Читать книгу The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture - John C. Madden - Страница 11

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry IV, Part I, Act III, Scene 1

I had already decided in principle that I would like to continue my conversations with the voice. Even though it would involve a lot of work on my part, the opportunity was just too fascinating to miss, and, being retired, I certainly had the time to do the work.

What, I wondered, would I want to know about human beings if I were in the voice’s position? Why was the voice so interested in understanding our beliefs about our origins? Was there a clue there? Perhaps the voice had something to do with our origins? But that seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was in search of its own origins? I would have to try and find out.

It seemed to me that it would want to understand a bit about the history of our accretion of knowledge, especially since progress in one field can strongly influence developments in another. So, I listed what I thought were the key discoveries that had affected the ways in which mankind viewed itself, and I sorted them into a rough order. What was not very clear to me at the time was the length of time I would need to prepare myself in each of these subject areas, but I decided that if I needed more time along the way, I would simply ask for it. The voice did not seem particularly hurried, though it was clearly worried.

A week after our last encounter the voice returned as it had promised. I was at work in my study when it announced its arrival with a sound remarkably like the clearing of a human throat.

– Well, I hope I am correct in concluding that you have agreed to continue our discussions.

– Almost. This idea of yours will take up a lot of my time. I want your assurance that you will be open with me, and tell me about your universe.

– You have my word. But I do need to listen to you first. That way I can better judge how what I say can help you. As you know, what I have learned from other humans does not leave me optimistic about your species. My vanished friends were a much better species than you are, and look what happened to them!

I was doubtful about the voice’s promise, but I decided to proceed.

– I suppose I can take your word of honour, assuming that your universe has such a thing as honour. And somewhere along the way, you will have to convince me that your vanished friends really were superior to us.

By the way, you may have noticed that it is our custom to adopt names by which we can refer to each other. I don’t know if you have a name that you use?

There was silence. So, I prompted.

– Surely many, if not most, of the other humans you are talking to have given you a name? Why don’t you just pick one you like?

– If you don’t mind, I would rather you chose a name for me.

I was more than a little taken aback by this, thinking to myself that this was a rather unhuman thing to request. Nonetheless, I searched my mind for a suitable name.

– In that case, would you mind if I called you Davey? You see, from my point of view, you are a Disembodied Alien Voice. I thought of Dav for short, but to my ears at least, Davey sounds better, especially since your voice is quite low, and definitely not feminine.

– That is satisfactory with me, though I can change my voice to sound like a woman if you would prefer it. Then you could call me Davina.

I balked at Davina. Perhaps he was just joking! It was hard to tell. Anyway, I was a long way from thinking of Davey as even close to divine. So, Davey it was for the duration of our dialogues.

Davey jumped in straight away.

– Let’s proceed immediately. All week I have been trying to guess how you will start.

– Do you really want me to start out with a discussion of creation myths?

– Please yourself. How you choose to start our conversation is of great interest to me.

I decided to interpret his response as a “Yes” and started in. At least I knew I would have his attention at the start of our long discourse.

– Imagine yourself to have been born as a human (Homo sapiens) about 150,000 years ago, which is to say very soon after Homo sapiens became a distinct species. Current scientific thinking is that you almost certainly were born in Africa, perhaps somewhere near the Olduvai Gorge in the eastern Serengeti Plains, just south of the equator. It is probable that you lived and died as part of a group of perhaps twenty people, all or almost all of whom were family members. You had intermittent contact with other similar groups. Sometimes these contacts were friendly (perhaps friendly enough for new spouses to be introduced to the group), and some decidedly hostile (which could result in reproduction through rape and slavery).

Your life expectancy likely was about twenty-five years, but a few members of your group may have lived a lot longer. You were a hunter-gatherer. Agriculture had not yet been developed. You had access to some crude tools, such as spears and stone knives. Writing had not yet been invented. History was all orally transmitted. Your spoken language was likely quite well developed, though your vocabulary was limited by your fairly restricted range of knowledge and experience, as judged by today’s standards.

The fight of your ancestors for survival amongst the competing mammals, reptiles, disease and hostile tribes, and while faced with variations in climate and environment over months, years and millennia – including cataclysmic events such as floods, fires and volcanic eruptions – meant that you had a number of innate behavioural penchants (almost all of which are subject to variations and modifications across the species) that helped you adapt to changing circumstances.

Insofar as mammalian competitors are concerned, your physical attributes were unexceptional. You were not especially strong or big, not particularly fleet of foot, nor could you climb trees rapidly, burrow in the ground, or swim with much finesse. In such circumstances, survival depended on co-operative behaviour practiced by groups of humans. These groups had to be large enough to yield survivable odds against predators and to improve chances of success when hunting, but not so large as to exhaust available sources of food within easy walking range.

You regarded most members of your small tribe with respect and affection. Others you disdained, though not so much that, for the most part, you wished them gone. You were part of a hierarchy, or pecking order. Your chief and his wife decidedly had the upper hand. The chief directed the hunt and took for himself, and his immediate family, the best part of the available food and supplies. His chief wife supervised the domestic chores (and may well, by dint of superior intelligence and drive, have been the de facto head of the tribe). No one was left without food or shelter unless he or she had unsuccessfully challenged the chief, or otherwise transgressed tribal rules in an unforgivable manner.

While your chief may have had a favourite spouse, he especially – and other males to a lesser extent – copulated with a number of females both in the group and outside it. Nonetheless most group members formed marriage-like relationships of a semi-permanent or permanent nature. Children born into longer-term relationships generally had an enhanced likelihood of survival into adulthood.

The pecking order in the group was clear. Those at the bottom were given the menial jobs and got the worst accommodation and the least tasty food. There was a constant jockeying within the group, as younger people especially attempted to improve their social position.

Now, think of yourself as having been a young woman or a young man, with, let us suppose, lots of drive and intelligence, but a pretty junior ranking in the group, a ranking that you badly wished to improve. The chief, let us again suppose, looked pretty unassailable. He was physically powerful and a good hunter. He could be vengeful and cruel, but most of the tribe respected his decisions. Those at the bottom of the pecking order feared him. His first wife was very cunning. She kept her ear to the ground for any signs of discontent, and she saw to it that the wishes of her husband were carried out. Both their children were especially favoured. The boy was likely to become the next leader. Not much hope for you there, unless (if you were a girl), you could become the first wife to the son – but age difference alone made this unlikely in your case.

It had been a disastrous last two years for the group. The rainy season hardly happened in either year, and the local water hole had dried up. Game, which had been plentiful, had moved on. Thankfully, most of the lions and leopards had moved on, as well, but some had stayed and developed a liking for human flesh. Two young children had been lost to lions in the last two months. Guards had to be posted all night, placing an additional strain on the small community. The group was surviving largely on plants still growing around the dried-up water hole. Small quantities of water were still available thanks to a second hole the women dug in the dried mud of the hole. Recently, signs of other humans in the area had been detected, and the tribe was worried about an attack from these humans.

Your mother had told you the story of the great Earth Goddess. It was generally believed that the tribe was suffering from her displeasure over some imagined slight unwittingly perpetrated by the tribe. You were dubious of this story and had seen no evidence of any earth goddess. But what other dark and mysterious force could be the cause of all your misery, and what might be done about it? You wished you knew!

It turns out that from early childhood you had been fascinated by the sun and moon. Somehow, you thought, it is the sun and moon together that decide how much rain will fall, and it is rain and sunshine together that seem to decide the health of plants and animals. Unlike the Earth Goddess – an invisible lurking shadow, imagined but not seen – the sun and moon are visible presences. If only you could communicate with them, you might learn how to arrange for more rain, so that the game animals would come back and the grass would once again be green and tender.

In order to better understand these distant but visible gods, as you thought of them, you embarked on a period of study. You found a quiet spot on a small rise of land about twenty minutes’ walk from your camp, and you spent many hours there, day and night, observing these aloof gods. You observed carefully the patterns on the moon, and thought you could discern the face of a goddess. You found a small clearing where you could drive a stake into the ground and observe the shadows cast by both the moon and the sun, and you devised a way to record the changes in shadow length and direction, and tried to correlate these with the weather. You tried saying prayers to both sun and moon. Sometimes you complimented them on their wisdom and strength, and thanked them for their gifts to you and your tribe. Other times you begged them for their help and offered them such gifts as you had that you thought might interest them, an animal hide, perhaps, or some food. All of this work took its toll on you, since you were still expected to contribute your share of labour to the daily life of your tribe, and your study of the moon in particular, being primarily a nocturnal pursuit, was both dangerous and tiring.

However, your mother encouraged you to keep going and helped you by carrying out some of your daily chores for you. Your interest in the sun and moon came to the attention of the chief quite early on – there was little in tribal life that did not – and after thinking about it, he decided to encourage you. Invocations to the Earth Goddess after all, had not been very effective, and it looked as though the tribe would have to move off south in search of better land, with all the perils that that involved. Just maybe, he thought, you were onto something that could help the tribe. Soon, all the tribe took an interest in what you were doing and came to you with suggestions. Have you tried eating some particular healing herbs before communing with the sun and moon? Have you tried going without food? What about sacrifices? You listened to all of these suggestions, especially to those coming from the chief, who was over twice your age and had some knowledge of the customs of neighbouring tribes. The chief’s first wife, unfortunately, was a problem for you. She thought your ideas would offend the Earth Goddess, and the goddess would curse the tribe even more. Fortunately, at least for a while, the chief was on your side, but several other tribe members agreed with his wife.

One night, after two days of fasting, you fell into an exhausted sleep after hours of prayer and invocation to your new gods. Times were especially harsh. The last drop of water would soon be gone from the remaining water hole, and the grass was tinder dry. A brush fire had almost demolished the campsite and its inhabitants a few days earlier. The group was becoming desperate. While you slept the Sun God came to you in the form of a handsome youth. He thanked you for your prayers to him, and told you he would answer your prayers, that he would bring rain, provided the tribe began to observe certain practices to please him. He advised you that he was the most powerful of the gods, and that the moon was his wife, and that she ruled the night. You are pleased to be told that the Earth Goddess did indeed exist and was a daughter of the sun and moon. It was therefore appropriate to worship her, too, but first obeisance must be to him, the Sun God. He commanded you to convince the tribe to worship him each morning at sunrise and to leave him some berries to eat here where you were sleeping. In the evening, you were to bring a gourd of water for him to drink. You alone were authorized to do this. He promised that rain would come on the third day of such observances, and that the animals would return and the tribe would prosper.

Figure 2.1 – The kudu is a large member of the antelope family. It lives in southern and eastern Africa. The long horns, found only on the male, average 1.2 metres long, make two or three complete twists of a spiral and diverge slightly. The kudu’s striking appearance has made it an animal of special affection and respect amongst local human inhabitants.

You awoke with a start and, looking up, you saw a male kudu, its noble horns spiralling upward in the moonlight, standing stock still about ten feet from you. After a pause that seemed to be an eternity, it turned and walked slowly away. You rushed back to camp and woke the chief. Soon everyone was roused, and you told them about your vision, for you were convinced that what you saw and heard was as real as the dry grass under your feet.

There was much discussion after you recounted your dream. The chief’s first wife was alarmed. She was convinced that it was suicidal to downgrade the all-powerful Earth Goddess to inferior status, and several others chimed in in strong agreement. There was even a suggestion that you were the incarnation of an evil spirit and should be banished or worse. But the chief quieted the discussion. He pointed out that obeisance to the Earth Goddess had been of little help of late, and that the tribe was in desperate circumstances. He suggested that the group heed the instructions and conduct a three-day trial to see if rain came. He even went so far as to praise you for your efforts on the tribe’s behalf. After three days, he suggested, the group would reconvene to judge the success of the experiment. If it failed to rain as promised by the Sun God, it would be obvious that the tribe should look elsewhere for solutions to its desperate problems.

Your pleasure at this success, and the huge increase in your status in the tribe, was tinged with a nagging fear. If rain did not result, you realized that you would be in some danger.

In the event, it was a near-run thing. Rain did finally come, but late at night on the fourth day. Late enough for you to have experienced the righteous resentment of the chief’s wife, and to hear her suggestions for the painful manner in which you should be disposed of to satisfy the angry Earth Goddess. But, after all, the rain arrived early enough to save your skin. Indeed, the rains continued for long enough to restore the water supply and to bring back the animals. Your reputation was made, and it spread to neighbouring tribes. The chief was able to negotiate treaties of friendship and co-operation with some of these, which made it possible to devote more resources to the worship of the sun and moon, a religious exercise of which you were now the chief practitioner, assisted by medicine men and women from the other tribes, and, later, by one of your children.

You were lucky. During your lifetime, the drought was never again as bad as it had been on that fateful day when you convinced the tribe to shift to sun and moon worship, while still paying obeisance to the Earth Goddess. Whenever the drought threatened, if prayers and sacrifices seemed to have no effect, you grew adept at finding earthly reasons for the failure. Perhaps someone in the tribe had jinxed the prayers, or perhaps the Sun God was otherwise occupied or the Moon Goddess had run off with someone else.

Through all the years, you never lost your interest in better understanding the world about you, for, in an all too real sense, your survival depended on knowing more than others. You kept looking for new ways to convince people to take you seriously, for the task of invoking rain or of predicting events of any kind beyond the sunrise and the changing of the seasons was fraught with error.

Somewhere along the line, you came up with the idea of promising immortality. Everyone was aware that they were going to die, and no one really wanted to die. Indeed, most would go to extreme lengths to stay alive. Why not promise those who adhered strictly to your religion the chance of an afterlife? At first, the chance for immortality was offered only to the priest class and the chiefs. You noted how effective it was in convincing the chiefs to do some things you wanted them to do, and it virtually guaranteed ready access to consultations with your own chief.

Some years later, when times were bad, and the people were restive, you had another revelatory dream, in which it became clear to you that every member of the tribe could enjoy everlasting life in the hereafter provided he or she met certain basic criteria. The criteria, which you reviewed with the chief and your council of priests, included obedience to religious authority and respect for one’s father and mother. The concepts of sin and morality were developed some time later by other members of your priestly class.

– Peter, all this is very well, but you haven’t yet told me how you or any of your ancestors thought you had come about. I thought I asked for your creation myth, not how religions got started!

– Quite true. You did ask for my creation myth. But you have to realize that for most religions the story of creation is not the central focus. The main goal of religion was to provide adherents, particularly group leaders, with a safer and a better life. For the early religions, this was a particularly difficult task as humankind knew very little about the world around them. Even the source of rain was a mystery.

As time went on, and scientific understanding increased, new religions better tailored to existing knowledge and the changing needs of increasingly organized societies came into being.

I plan to provide you with enough background on our universe and ourselves that you will be able to discern for yourself the most probable roots of our creation. It would spoil the fun to tell you now!

– Okay for now, but please keep in mind that I am not here for fun. I simply want to understand humans as best I can.

In that regard, I note that your invented religious leader had very simplistic religious rules for members of her tribe. The list doesn’t begin to compare with the rules of contemporary religions that I have been hearing about in some of my conversations with others. Are you implying that robbery, adultery, brutality, fraud and lying (to mention but a few categories of current thinking on sinful behaviour that I hear about) were all tolerated?

– Very likely. Remember that the groups were small, so the chief would generally set the rules without the need or desire for religious sanctions to back up his orders. Murder could seriously affect the success of the hunt and the requirement for the critical numbers needed for self-defence, so a religious sanction against it would likely have been introduced early in the evolution of religion. The sanction of course would probably have only held for other members of the same group. The murder of humans who were members of other groups was much more likely to have been permitted, and doubtless was actively encouraged in some cases.

Anthropologists have documented many quite recent primitive societies where deception, lying and cheating are or were the norm. They may not have been pleasant societies to live in, but they worked well enough to permit the tribe to survive. For example, in Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict describes the lifestyle of the Dobu Islanders of eastern New Guinea. She writes that “the social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium upon ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognised virtues of their society.”[1] The Dobuan society was actually matriarchal, perhaps an exception to a widely held belief that if only women were running affairs, things would be a lot better!

The life of our early forebears was almost certainly nasty, brutish and short, just as the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously suggested it was.

I prepared this imaginary tale because I think it illustrates well how the pursuit of science likely got its start. Our forebears simply observed that there were a lot of survival-affecting things going on that they did not understand. These were largely understood to be acts of God or of gods, so they quite sensibly tried to find her or them and address them in the hopes of getting some help. Since no gods were observed walking on Earth, a study of the heavens seemed to be the next best place to look for them.

This was a very sensible approach to take. Over time, it led to some fascinating discoveries, as you will see. After all, it does not take a genius to realize that many of the phenomena that matter to survival are regulated by or come from the sky. Daylight and warmth come from the sun, night light almost entirely from the moon, while thunder and rain and wind all seem to be “heaven sent”. It was also natural that a tool as powerful as religion would be used for other purposes. Over history, our religions have served four primary purposes: explaining otherwise inexplicable phenomena; serving as an instrument of power; serving as a means to establish and enforce social harmony (particularly useful as tribes grew in size so that it became increasingly difficult for a chief to maintain control); and finally as a source of comfort and solace when things did not go well, and, increasingly, even when things did go well. Thus religion very quickly became much more than just a means of understanding otherwise inexplicable events.

Davey seemed pleased. I thought I detected faint notes of gratitude and excitement in his voice when he said:

– Already you have helped me! I have found this whole business of religion amongst you humans rather confusing. It is obviously very important to most of you, yet I was not aware of any religious practices amongst my superhuman friends before their disappearance. They had ancestors just as you do. I wonder if they were ever afflicted with religion?

– You might want to be careful about assuming that religion is an affliction. As I just mentioned, for many people religion is a great joy and comfort. It suffuses their lives.

– So I have noticed. But it doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain why different people profess faith in different gods? You would have expected that over time one god would have won out over the others. After all, they cannot possibly all be omnipotent at once!

– Such behaviour is completely rational in the context of human development, but hold on, I would prefer to answer your question later on. For now, I hope you will be as amazed as I am at what the ancients were able to learn about the heavens, driven in large part by curiosity about what the gods were doing up there.

As far as we know, Galileo fashioned the world’s first astronomical telescope in 1609. Prior to 1609 astronomy was practiced exclusively with the unaided eye assisted by some instruments that permitted the user to measure direction and the angle of inclination to a particular object in the sky.

How might you and I have fared in sorting out the riddles of the heavens in such circumstances?

Might we have been like the Sumerians, deemed by some to be the earliest astronomers of recorded history, who, as early as 4000 BC considered the sun, the moon and Venus to be the homes of gods? If we were both lucky and crafty, we might have become priests in a temple system with hundreds of “staff.” Perhaps we, like them, would have designed a calendar; identified the basic cycles of the sun, moon, planets and stars; and divided the year into twelve months based on the moon’s twelve cycles during a year, though I find it hard to imagine that I, at least, would have been smart enough to do that!

Perhaps, like some ancient Britons at Stonehenge in about 2450 BC, we would have added some very large stones to an existing structure to indicate the alignment of the sun at the time of summer solstice, and thus marked the start of a decline toward a winter whose dampness and cold were uncomfortable and life-threatening.

Mankind’s first known record of an eclipse of the sun was made in China in 2136 BC. Might we, like the Chinese, have attached particular importance to the constellation Ursa Major, and looked on the North Star as the keystone of the heavens?

Would we, like Aryabhatta of India (said to have been born in 476 AD) have concluded that Earth orbited the sun (and not vice versa as most of the “civilized” world believed at the time), and then gone on to predict eclipses as well?

Maybe we would have been more like the Mayans in Central America. They were able to figure out that the planet Venus has a 584-day cycle of appearance as seen from Earth. They also learned how to predict lunar eclipses and developed a detailed calendar based on a twenty-day month that accounted for seasonal changes as well as lunar cycles.

And I could go on with many more examples from other parts of the globe. It turns out that many if not most peoples of the ancient world had an interest in and a fascination for astronomy, and some learned a surprising amount while pursuing that interest.

– Are you just being rhetorical, or are you really asking me these questions? Frankly speaking, if it were up to me, I certainly would have made all those discoveries you speak of, and many more besides. I would have thought that having an understanding of one’s surroundings was pretty basic, yet you humans seem to have been quite slow to catch on.

I felt frustrated by Davey’s response at this point, after all my work at finding good examples of ancient discoveries, and I felt it was important that I express it.

– You have me at a disadvantage. You tell me nothing about yourself and how you came about, while you seem to imagine that human intelligence was such that as soon as it had evolved, it would necessarily learn all about its surroundings almost immediately. That is not the way things happen in our universe. I shall be interested to learn how things got going in yours.

– You are right to complain. I apologise. I sometimes forget how different your development has been from mine. Please continue.

– Well, that pretty well wraps up what I wanted to say about early synergies between religion and science. Like other human institutions, religions have undergone a continuing evolution as the human situation has changed. For example, as Richard Dawkins has succinctly pointed out, Christian doctrine today is worlds apart from that of the early Christians.[2]

While there is no shortage today of writers promoting atheism, Dawkins notably included, available polling evidence strongly suggests that religions will continue to have an important influence on human activity for years to come. After all, the founders of the major religions were all very wise men, whose insight into the foibles of human nature rightly won them many adherents. Furthermore, the pastoral work of the clergy and the social networks provided by attendance at religious ceremonies are, for the most part, important contributors to social cohesion and happiness.

Nonetheless, religious tenets and practices will need to continue to adapt if religion is to survive.

You can count on it that many if not most major religions will therefore adapt.

– Well, I am not at all sure you are right. I continue to find your religions very puzzling, though I think I now understand much better how they probably got started. My friends in my universe did not seem to have any need for a religion. Nor do I. But you humans do seem to have such a need, though I wonder if that need is permanent, or merely a phase in your evolution.

Very puzzling, indeed.

– I hope that as our discussions progress, the mainsprings of human religion will become clearer to you. Next week, I plan to talk a bit about some other non-scientific sources of knowledge concerning humans and the environment we live in. That should set us up for the scientific pilgrimage I have in mind.

– I, too, hope you are correct in predicting that it will all become clearer for me. At this time it seems to me that religion is a potentially damaging and unnecessary luxury.

I look forward to next week.

With those few sceptical words, Davey apparently took his leave. I quickly discovered that I always knew when he left, but I never did quite understand how I knew.

I clearly recall that I felt both relieved and exhausted after this first real session ended. It was evidently more stressful than I had anticipated or even realized as the dialogue progressed. It was surely a privilege to be able to have a dialogue with Davey, but it was a very odd privilege – and it was quite some time before I developed any feelings of kinship or affection for Davey.

By the next morning I felt rested and imbued with a renewed sense that Davey’s education was a challenge I could and should meet. At the very least it seemed important to understand him better.