Chapter 2 serves as a sketch of the major historical trends in the subject. The key points to stand out from the author's analysis:
1. Delineation of several phases of research, each characterized by its own candidate for what constituted the earliest religion. From 18th century onward, these candidates were:
- Nature-myths
- Fetishism
- Ancestor worship and/or ghost theory
- Animism (i.e. souls everywhere)
- Totemism
- Magic, or some undifferentiated mixture of magic and religion
- Discovery of "sky god", beliefs resembling monotheism in certain cultures.
The author, as a proponent of urmonotheismus, makes the interesting observation that the evolution of religion on earth took the exact opposite path of the chronological appearance of these candidates in the study of religion. This is not difficult to explain- the latest appearances in history would be the easiest to study and be detected the earliest, e.g. proponents of the nature-myths only ever studied written documents left by cultures, which leaves all presumably less developed cultures with more "primitive" beliefs from the analysis. This pattern would continue progressively until we know everything there is to know about anthropology of religion.
2. Emergence of the theory of evolution (or as the author calls it, evolutionism) as a deciding force in the path this line of research took. Evolutionism burdens the author working in this field with some unwarranted assumptions, like the proceeding of religions in cultures according to fixed laws of nature and from simpler to complex forms. Even one buys into that assumption, it becomes immensely difficult to understand what simplicity or complexity entails. There's a lot of room for arbitrary restrictions here, so the best course of action would be to just look at the data.
Incidentally, I do plan to read on evolutionary theories of religion later in my studies to understand their arguments, and see whether scientific facts from that field of investigation can narrow our hypotheses in any substantial way,
3. In reference to Lang, the author points out that there's no concrete method characterizing Lang's approach- something I agree with wholeheartedly. Indeed, all Lang does in his defense of primitive monotheism is just show that it's prevalent among some cultures. But without knowing whether his samples are representative, it's impossible to draw any conclusions either way. Interestingly, however, the author argues that him and his contemporaries are indeed in possession of a 'scientific' method to determine the identity of the primitive religion (and perhaps facts about later evolution), that can lay the cultures side by side and figure out which came first among them as part of a causal chain (which he will discuss further down the line). The author also addresses the question of sample representation head-on: specifically, he claims
a) His conclusions are based on all known religions and cultures of the world,
b) We now know about earlier religions in a width or depth sufficient enough to rule out future reversals of these conclusions.
If these two premises are solid, of course, that would mean that his conclusions are not based on cherry-picked data, and would remain robust in the face of future discoveries (i.e. not a "data of the gaps" argument). This reminds me of the following excerpt from Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box:
[L]ike a neighbor's story about vanishing buttes, it has been difficult to evaluate whether the elusive and ill-defined small steps [which would plausibly lead to complexity] could exist... until now. With the advent of modem biochemistry we are now able to look at the rock-bottom level of life. We can now make an informed evaluation of whether the putative small steps required to produce large evolutionary changes can ever get small enough.Chapter 3 explores the different efforts at exploring the question of origin of religions, with brief sections on the Greeks and Romans, the Christians, people in the middle ages, and during and after the Age of Discovery. For our immediate purposes, only the last bit is of relevance and significance- because the former approaches were based on so little data that their conclusions can be discounted safely. I'm reminded here of this excerpt from Moreland and Craig's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, where they talk about thoughts on religious diversity among Christian thinkers prior and posterior to the age of discovery:
[Christian] particularistic doctrine was just as scandalous in the polytheistic world of the Roman Empire as in contemporary Western culture. In time, however, the scandal receded, as Christianity grew to supplant the religions of Greece and Rome and became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Indeed, for medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, one of the marks of the true church was its catholicity, that is, its universality. To them it seemed incredible that the great edifice of the Christian church, filling all of civilization, should be founded on a falsehood.
The demise of Christian particularism came with the so-called expansion of Europe, the three centuries of exploration and discovery from about 1450 until 1750. Through the travels and voyages of men like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan, new civilizations and whole new worlds were discovered, which knew nothing of the Christian faith. The realization that much of the world lay outside the bounds of Christianity had a twofold impact on people’s religious thinking. First, it tended to relativize religious beliefs. It was seen that far from being the universal religion of mankind, Christianity was largely confined to Western Europe, a corner of the globe. No religion, it seemed, could make a claim to universal validity; each society seemed to have its own religion suited to its peculiar needs. [Emphasis mine](I'm not convinced that these discoveries leads to the conclusion at the end, by the way)
What might be of some tangential interest, however, is how proponents of particularist forms of religion explained the existence of other religious beliefs. These were some of their theories:
1. Demons (for some Christians, the spawn of fallen angels and men) have given rise to pagan beliefs
2. For the parts of pagan beliefs that agree with Biblical monotheism- they were borrowed from Judaism
3. Divine condescension- basically progressive revelation, God might have let "imperfect" beliefs subsist because such was concordant with the state of humanity back then.
Regarding 1, the hadith mention Satan deceiving people into polytheism, with Noah's community being the paradigm case. Some (weak?) narrations also mention Satan deceiving Amr ibn Luhayy into bringing in the Hubal idol from Syria to Makkah. Even if these reports were absent, however, given Islam's stance on Satan's role in misleading people from the true path, this fits nicely in Islam's weltanschauung.
2 can be expanded to more generally state "derived from" as opposed to "borrowed from"- meaning in addition to horizontal transfer of culture, pagan beliefs might even be degenerated forms of revealed religion. This is something Islam agrees with wholeheartedly, as its characterization of the prevalent beliefs among the Arabs is that it's a degeneration of the faith of Abraham. In fact, one of Islam's most powerful arguments for itself was that it's not a "new faith", but a reversal to a form of original religion that was revealed from God and the forefathers of its audience subscribed to. This argument was only possible on a premise of degeneration of the earlier faith. I think this fits in better with Islam than any other major religion, as Islam states revelations were sent to every people.
3 is also endorsed, to some extent, in Islam- there is a hadith which mention that the Prophet Moses (as) would be a follower of Muhammedan Islam if he were alive. This implies the Muhammedan religion is a "more perfect" version of Mosaic religion. Also, the Qur'an and the hadith mention earlier people engaging in practices that have been outlawed in Muhammedan Islam, like the Prophet Solomon's (as) making of statues. However, this is rather limited in its explanatory scope. I doubt it would be very relevant when we're trying to explain wayward beliefs about God or theology. Progressive revelation can't explain, for example, people believing in an anthropomorphic God. That consideration would become very relevant in discussions of anthropomorphism in primitive religious beliefs.
One other tidbit from this chapter- the author, himself a catholic priest, identifies Christianity as being absolute monotheism, but Islam as being fanatical monotheism. So he acknowledges the difference between the two. On the other hand, he cites ancient writers who argued for the truth of Christianity on the basis of the fact that it is monotheistic. I've heard this argument made before- a religion being true because it's monotheistic- the Muslim apologist Bassam Zawadi made it in one of his debates, and the Bengali author Ghulam Mustafa dedicates an entire chapter to this argument in his seerah book. I wonder if this argument has any promise, or how one might go about constructing it?
