For years, historians, archeologists, anthropologists and pretty much all of the other "ologists" have agreed that agriculture created civilization, including religion, as we have known it for the past 12,000 to 15,000 years. The assumption was that settling down to lives of farming, people built cities, created art and made up organized religions to suit the new needs they faced in the transition from hunter-gathers to farmers. Or not.
New evidence suggests that it was not agriculture which created civilization, but religion. The June issue of National Geographic offers a brief and provocative story from a place in Turkey known as Göbekli Tepe, site of the world's oldest example of monumental architecture i.e. a temple.
While the interpretation of archeological remains is often as much art as it is science, there is plenty of reason to believe that in Gobekli Tepe people's need/desire to gather for worship is what created civilization, not the reverse, as was previously assumed. The Temple existed without a city.
As article author Charles C. Mann observes:
At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight -- emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
That human minds, at least some of them, envision things ahead of what is physically possible and respond to impulses which are driven by more than physical needs is not only wonderful, it demonstrates that religion is more than what typical utilitarians suggest. It also does so without having to buy into theologies which many people reject.
The choice is not necessarily to view religion as a low level response to changed physical circumstances on the one hand, or as the gift of supernatural beings who live in the skies above or in the depths below on the other. That dichotomy, like most dichotomies, is false. At least that is the evidence suggested by the remains at Gobekli Tepe.
The evidence from Turkey suggests that the pilgrimage impulse, the collective worship impulse, the sacred space impulse, are all supra-natural, if not super-natural. There is something within us, not necessarily from outside us, which compels the building of Gobekli Tepe and places like it. That "something" is not simply accounted for by the usual explanations which seek to explain, or, too often, explain away, people's attachment to religious expression.
That conclusion, if correct, means that religion needs to be taken a whole lot more seriously by many of the people who read this section, especially those among them who constantly insult the religious impulse. It also means that those who assume that religion belongs to one group, one understanding of God or Gods or one particular scripture, would do well to practice more modesty about such claims.
The evidence from Gobekli Tepe suggests that religion is both more real, and more human, than is often admitted. The ultra-orthodox in both camps in the ongoing debate about what religion "really is," where it came from and what purposes it serves may find this difficult to accept.
Of course, the assumption that something cannot be both deeply religious and deeply rooted in human impulse and capacity, may be one of the idols which need to be smashed in this debate. Gobekli Tepe may be just the hammer for which we have been waiting.
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To make the argument that this discovery somehow indicates religion or even “the need to worship” created society is specious at best, as it is trying to create a false equivalency. Neither one could or did create the other. They both stem from the same human needs and as such society and religion have both existed since the first human had a second to concern themselves with something other than survival.
I am also a little confused by the “dichotomy” the author talks about. Most of the religious objectors I know, myself included, never doubted that the human “need” for religion is motivated by internal rather than external factors. I see nothing “supra-natural” about all humans having similar psychological needs and responses. As humans however, we have the ability to, and should, overcome these primitive needs for the betterment of all.
Other culprits include:
Agriculture
Specialized jobs
Large families
Tribes
etc
The suggestion is that civilization arose under various circumstances in response to a variety of impulses, insights, and needs. Agicutural triggers in one place do not exclude socio-spiritual concerns in another. Population needs in one place can displace the nomadic practices in one group while, in another group, it might trigger an impulse to move on yet again and then again and then again.
To follow the rabbi's example and offer an extravagant generalization: Whoever built that temple lived at the early end of the Proto-Indo-European migrations and inside their primordial homeland. Maybe it's the House of the Great Hoo-Hah where the Proto-Indo-Europeans received their mythic mission to go forth and conquer the Earth and eventually command all living persons to speak English.
Maybe.
Overs have views quite different from Schmidt's. As the article says:
"... increasingly, archaeologists studying the origins of civilization in the Fertile Crescent are suspicious of any attempt to find a one-size-fits-all scenario, to single out one primary trigger. It is more as if the occupants of various archaeological sites were all playing with the building blocks of civilization, looking for combinations that worked. In one place agriculture may have been the foundation; in another, art and religion; and over there, population pressures or social organization and hierarchy. Eventually they all ended up in the same place. Perhaps there is no single path to civilization; instead it was arrived at by different means in different places."
To claim that "Religion created civilization" on the basis of Gobekli Tipi is simply absurd.
Are we to say then that Julius Caesar was a religious leader?