* God and Gorillas ~ Because We've Evolved to Relate to Each Other We Think and Feel that We are in Relationship with Something Larger

God and Gorillas

by Steve Paulson
Salon.com
January 31, 2007

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.

[Brief overview] "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."

Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, is not out to to undermine religion or to say that apes are religious. She presents with an agnostic position as to the existence of god(s).

She says it is "the emotional connection to that transcendent realm is what I'm looking for, rather than a mental or rational formulating of beliefs about such a realm. A word that's so important to me is 'embodied.' It's an embodied religion. Religion is based in our senses, in our emotions."

King shows in the behavior of apes how religion evolved, "I look at four different kinds of behavior -- meaning-making, imagination, empathy and following the rules. Together, I think they give us a sense of what religion might have started out to be. The apes have bits and pieces of all these four things, but not in a coherent pattern that adds up to religious behavior. To my mind, apes are conscious beings and they do these four things in incredibly fascinating ways.

"I see them really transforming each other as they act. The smallest gesture or eye gaze can cause one ape to shift its behavior toward the other, until they converge on a shared action or maybe decide to avoid each other. That's what I call meaning-making."

..."I think we have evolved to believe in transcendent realities. What we're about as a group of humans on this earth is believing that there's something more than us. It takes many different forms. I don't know that I'd focus on a single transcendent reality. I would say that because we're made to relate, we think and feel that we're in relationship with something bigger ... [my stance] is about 'agnosis'; that means not knowing. That's where I would like to leave that question. But we as human beings have gotten to this certain place because of our evolutionary history."

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