Paper 86 Overview: Early Evolution of Religion

The evolution of religion progressed from primitive worship urges without requiring divine revelation to initiate it. The human mind, under the influence of the sixth and seventh mind-adjutants of universal spirit bestowal, naturally developed religious concepts through a logical progression. This evolutionary journey began with fear of natural forces, which gradually became personalized, then spiritized, and eventually deified in human consciousness.

Early religion was deeply connected to humanity's experience with chance events and unpredictable outcomes, which primitive peoples interpreted as supernatural interventions. As humans struggled with the mysteries of existence, particularly death, they developed explanations involving spirits, ghosts, and eventually more complex religious frameworks. These belief systems, though based on misconceptions, served important functions in human development, providing structure to primitive societies and preparing the human mind for later spiritual growth.

The evolution of religion from primitive worship urges did not require divine revelation to develop. The normal functioning of the human mind, guided by the sixth and seventh mind-adjutants of universal spirit bestowal, was entirely sufficient to ensure this religious development. These natural mental processes laid the foundation for increasingly sophisticated religious thought.

Man's earliest prereligious fear of natural forces gradually transformed as nature became personalized with spirit-like qualities in human understanding. This process of nature becoming spiritized and eventually deified in human consciousness represents a natural biological consequence of the psychological tendencies of evolving animal minds once they began to contemplate supernatural concepts. This progression reflects how the human mind naturally organized its understanding of the world.

Apart from the innate worship urge, early evolutionary religion was deeply rooted in human experiences with chance—what people called "luck" and everyday happenings. Primitive humans, who primarily hunted for food, experienced highly variable results in their hunting efforts, which they interpreted as instances of good or bad luck. This unpredictability became a significant factor in the lives of early men and women who lived perpetually on the precarious edge of survival.

The limited intellectual perspective of early humans concentrated their attention on chance occurrences, making luck a constant factor in their existence. These primitive Urantians struggled merely to survive rather than to achieve a higher standard of living, and their lives were filled with peril where chance played a crucial role. The persistent dread of unknown and unseen calamity hung over these early people like a cloud of despair, effectively overshadowing potential pleasures and making them fearful of experiencing good fortune, which they superstitiously viewed as a harbinger of coming disaster.

Anxiety represented a natural state for primitive minds, and when modern humans experience excessive anxiety, they are essentially reverting to the mental condition of their distant ancestors. When anxiety becomes genuinely painful, it inhibits normal activity and inevitably initiates evolutionary changes and biological adaptations within the organism. Pain and suffering have been essential components in the progressive evolution of humankind.

The primitive mind, searching for explanations, began to personify the intangible forces affecting their lives. Early humans possessed logical minds but had few ideas for intelligent association, making them unsophisticated in their thinking. They tended to connect sequential events as cause and effect, not understanding that events could occur without direct relation. This tendency led to the personification of natural forces, chance, and abstract concepts as ghosts or spirits and eventually as gods, creating a foundation for religious belief systems that would evolve over millennia.

Death represented the supreme shock to evolving humans—a perplexing combination of chance and mystery that defied easy explanation. It was not reverence for life but rather the shock of death that inspired fear and effectively fostered religious development. Among primitive peoples, death typically resulted from violence, which made nonviolent death increasingly mysterious, and it required countless generations for humans to fully grasp death's inevitability as a natural process.

Early humans accepted life as a straightforward fact while regarding death as a strange visitation from unknown forces. All races developed legends about people who never died, reflecting humanity's early attitude toward death. Human disease and natural death were initially attributed to spirit influence rather than natural causes. This belief persisted even among some civilized peoples and eventually contributed to religious doctrines like original sin and humanity's fall from grace.

The concept that humans possess a supermaterial component that survives physical death emerged from unconscious associations related to dream experiences. When multiple members of a tribe simultaneously dreamed about a departed chief, this coincidence seemed to provide convincing evidence that the former leader had truly returned in some form. These dream experiences felt entirely real to primitive people, who would often awaken trembling, sweating, and crying out in fear.

This dream-originated belief in afterlife existence helped counteract the fear of death associated with the biological instinct of self-preservation. Early humans were particularly fascinated by breath, especially in cold climates where it appeared as a visible cloud. They recognized breath as the distinguishing characteristic between the living and the dead and, combined with dream experiences, developed the idea that humans consisted of a physical body plus a breath-spirit. This concept of disembodied spirits provided a convenient explanation for unusual, extraordinary, and inexplicable occurrences.

Throughout history, the nonmaterial aspect of human beings has been variously termed ghost, spirit, shade, phantom, specter, and more recently, soul. The soul was conceived by early humans as a dream double—an exact replica of the physical self that lacked tangible substance. This belief in dream doubles expanded to include the notion that all animate and inanimate objects possessed souls, a concept that perpetuated nature-spirit beliefs that still persist among some groups like the Eskimos.

The ghost-soul was believed to be perceptible through hearing and sight but remained untouchable to physical contact. As human dream experiences became more elaborate, the concept of the spirit world expanded accordingly. Death came to be understood as "giving up the ghost," and all primitive tribes, except those barely above animal level, developed some concept of the soul. The ancients held confused views about whether the ghost-soul originated within the body or represented an external entity that possessed it, leading to significant inconsistencies in primitive spiritual beliefs.

Humans inherited a natural environment, developed a social environment, and imagined a ghost environment that significantly influenced their worldview. The state represents humanity's reaction to the natural environment, the home reflects the response to social conditions, and religious institutions embody the reaction to the illusory ghost environment created by human imagination. These three domains shaped how early humans understood and responded to their existence.

The imagined spirit world quickly became a powerful influence on primitive society after humans conceived of it. The mental and moral development of all humanity was permanently altered by this new factor in human thinking and behavior. This imaginary realm constituted humanity's only religion before the arrival of revelation, and many world populations today still adhere primarily to this evolutionary religious system. As civilization advanced, good fortune became associated with benevolent spirits and misfortune with malevolent ones, creating a framework for understanding life's unpredictability through supernatural causes.

Early humans sought insurance against misfortune and willingly paid heavy premiums of fear, superstition, and appeasement to secure magical protection against bad luck. Primitive religion essentially functioned as premium payments for insurance against forest perils, while civilized people now pay material premiums to protect against industrial accidents and modern living hazards. This transactional aspect of early religion reveals its practical origins in managing uncertainty.

Modern society has largely removed insurance functions from religious domain, transferring them to economic systems, while religion increasingly focuses on the afterlife. Though based on misconceptions, early religious beliefs prevented humans from becoming fatalistic and hopelessly pessimistic by suggesting they could influence their fate through specific behaviors. As civilization advances, humans gradually emancipate themselves from ghost-fear explanations of fortune and misfortune, though many now replace these with equally problematic attributions to political, social, and economic factors rather than developing scientific understanding of natural laws and their consequences.