FEBRUARY 2003

The God thing. What is it? Other than being practically universal in all known human communities and almost always male, it's hard to pin down. Philosophers, and now scientists, have pondered the nature of these gods, and their seemingly essential role in human existence. Many "scientific" articles, including one in the New Scientist, April 21, 2001, have suggested that the need for God is hardwired into our Homo sapien brains. Of course they don't tell us which god(s) we're supposedly wired for. It seems to me that entirely different wiring schematics would be required to tune in Brahma, Allah, Jesus, Zeus or Isis, for example. Still, it's an interesting theory; but I think perhaps it goes too far in trying to explain something that may not be as complicated as it seems.

The very fact that there have been so many disparate gods, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the others, should tell us something: The human need seems to be the same, but the solutions adopted to satisfy that need certainly are not. The key, then, is to define the need—not the responses to it. And this is where I think we have made things more complex than they really are.

Consider our closest living relatives among the Great Apes—chimpanzees and gorillas. Details may vary, but there is no denying that one of the most vital forces shaping their social structure is the Alpha Male. When he talks, everybody listens. One of the first things a baby ape learns is how to stop bothering an irritated Alpha. While generally quite tolerant with infants, an Alpha will put up with only so much, and unless Mother intercedes the infant will, at the very least, have the life scared out of it. An Alpha rules with a usually benign but nevertheless iron fist. He represents perhaps the closest thing to a benevolent monarchy that any primate species, including us, has ever come up with.

All apes learn the delicate art of appeasement. There are numerous ways to appease an irate Alpha, and all of them are needed if you know what's good for you. Grooming is a good bet, but the symbolic "presenting" of your backside is almost guaranteed to diffuse Alpha anger. Whether you are male or female, you are saying, "See? I know you're superior and I'm inferior. Really. Truly." And nine times out of ten it works.

We have similar appeasement gestures. Whether considering a formal, 17th-century Japanese bow, where every centimeter of bending was duly noted, or a curtsey before a Queen, or a tug of the forelocks to the Manor Lord, we have our own vast assortment of appeasement gestures all meaning, "See? I know you're superior and I'm inferior. Really. Truly." Is there actually such a difference between a submissive chimpanzee bending to show his inferior status, and a human bending to show the same thing?

Apes have Alphas and, below that, a most distinctive pecking order. They all know their places. Likewise, we have presidents, queens, emperors, governors, generals and so on right down to high school student body presidents. This is where I think God fits in. Once our intelligence had leapfrogged ahead of that of our simian relatives, we recognized death—and the fact that our local Alpha could do nothing to prevent it. Nor could he do anything about the weather, or illnesses, or still-born babies and so on. So who was in charge? Perhaps there was an even more powerful Alpha, somewhere, who took care of such things. Our evolutionary background almost demanded such an Alpha. There simply had to be one. And so the search was on.

But tacking on the word God when describing that search is, I believe, overreaching, constrictive and misleading. We are being anthropomorphic about our own remote ancestors. Because we have gods today, we project them too far into our past. We may have looked up fearfully at the sky, and wondered where the thunder came from, but officially naming gods undoubtedly came much, much later.

Carrying this analogy further, when something goes wrong in an ape/human group, all eyes fly to the Alpha/God to see what he's going to do about it. When the Alpha/God is angered, we must appease him somehow. We teach our children to honor and obey the Alpha/God. He is the final arbiter, the Judge on High. When the Alpha/God takes notice of us, we feel honored and may even strut a bit, lording it over our peers. If you get a wild notion to upend the status quo, and thumb your nose at the Alpha/God, you may find yourself completely ostracized from your entire group. And so on.

I believe that the striking similarities between the general Follow the Leader mentality and the Look up to God mentality can explain our universal yearning for a god of some kind. At some point in our evolutionary history, Follow the Leader must have been a clearly adaptive custom. And nowhere is our Follow the Leader inclination more apparent than in war. Men have blindly followed their leaders into unambiguously suicidal missions. This is taking it a bit far I think; but it demonstrates how powerful the impulse is.

Reinforcing this primate theory are Confucius and the Buddha. Regarded by most as mortals but with an "enlightened" message for fellow humans, they are the quintessentially perfect examples of what I'm talking about. They are almost like missing links except that it's not about different species of animals. It's about the link between human and God. They aren't quite divine, but neither is considered just your average Joe either. And they represent our need to look up for help, beyond our ordinary mortal limitations.

Are we hardwired for God? To the extent that we are hardwired to follow a Leader, yes. But anything more detailed than that will not suffice as an explanation, or else our gods would not be so very different from each other. If we were hardwired for something as concrete as the concept of God, we should all have come up with entities at least remotely similar. But we aren't even close on this one. Jesus and Aphrodite, for example, are worlds apart. Literally.

This is of course pure speculation; but then so are all the other theories about how gods came into existence. There is a human urge, definitely. But that urge may be nothing more than an extension of an already existing inclination found in all the Great Apes—a worshipful respect for the Alpha Male. We have simply refined it and added some picturesque details, projecting our human fears and hopes by means of this purely primate trait.

© 2003 Judith Hayes

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