God and Gorillas

Anthropologist Barbara J. King explains what our distant cousins can tell us about religion and why it's OK for scientists to believe in God.

"Every human culture has believed in spirits, gods or some other divine being. That's why human beings have often been called Homo religioso. Some people take this long history of belief in the otherworldly as evidence for God; doesn't it explain why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about the origins of faith. Take Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme -- an idea that evolved like a virus -- that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs."

"Of course, these thinkers are either religious skeptics or outright atheists who mean to imply that we've been duped by evolution to believe in supernatural beings when none, in fact, exist. That's what makes Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, so unique. She has no desire to undermine religion. In fact, she's been deeply influenced by the religious writers Karen Armstrong and Martin Buber. But her main insights about the origins of religion come not from researching humans' deep history, but from observing very much alive non-human primates. "

"For the last two decades, King has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. In her new book, "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion," King argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What's more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier -- back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs."

The entire interview of a very provocative concept from Kingcan at Salon.
Source-Quotes from the same article.