ABSTRACT
We humans seem to have an innate drive striving to understand the world around us. is is not something restricted to scholars and the academic world but – as demonstrated by the quote from Terry Pratchett – it is something our cognition is primed to do (e.g. Guthrie 1993; Holyoak & agard 1995; Strauss & Quinn 1997). at we humans strive to understand is not in doubt but – as we all know – what exactly is meant by understanding is a hotly debated issue, and it seems to mean dierent things for dierent peoples in different contexts (e.g. Outhwaite 1975; Gothóni 2005; Dennett 2006: 258-64). e debate might as well go on ad infinitum, and my intention is certainly not to tackle it here. Instead, I will draw attention to the rather trivial point that depending on what we mean by, for example, understanding, religion as an instance of human behaviour might sometimes have important consequences in terms of how feasible our approach is in scientic terms. Understanding this is essential in order to fully appreciate the recent scholarly eorts to revisit the issue of the origins of religion – a task which is commonly held to be unscientic and not worthy of serious scholarship because the evidence – whatever that might be – has vanished into the mists of prehistory and is, therefore,
not accessible to modern scholars. is makes it impossible to argue persuasively for any theory about the origins of religion, because by necessity they are always based on pure speculation which cannot be refuted on the basis of evidence (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1965). In the words of Garry Trompf:
It can be asserted with condence that no one can know for certain how what we commonly term “religion” rst began. It may not be trite to infer that it is as old as humanity itself – that men and women are ‘naturally religious’ – but then no one is currently in a position to decide with any precision when and where the rst humans actually came into being. (Trompf 2005: 21)
e classical evolutionary theories of the origins of religion were criticized mainly because of their progressivist understanding of how history proceeds. us, scholarly interest had been very much focused on distinguishing different stages in the evolution of mental capacities and the place of religion in this process. e main line of evidence followed the Spencerian view of human evolution, where an entity always develops from a simpler to a more complex form. e critics pointed out, correctly, that evidence of this type of development was not available in the ethnographic data. Chronologically earlier religious traditions could be as complex as more recent ones, and the complexity of a religious tradition did not necessarily correlate with the complexity of the social environment in which it was nested (see Widengren 1946; Capps 1995: 94-5). As implied by Trompf above, if we are to discuss the origins of religion, we must turn our attention to those features that all religious traditions share with each other, not to those that make them distinct. After all, it is the origins of religion as a universal aspect of human existence and social behaviour that we are striving to explain, and this capacity must be shared by all humans alike.
