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One way of categorising religion is the distinction between polytheism (belief in many gods) and monotheism (belief in one god). But according to a fascinating article in The Economist, some scholars of comparative religion make a distinction between the gods that watch over small societies and those that watch over larger, more complex societies.
The latter kind – the ‘Big Gods’, as the article’s anonymous author calls them – can feature in polytheistic or monotheistic belief systems; what they have in common is that they are perceived as a “supernatural ‘eye in the sky’ who cares whether people do right by others”. Most of the main religions in the world today fall into this category. The gods of smaller, less complex societies – the deities of tribal mythology – “tend to demand only that people show deference to them”:
“One theory holds that this is because small societies do not need a supernatural policeman. If everyone knows everyone else, antisocial elements are easily managed. But as societies grow, and especially as they absorb ethnically and culturally diverse groups through conquest, a different policing mechanism is needed. What could be better than an all-seeing eye that enforces co-operation between friends and strangers alike?”
But which came first, the development of big societies or belief in ‘Big Gods’?
The article summarises a comparative study led by Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford University, which concludes that in almost all parts of the world, “Big Gods appeared about 100 years after a society took a leap forward in complexity, with populations in the region of 1m”.
So big societies first, then Big Gods:
“If Dr Whitehouse and his colleagues are correct, today’s religions did not create modernity but, in the past at least, they held it together.”
Of course, contemporary western scholarship doesn’t really do God as a starting assumption, let alone as the explanation for observable religious phenomena. It is, therefore, predisposed to functional explanations of religion – God made in man’s image, not the other way round.
But leaving that aside, and assuming the historical correctness of the claim that belief in Big Gods usually emerges only after big societies become established, might there be an alternative to the functional explanation? Here’s one hypothesis:
Whether or not one believes in the reality of a ‘Big God’, the idea of a divine being who is beyond our ability to fully comprehend has always been out there. Crucially, the jumping-off point for our conception of what we can’t comprehend (and thus can only have faith in) is what we can comprehend. For instance, one can’t believe in an afterlife without a concept of death; nor can one believe in a creator without a concept of nothingness.
So, if smaller, simpler societies had no concept of a Big God who cares about the justice of complex social relationships, is that mainly because they had no immediate need of such a belief system? Or because they had no concept of complex social relationships (having never experienced them)? Surely, it is not until these structures emerged that human beings could conceive of how God might be greater than – and set the standards for – such a society. People may always have had an inkling of the bigness and beyondness of the ultimate realities, but when it comes to articulating that intuition into a formal system of belief, developments run only just ahead of human experience.
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