The Concept of Deity
This speculation was in line with the evolutionary thought of the period in which it arose, but it has now become apparent that it was too neat and tidy, too specialized and intellectualized an approach to explain accurately the origin and development of religion and of the concept of deity.
The starting point of religion must be sought in something more comprehensive: in a belief in a sacred power which transcends the universe, and is its ground and support. This may not have been personified, and so it would seem to have been a vague conception of providence as a creative and recreative power operating in the food quest, sex, fertility, birth, death and the sequence of the seasons. When the idea of this potency acquired an independent life of its own in its various aspects and functions, it found expression in spiritual beings, ghosts of the dead and departmentalized divinities. These had many different shapes and forms, and characteristic features and functions of their own, emerging from a common providential source, incalculable, strong and good, determining the operations of nature and the destinies of humanity, at once above and within the world of time and space.
The recurrence of this conception of deity in all states of culture and phases of religious development from prehistoric times onwards suggests that it arose spontaneously.
It was the expression of some inborn thought and feeling, rather than a developed kind of knowledge about the universe and natural phenomena.Its highest expression undoubtedly has been in its monotheistic idea of god as the sole creator and sustainer of all things. So far from polytheism passing into monotheism, speculation about the cosmos and its processes led to the peopling of the natural order with a multitude of spirits and gods, making the supreme being a very vague and inoperative figure obscured in the mist of animism and polytheism, unless it became a pantheistic impersonal absolute as in I Hinduism in India and elsewhere in the Far East. In the other higher religions, to be considered later in this volume, a genuine monotheism was firmly established, notably in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Under Palaeolithic conditions the notion of providence was much more within the capacity of this stage of prehistoric mentality than speculation about the animation of nature in relation lo spiritual beings and departmentalized divinities organized on a personalized hierarchal basis, or of one wholly exclusive living god like the Aten in Egypt, Ahura Mazdah in Iran, Yahweh in Israel and Allah in the Islamic world, or the Trinity in unity in Christendom.
Prehistoric Religion
It would appear that religion in some form or other has been an essential element in the life and culture of humankind throughout the ages, going back far beyond the threshold of history. Moreover, many of the beliefs and practices of the later and higher religions, both ancient and modern, are rooted in their prehistoric prototypes of the Old Stone Age, a period lasting roughly from about 500,000 BC to 10,000 BC. This phase therefore has its place and significance in any study of the religions of the world, past or present. The difficulty, however, about such an inquiry is that nearly all the available data are confined to those concrete survivals like graves, sacred places and their contents, sculptures, bas-reliefs, engravings and paintings that have escaped the ravages of time. Their interpretation must be to some extent conjectural, but much of the material has survived, little changed, in everyday occurrence among the peoples who live today under conditions very similar to those of early humans. If employed with proper caution such evidence can afford useful and illuminating clues to the purpose and meaning of prehistoric religion..........Continued.........
