster, Mahavira (Jainism), the authors of most of the Hindu Upanishads, and the Israelite prophets Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Was this all merely a freak accident of history, or was something else going on? Stark appears open to the plausibility of a spiritual element to explain an otherwise inexplicable series of events occurring within such a short time period. He believes that it was at this moment in history that the concept of ‘sin’ became widely apparent and made a significant impact in linking religion with morality, and thus becoming a crucial social mechanism.
  When discussing 'revelations', he allows that they could be merely psychological phenomena; or the voice of God
 
 

Stark argues that the cultural evolution of belief leads inevitably towards dualistic monotheism by which he means monotheism with an explanation of evil built into it. If God is to be absolved of responsibility for evil, then lesser spiritual powers must be responsible. Conceptions of God as a loving, conscious, rational being with unlimited knowledge and power who created the entire universe, as opposed to, for example the distant and impersonal gods of Greece and Rome, or the capricious, implacable gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, represent the most advanced and enduring faiths. The three great monotheisms Judaism, Christianity and Islam each capture something of this development.

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