God, the Monster

Growing up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I was often reminded by the platform that worshiping a higher power was a built-in feature of humanity. We were supposedly created to recognize the existence of a deity, even when there was no hard evidence to support that assertion. We even came up with silly generalizations like "there are no atheists in foxholes" to justify the inexplicable fear of the unknown. We build rites and rituals in the form of religions to assuage these fears, ever hopeful that we do not incur the ire of our Celestial Parent.

Is there a God? I don't know, and I'm certain that I don't know. Neither do you, for that matter. Gnosticism is, at its core, a self-prescribed confidence that one can know that there is or is not a God. Agnosticism is the opposite. It is the confidence that available evidence does not adequately support the hypothesis. Theism and Atheism are opposing axes of the framework in which a person either believes or does not believe in a God, doing so with either a Gnostic or Agnostic backing. People often mistake Agnosticism for being non-committal Atheism, but they are not related in that way (figure 1).

figure 1

Whether we want to believe in a deity or not, we are still limited by the absence of evidence either way. In the common era, we direct people to whom God speaks directly to the nearest mental healthcare professional. But this is only after decades of research into human psychology and neurology. The Bible, Quran, and Torah were all written by people making exactly these claims. They include grandiose visions of heaven, hell, horrible beasts, and agonizing persecution. We currently diagnose these events as paranoid schizophrenia and apply anti-psychotic medications to treat them.

But we treat religious texts with a very different frame of reference. Why, though? The fact that it happened hundreds or thousands of years ago somehow makes it perfectly understandable? Logically, no, yet we still revere these texts as inspired and authoritative. Generation upon generation, we have passed on the myths as a means of regulating our society, measuring our success by the fear they inspire.

Remembering that there is a greater scientific foundation for evolution than creation, I began to wonder if there was another, anthropological explanation for this seeming in-born fear.

The fossil record indicates that we evolved from lesser mammals. The discovery of Homo Naledi in South Africa back in 2013 extends the primate record back as far as 2 million years. While there is a considerable margin of error in the dating (owing primarily to radio-carbon dating being useful only back to 50,000 years), it is evident that they were alive long before civilization as we know it. The remarkable practice of burial of their deceased is something that we haven't seen in mammals other than humans, so its extensive use by a million-year-old primate is not without wonder.

What is not left to wonder is that this one-and-a-half-meter-tall (5 ft) primate was subject to animal predation. Mammals, right up until the extinction of dinosaurs, were easy pickings for larger and hungrier things. As the ages dragged on, some of those mammals became Homo Naledi, and others became lions. While Oldowan stone tools did emerge some 2.6 million years ago around Ethiopia, there isn't much evidence that these tools became weaponized until around 64,000 years ago, well after Homo Naledi became extinct. This would preclude the assumption that Homo Naledi had defensive tools, and biology didn't really equip primates with claws or fangs.

It is only through technology that Homo Sapiens became an apex predator. Prior to the evolution of weapons, humans were just as likely to be eaten, and had thus evolved with a fight-or-flight response to danger. This evolutionary psychology was sometimes the only response to a predator when the prey was unable to prepare itself against the threat. In modern psychology, it is well documented, and the physiology well defined.

In modern society, this response is largely unnecessary, and yet is common enough to be called instinctual. So why is it still there? Well, evolution is slow to discard things that are no longer useful.

It's impossible to tell now whether early hominids had any sense or inclination of intelligent design of their species. Odds don't favor that possibility, but it is there nonetheless. What they certainly did have was acute stress responses to threats; a tool that persisted long after they had evolved and developed the technology to be apex predators.

It's an awareness, as much as a hard-wired response, that we carry into the modern era. Evolution dictated that our survival was dependent on this awareness. Just because we were no longer prey doesn't mean that we aren't still on the lookout for the apex predator we once ran from.

How do we define an apex predator though? Well, that's pretty straight forward.

It's creature that no others prey upon. They kill with comparative impunity, challenged only by the flight of their prey, and no other creature subordinates them as a food source. Lions, as mentioned earlier, are such an animal (absent the presence of humans). So is God...

Abrahamic religions, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, refer to religious texts in which God is the alpha and omega. Before Him, there shall be no other god. Sodom and Gomorrah were leveled by fire raining from the heavens. Noah's contemporaries were drowned by a divine flood. The Assyrian army was slain by His angel as they slept.

God is an apex predator, no matter how you want to look at it. He's the biggest kid on the block. He has the most unstable temper. He demands the most stringent obeisance. He knows everything. He is everywhere. When his wrath is poured out upon thee, there is no escape. Multiple holy books are very clear about these truths.

The invention of God very conveniently responds to an awareness that has been born into us through millions of years of genetic refinement. The awareness didn't fail, even though there was nothing to run from. Our ancestors, for centuries, have had no need to fear being hunted and yet they still laid awake at night under the blanket of the universe, listening for bumps in the night.

Never in the modern era has God stepped forward to smite us personally. Evolution, however, is prepared just in case.