Eclecticism

Rediscovering God

No, this is not a tale of how I was brought back to the faith. It's not really even a tale about Christianity in particular. This one's in response to a question that I was asked-- perhaps just flippantly, just for a brief trip down the imagination rabbit-hole, but it's weighed a bit heavily on me, so here it is.

Let's go back to 300,000 years ago. That's before Rome, before the Pyramids, before Sumer, before any known human writing. That's the beginning of this organism called Homo sapiens. That's the beginning of us. For a bit of context, agriculture (and following that, civilization) happened roughly 10,000 years ago. So only 3% of our history involves farming-- we went from hunting and gathering to the heights of Rome to the Industrial Revolution to nuclear bombs to AI in 3% of Homo sapiens history. That's a pretty remarkable amount of accomplishments in a (relatively) short period of time.

So if humanity lost everything right now, if we had to redo everything from the beginning, what would happen? We're all the way back to square one again. We no longer know of natural rights, cancer, radiation, churches, refrigeration, bronze weaponry, dark energy, or writing. We don't know of gravity, evolution, heliocentrism, or genetics. We don't know of God, Krishna, Allah, or the Buddha. Do we rediscover anything as it was, or do we end up at completely different conclusions? 

Science seems the easy one to answer with rediscovery. We might not call it gravity any longer, but something still falls when we drop it. But then we go into the social sciences-- if our new civilizations are significantly different from the old, then what explanations will we have for human behavior? There's a whole field for cyberpsychology now, but if the computer is not invented-- or not invented in the same manner as ours today-- what knowledge might we lose, and what might we gain? Even the more 'traditional' sciences are subject to this uncertainty. There are multiple theories for how the universe began, and among them, the Big Bang Theory is the most predominant. But what if one of the others gained new support through the different methods and rediscoveries of the new world? What if one that we never thought of came into play?

Religion is the one that's up in the air for me. On the one hand, there are certain elements of our ancient selves that made it into known religions. Fertility with humans and with crops and livestock was immensely important to us when we relied on it for everything. The entire day practically revolved around getting enough to eat, even with agriculture in play-- if your crops and animals don't reproduce and/or die, you're practically finished. So of course there are a number of deities that correspond with fertility: Sobek (Egypt), Tonacatecuhtli (Aztecs), Laima (Lithuania, Latvia), Ba'al (Canaan), Jiutian Xuannü (China), Freyja (Scandinavia), Parvati (India), and Anjea (Australia) were all associated with fertility, among many others. Multiple Catholic saints are also dedicated to fertility, so ideals in deities from the age of Sumer still influence the largest religion today. We would likely see these same ideals if we started over, but the real question (for me) is whether you'd ever get the same, exact deity/deities. 

Let's say for the sake of argument that there is a deity. I'm not really here to argue if a certain religion is true or not. Since Catholicism has the largest number of adherents, let's go with that-- let's say God is real. Even if He performed miracles and spoke through prophets, would we get the same idea of Him as we have today? If the Bible is divinely inspired, would we get the same text, or at least close to it? Could we get the same, if certain events like the flood happened in the first stretch of humanity (our current one, not this proposed new one)? Now throwing out the assumption that this deity is true, could we still get to God? Would all of the Christian ideals and tenets be the same as they are now? Would there even be Christianity at all? Personally-- and of course, feel free to disagree with me-- I don't think so, not in the same manner as today's version. So much specific history went into the formation of each religion out there. Without the history of the 95 Theses, the Inquisition, Gandhi's ending of the caste system, Parshvanatha, Buddhist missions, caliphates, etc., I find it difficult to believe that humanity could ultimately reach the same exact conclusion that we see in current religions, especially for smaller religious movements like the Church of England (specifically started under Henry VIII's reign and assuming England would reform as-is).

So the last thing I wonder, for now, is if we'd still end up with the same debates, in the end. If humanity made it again to a point equivalent to this one, would we still find ourselves at odds over issues like abortion, immigration, terrorism, public security versus individual rights, torture, whistleblowers? What values would we have? What groups would we discriminate against the most? What kinds of people would take the forefront in our new history? Would we still eventually end up in world wars, and if so, how many? What ideologies, what flags? What atrocities would we rediscover, and what new ones would we create? What inventions would we develop then that we might never dream of in this world? The power of this new world would ultimately be in our hands. We would be, in a sense, sorts of gods-- creating our new selves, our new existence, and our new history. 

My remaining question, some food for thought if you will, is this: What would happen if we went further back, if we had to start anew from the beginning of all life?