The Invention of Religion

Comedian Ricky Gervais is a funny guy, a very talented comedian, and an outspoken atheist. In his movie The Invention of Lying, there is a scene where the character he plays invents religion. If you haven't seen the movie, you have to understand the concept: the film takes place in a parallel world where humans haven't evolved the ability to lie, and Mark Bellison (played by Gervais) is the first person to ever lie. Because of Bellison's ability to lie, and everyone else's inability, every time he lies, people believe him. Eventually, Bellison tells everyone that there is a powerful man in the sky who is watching over everyone, and this man rewards good behavior in a special place after death.

It's funny, but there's something about it that bothers me. Gervais is making a statement about religion as an atheist that I don't think is true. That implied statement is that religion wouldn't exist without lying. He's suggesting that the source of all religious ideas is someone telling a lie.

(Perhaps it's important to take an aside here and talk about the nature of lying in itself. I want to distinguish a difference between lying, which is to deliberately tell someone something that one knows is false, and merely saying something which may not be true but one believes it to be a fact. Gervais and other atheists may believe that there is no God, but when a theist talks about God, they're not lying, they're talking about the truth as they see it.)

Now this is the thing, and the point of this piece: while there may be religions that started by someone telling a lie (and I can think of a few likely candidates, but I won't go there), I don't believe that that's how most religions were started, even if all religion is bunk. I can think of a lot of other ways that religion could be started, and I actually believe they are more likely.

There are a lot of variations on the idea of religion starting as the result of philosophical thought; these are not quite lies, but rather people thinking deeply about the world around them and coming to conclusions that the world is a certain way supernaturally because it somehow makes sense to them. The most simple form of this is the likely scenario of people trying to explain natural phenomena without scientific knowledge. Imagine living in a primitive society and experiencing thunderstorms. Where is that noise coming from? A lot of polytheistic religions have a god of thunder, and I imagine if you don’t know where thunder comes from, you would think there's something in the sky making that noise, and maybe it's a powerful man with a giant hammer? If you start imagining things this way, it would likely follow that you'll assign gods to other aspects of nature. There must be a god of the sun, who makes sure it shines and always crosses the sky on schedule each day. It would also make sense that there's a goddess of the moon, then. And so on and so forth, and someone eventually gives these gods names and comes up with stories about them that stick in the cultural consciousness. None of this is lying per se, but attempts to explain nature and the world around us.

I think some religions start with someone thinking that surely there must be a higher power, and surely that power must care about humankind and our moral choices. That someone puts into words a moral code, and expresses that God or the gods endorses this moral code, because of course they would. This person or persons sincerely believe this to be true. (I think we see a bit of this in already established religions, such as the many doctrines of Christianity that were established hundreds of years after Christ. Original sin? The rapture? Not in the Bible, but someone thought they made sense, so they became doctrine.) Honestly, it's a fine line here between lying (this is truth because I want you to believe it's true) and pontification (this is the truth because I am certain that it's right).

I think one can't rule out the idea of religion starting because of a person just being the right sort of crazy. There are a lot of people who hear voices in their heads, and there are certainly more than a few who decided (or the voice told them) that it was the voice of God. If they hear the voice of "God" and it's telling them things that aren't too farfetched, then when they tell other people that God is talking to them, they could easily be believed, and a religion could be born. On a similar note, a lot of people believe that those who had visions of God or something divine were either crazy or had ingested some sort of hallucinogenic substance. If their visions made some sort of sense, it could start or add to the religion of a group of people who believe in those visions.

All of the scenarios I have suggested so far have suppposed no actual supernatural intervention, but really, I don't think you can rule it out, and if you consider the supernatural, there are all sorts of other scenarios. You don't even have to get into the concept of religion possibly being true (although I of course don't rule that out either).

If there are supernatural powers out there that can influence people in some way, then there's certainly the possibility of those powers influencing religious thought. If there was a powerful being that wasn't God as westerners tend to think of him (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and creator of the universe), that being might nonetheless for one reason or another want to be thought of as God, and influence people to think that way. I suppose in such a case, religion is technically still a lie, but not a lie from humans. If an angel (a word that just means "messenger") came to you with a message from God, and the angel looked very impressive, you might be inclined to believe that message.

There may in fact be multiple "gods" out there vying for people's attention, and each would have a message of truth that would be different from the messages of other gods. Perhaps these messages were even actually true, but only within a specific scope of time or region. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, but many have suggested that there are many gods, and these gods get power based on how many people they can get to believe in them. (Terry Pratchett actually has a novel that is largely about exploring this concept humorously as part of his Diskworld series called Small Gods; it's a terrific novel that I think is both entertaining and thoughtful about the nature of religion that I highly recommend.) The idea seems too farfetched for reality to me, but then what about religion isn't farfetched?

There are probably many other possibilities that could account for the start of religion, but of course, there is still the possibility that one or many religions is actually the truth. Certainly all religions can't be true, because a lot of them contradict one another, but that doesn't preclude at least one being true. And just because one is true doesn't immediately imply that all others are false. As a Christian, I am of the opinion that Christianity is true, but I feel that it's implied that Judaism is also true. In fact, it may be a truism of all the Abrahamic religions that Judaism is true, since all of them build off of that foundation in one way or another.

So, are there religions that are based on a lie? Almost certainly. Are most, or even all religions based on lies? No, I really don't believe that's the case. I believe that most religions are based on people trying to have an understanding of the parts of the world that they didn't understand without religion. Some of these understandings were accurate at least in part, while many were not. But it wasn't about lying. For whatever reason, I think that's an important thing to understand.