Been wanting to write some short history of where religion came from for a whole week or two now, but I couldn't think of where to begin. So I thought why not THE beginning.
13.7 billion years ago or so, singularity existed no bigger than a computer case. It was so hot and dense that things like gravity, magnetism, and the nuclear forces didn't exist. It was so compact that not even individual atoms existed; it was pure energy. No one knows how long this lasted, and is little chance we'll ever know what came before, but quantum physics tells us that even if there was nothing before this, something could have come of it.
There are two things the people most commonly get wrong about the Big Bang theory. One is that it is just a theory, as though theorys definition was that of the layman and is synonymous with supposition or guess. It is not a supposition and is based on facts as a requirement. The second is that it breaks one of the laws of thermodynamics or the conservation of energy by creating energy. Most people who invoke this claim have never read the text for themselves and do not understand that it only applies to isolated systems and requires an imbalence. Not only do we not know if the universe is an isolated system, but even if it is what we can see of the universe shows us a net zero energy. What this means is that the laws of quantum physics tells us energy can be borrowed if both positive and negative are created and eventually paid back. So the universe at net zero energy means that it breaks no laws. All this energy just has to be given back one day.
What we know for sure is eventually this singularity began expanding and in a matter of microseconds forces that shape our world today were created. Takes only another 10 or 20 min. before it is cool enough for atomic nuclei to form, yet it takes almost 400,000 years before hydrogen and helium atoms form. Few hundred million years later. Some of these clouds of helium, hydrogen and lithium have collapsed to become the first stars. It is in the hearts of these stars that the heavier elements with the form, and the first time, the universe, our universe, would see anything beyond the first three elements. These first stars would explode and spread their enriched course throughout the clouds of other systems which would collapse and become new stars and create heavier elements.
It takes another 9 billion years of this constant destruction and rebirth before the little system of Sol has enough mass to collapse. The entire disc would've been spinning already collecting in small pockets here and there, but then the very center of this mass would've become nuclear, and our newborn son would have blasted away the excess gas from this area. This would've been like blowing away all in revealing the structures underneath. We would've seen the eight planets we know but probably many, many more dwarf planets are Pluto.
In the beginning our planet would've been molten and rotating much faster than it is today (probably 4 hour days), but not as dense as it is today. Spinning so fast, some used to theorize, that part of the molten rock was flung off into space and became our moon. This theory has since been replaced by the now accepted theory that another body, about the size of Mars crashed into the earth; the debris slowly accumulating to become the moon over the next hundred years. This was somewhat confirmed when the first moon rocks were returned to Earth, and we found them to have the same composition of Earth's oldest rocks.
4.5 billion years ago, when this all took place, the earth had no water on it, and almost no atmosphere. The solar system too was a much different place; it was young and filled with debris constantly battering the planets. In our case, this was a good thing because frozen water was raining down on the earth with the rocks. Over the next few hundred million years, a few meteors became pools of water, pools became lakes, lakes became oceans, and it was during this very early period when life began on this planet.
No one knows for sure how life began. The scientific consensus is that it was abiogenesis, which is life from lifelessness, but there are others who believe that it was panspermia. No, that is not some lewd act, it is the hypothesis that life began elsewhere and was seeded here on one of the many tons of rock and ice that fell on the planet in its early years. Personally I have no problem with either theory because even panspermia requires abiogenesis, just on another planet. Either way, extreme conditions for hundreds of millions of years across the entire globe… and one day a cell replicated. The fact that we have not replicated that in a lab yet is not evidence of anything. (That last bit was just my rebuttal against the religious reply to abiogenesis, which is “we cannot do it, ergo: “God” must have”, which is no different than the caveman who said the same thing about lightening and the rain.)
Assuming abiogenesis (cause it is irrelevant whether it happened here on another planet first), the cool thing to note at this point is that all it took is liquid water and a few million years and life began. The reason this cool is because it means all life needs is water and time, so any place that has liquid water has a chance of also having life that didn't begin on Earth.
At the time that life began in the oceans are atmosphere was still toxic filled with ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide. Excluding the pressure and the heat, our air was probably a lot more similar to that of Venus than that of earth today. It took more than a billion years, but eventually cyanobacteria evolves due to all the CO2 that has been sinking into the ocean. This is the first form of life that can convert light and carbon dioxide into oxygen. Another half million years down the road, and there is so much oxygen in the oceans that life evolves to convert oxygen into energy. I like to think of this little single celled critter as our first ancestor, the first creature to respirate.
Few hundred million years later and we’re at around 2 billion years ago. Nothing really special happens to life around this time (except that a bunch of it is killed off) , but kind of anything happens, where the new atmosphere has caused a drop in global temperatures to roughly that of Antarctica. This period is called Snowball Earth and the tire surface of the planet is covered in ice.
The next major news begins around 600 million years ago and is kind of the real start the story, because this is when multicellular life evolves, and it does so with an explosion of new forms of life, quite aptly named the Precambrian explosion.
From here on out it is basically an evolutionary arms race with some creatures evolving better catch other animals and other animals evolving to better avoid being caught. At first creature would have to touch another to know was there. Eventually they evolved photoreceptors, or proto-eyes. Then came the brain, spine, lungs, appendages and all the other beginnings to the organs we have today.
A few hundred more million years later and life makes its way out of the oceans. Starts with plants, followed by creatures which can eat them, pray looking to get away from predator, and predator following them. Anyone afraid of bugs would've hated this era of 2 to 3 foot long insects.
I'm sure most people know this era, but the next stage came when large reptiles gave way to even larger dinosaurs and these dinosaurs flourished and became dominant all over the planet. This wasn't that big a feat, though, because the entire Earth's land mass was all connected as one super continent called Pangaea (this was the case until about 200 million years ago, when it began breaking apart).
The next really important thing happens around 66 million years ago, 100 mile wide asteroid struck the earth, setting North America on fire, triggering global volcanoes and covering the planet in soot and dust. This was the last major extinction level event (or ELE), and it killed off 75% of all plant and animal life on earth. The numbers are uneven though, and most fish survived, while nearly all forms of non-avian dinosaurs did not.
For 50 to 100 million years before this happened, mammals existed but were unable to gain any sort of foothold because of the diversity of dinosaurs. They were incredibly small, lived underground, and were exclusively nocturnal, but after the dust settled from the dinosaurs were all gone, our little rodent ancestors began spreading over the former dinosaurs’ territory. Their size and ability to survive on small amounts of food also helped him survive what would've been many years of nuclear winter.
Evolution is pretty clear-cut from here on out; start out as little squirrel looking things, 15 million years later and they look more like lemurs, 10 million years later and they kind of look like the monkeys of today, another 15 million years and they look almost exactly like the great apes we know. That was 25 million years ago, and our brains and grip had evolved greatly.
7 million years ago we developed a larynx, which allows us our speech today. 2 million years after that and thinning forests in Africa are what most likely had us beginning to walk upright more often. 2 million years ago, we find something that looks pretty human and has begun to use tools as well as hunt animals.
From 2 million years ago to the few hundred thousand years ago, there were several humanoid species, but eventually it came down to the more evolved Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. And while the Neanderthal was bigger, stronger, more rugged and had a slightly larger brain, they were less clever and slowly went extinct (the most recent cave painting by them we can find dates to 25 000 years ago).
We had long developed using our voices to communicate, but it was not until around 100 000 – 150 000 years ago that we actually developed a language. This was also around the time that we begin to develop something like animism, or the belief that everything has a life, as well as the concept of an afterlife, because we began burying our dead.
These new clever humans spent the next hundred thousand years learning to adapt to their environment instead of simply waiting to evolve to survive it, and they now traveled the globe. They spread to India, Asia and Australia, around 60 000 years ago, North America around 35 000 years ago (and again 10 000 years ago), and finally, South America, Iceland, Alaska and northern Canada, around 15 000 years ago.
Until about 10 000 to 15 000 years ago all humans were nomadic hunters. Then for the next few thousand years we developed farming and animal husbandry; we settled down. This is also around the time that several species of animals became domesticated. Some, like the pig, because we caged them and forced them to rely on us, and some, like the wolf, because it could sometimes be easier to feed off our scraps and be friendly with us.
It would be another 5000 to 10 000 years before enough of us began settling in a group that we call it a civilization. 6000 to 7000 years ago, pre-civilized cultures (Neolithic) had begun in China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and India, but the primary two are considered to be Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was in these two places where we find the earliest forms of writing around 5000 years ago and it is from these writings that we know the civilizations already had well-developed religions based on polytheism. However, we also know from tablets 4000 years ago that the first established laws were based on practicality and not religion (see the Code of Urukagina).
(Four pages in and just now getting to the origin of today's religions.)
During the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, about 1336 BCE or 3300 years ago, a Pharaoh by the name of Akhenaten decided to go against the polytheistic tradition and told his people that they were to worship one of the gods above the others. This was not well-received, and he didn't last long, but the importance of the story is that this is the most likely origin of the story of Moses and the birth of Judaism. It is entirely likely that one of Akhenatens ousted priests began the first version of what we now know as the New Testament, which would have begun as an Egyptian document regarding several or many gods, which was edited to instead say that only the one God should be worshiped.
As we know today. This has turned into “there is only one God”, rather than “just don't worshiped the lesser ones”. If you have read the Bible. This makes sense because of the sometimes contradictory descriptions of God; sometimes he is the God of love, sometimes the God of war, jealousy, anger, peace… Us atheists sometimes like to joke that He cannot be all of these things at once, but it seems more logical if it was a book originally written to describe all the gods.
More than 1000 years of this message passed down by word of mouth mostly, in the longest game broken telephone ever, and you wind up with thousands mythical stories of the past and prophecies of things yet to come. Seems pretty obvious to me that one prophecy in particular would have been foretold and that is the one about God sending a shit starter to shake things up (because of course people want to let other people know they are doing religion wrong, and they will have to pay for it one day).
2000 years ago Jesus shows up, and he happens to be born during some of the worst internal conflict the Middle East has ever seen. So of course there are going to be fanatics, and Jesus happened to be one of them. Eventually, his message was passed around enough that he had a small following, but that is all it would be for many generations. His popularity did grow, however, and after 300 years of persecuting and killing Christians in the same way they did hold the other pagans, one Roman leader happened to take an interest and declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Had this one thing happened is unlikely that Christianity would be any more popular today than the cult of Athena is, or even that Islam would have ever been born.
As the Empire liked to violently expand was now spreading religion as well as the sword, Christianity, and the religion from which it took its borrowings, Judaism, became widely known. This notoriety spread by war but also by the Christian traders who spent the next 1700 years bringing religion to every continent on earth. One trader in particular is of note, a man born Muḥammad ibn `Abd Allāh in the year 570 CE, and the founder of Islam.
Unlike Jesus, Muḥammad was fatherless by age two, and completely orphaned by age six, however, the rest of his childhood could be considered similar to the environment Jesus grew up in. He grew up with pagans and poverty, and although Jesus never started a war (in his lifetime), they both appeared to begin their message as one of unity and helping the underclass. Adopted by his uncle, by age 9-10 and all through his teens, he traveled to Syria often for trade, and it was on these trading trips that he would hear about the monotheistic religion which spoke of humility and honesty (if you don’t read the entire book). It would be another 30 years till at age 40 he began to preach his revelations to those around.
Unlike Jesus or the mythical Moses, the spread of Islam after this was rapid, at least locally, and was done at the cost of many lives during war, but eventually the new rule united large areas of land. However this was not the end of bloodshed and area has rarely had a decade without some internal or external violence to contend with. Not that they were alone, as the Christian nations to the west either were involved in those conflicts, or fared no better at home.
I won’t detail the next 1250 years of wars (many based at least in part on religious differences), but they include the dozen Christian “Crusades”. Suffice it to say, none of the religions, not even the self-proclaimed “religion of peace”, brought any such thing to any place for long.
(Yea I am jumping ahead 1000 years… so what, you didn’t care when I jumped ahead 9 billion years on page one did you? lol)
At this point I would encourage you to Google the YouTube video “Spread of Religion”. It is accurate and shows very simply where and when religion spread using a map view of the area.
What you will see is that after the spread of Islam, it was a 1300 year struggle between Islam and Christianity to define the borders between the two. What most people do not know is that it was the Imperialism of Christian nations occupying Muslim nations after the First World War which made Islam such a big deal for these nations. That, most likely, had the Ottoman Empire not been so crushed and occupied that Islam would have likely become less influential in peoples lives (as Christianity has in most nations). These occupied nations began to strive for a national identity under the rule of another nation, and religion was the easiest route.
Today we see those claiming no religion on the rise, but we are also seeing that as the religious become more concentrated, they are also becoming more fundamental, and often extremist. Personally I can only hope we go the way of several European nations, where the religious are no longer the majority, and it happened peacefully. More importantly, the religious of those nations are not threatened or lashing out.
Well that is everything up till WWII pretty much… I guess I did not plan out how I was going to end this. Hope you enjoyed it… it was mostly all from memory, and typed hastily, so excuse grammatical errors.