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Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion
In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions?
Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born.
Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.
Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born.
Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2010
13 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
James David Lewis-Williams
31 books68 followersLewis-Williams had been interested in archaeology in his youth.[2] When interviewed on 19 February 2014 in his office at the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI) at WITS, Lewis-Williams related that in the early days of apartheid, there were very few English-speaking archaeology teaching posts available. One was held by John Goodwin at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the other was held by Clarence Van Riet Lowe at WITS. These posts were in addition to several Afrikaans-speaking posts held at the University of Pretoria (UP)as well as a number of national museums. To major in archaeology was not an option for an undergraduate in South Africa at the time, and in 1952 Lewis-Williams enrolled for a BA at UCT majoring in English and Geography. After his graduation he taught English for twenty years, taking up a position at Selborne College and subsequently at Kearsney College. In the school holidays, Lewis-Williams was able to follow his passion for archaeology, organising field trips for the boys of Kearsney to explore the Drakensberg for rock art images. In 1964, while still teaching, he completed an Honours degree through the University of South Africa (UNISA) entitled Cove Rock: A study in coastal geomorphology. Several years later, Lewis-Williams met Professor John Argyle after giving a College Lecture in Pietermaritzburg. Argyle, who was professor of social anthropology at the University of Natal, suggested that Lewis-Williams do a master's degree under his supervision. Living comfortably in the grounds of Kearsney College, Lewis-Williams was not rushed to complete his master's. Eventually Argyle decided to pressure Lewis-Williams by upgrading his degree to a PhD which was finished in 1977 and published in 1981 as Believing and Seeing: Symbolic meanings in southern San rock paintings.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 1, 2017
Lewis-Williams is convinced that religion ultimately has a neurological origin: i.e. it is a construct of the human brain. His book deals with a cool, dispassionate and quite thorough presentation of why he has this belief.
He is also firm in the belief that it is not possible ever to reconcile 'religion' and 'science' as being two separate ways of knowing. There is only one way of knowing (and that is through science), and it is only comparatively recently that humanity has had access to increasingly sophisticated studies of the human brain that has permitted the first steps to be taken in the scientific study of both 'normal' and 'abnormal' brain functions. These have contributed to a reappraisal of archaeological findings, especially in the cave paintings of some 70,000 years ago, that reveal the possibility that common neurological explanations can be attributed to what have to now been attributed to 'religious' activities.
In one fascinating section (although possibly the more difficult part to read through, because of the anthropological terms necessary to explain them) he examines certain ancient paintings and then compares them to the drawn images of the mystic Hildegard of Bingen to identify a possible common source of these so-called 'visions'.
Lewis-Williams is not at all aggressive in his analyses. Yet he does not shy away from suggesting that any attempt to 'reconcile' religious beliefs with science is doomed to failure. His final chapter ('God's Empire Strikes Back') is a superb and succinct analysis of all the main arguments contemporary religionists have posited against science, and effortlessly and relentlessly Lewis-Williams finds them all lacking. For atheists possibly smarting at the relentless attacks and sneering condescension they often receive from fundamentalists, this is a soothing balm, and is perhaps alone worth the price of the book.
He is also firm in the belief that it is not possible ever to reconcile 'religion' and 'science' as being two separate ways of knowing. There is only one way of knowing (and that is through science), and it is only comparatively recently that humanity has had access to increasingly sophisticated studies of the human brain that has permitted the first steps to be taken in the scientific study of both 'normal' and 'abnormal' brain functions. These have contributed to a reappraisal of archaeological findings, especially in the cave paintings of some 70,000 years ago, that reveal the possibility that common neurological explanations can be attributed to what have to now been attributed to 'religious' activities.
In one fascinating section (although possibly the more difficult part to read through, because of the anthropological terms necessary to explain them) he examines certain ancient paintings and then compares them to the drawn images of the mystic Hildegard of Bingen to identify a possible common source of these so-called 'visions'.
Lewis-Williams is not at all aggressive in his analyses. Yet he does not shy away from suggesting that any attempt to 'reconcile' religious beliefs with science is doomed to failure. His final chapter ('God's Empire Strikes Back') is a superb and succinct analysis of all the main arguments contemporary religionists have posited against science, and effortlessly and relentlessly Lewis-Williams finds them all lacking. For atheists possibly smarting at the relentless attacks and sneering condescension they often receive from fundamentalists, this is a soothing balm, and is perhaps alone worth the price of the book.
August 20, 2012
David Lewis-Williams authored two of my favorite books that I've read in recent years, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (2002), and, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (2005). The Mind in the Cave figured heavily in a paper I wrote for my Masters and I have looked forward to additional synthesis of his ideas. Inside the Neolithic Mind is also an important work, but I'm most interested in trying to figure out what happened back in the cave. In Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion (2010), Lewis-Williams' returns to the cave and the neurology of the Homo Sapiens who left signs of their emerging religious sensibilities on its walls. In some ways Conceiving God is his most personal book to date. The core of his argument, literally and conceptually, are found in chapters five through nine, where he applies his prodigious knowledge of archeology and anthropology to the question of the origin of the religion impulse and all its subsequent accretions. There is an edge to his other chapters that theists (and some accommodationists) may find off-putting , but Lewis-Williams is not nearly so abrasive as some of the new atheists and he's a better writer, so I found his work bracing.
March 11, 2021
A rousing condemnation of religion with interesting pieces of the argument coming from archaeology, history and anthropology.
February 21, 2012
Excellent addition to the literature of scientifically explaining religion, but unpersuasive in some of its claims.
David Lewis-Williams has written an excellent book with "Conceiving God." It is learned, clearly written, and synthesizes (as any explanation of religion must) many fields of study to make its case. Covered here are a range of topics including the differences in the epistemological methods of science and religion as well as an interesting discussion on the history of science.
The author's specialty is archaeology and thus he brings much from this field into his book. His discussion of the Volpe caves is fascinating and persuasive. This was a welcome change from the often used examples in this field of ethnographies and recent written history. This merit allows the author to fulfill much of the titular promise of explicating the "Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion" since his thread of evidence leads further back along the homo sapiens timeline than many other authors in the field.
Central to Lewis-Williams' thesis is the idea that altered states of consciousness need explanation and that the explanations working hand-in-hand with the experiences is what led to belief in the supernatural:
"Even as other components of human consciousness were emerging (such as a sense of self), people were aware of two basic realms: they did not have to invent a realm of inner experience, dreams and visions. They merely had to deal with the weird, non-real experiences that their brains sometimes generated. And they did so by accepting the existence of a parallel realm where all this was happening, what today we call the supernatural. Belief in a supernatural realm thus formed in parallel with conscious perception of the material world, symbolic thought and the notion of a person as an individual distinct from other individuals" (p. 157).
Lewis-Williams argues that these altered states should be given primary standing in the explanation of religion; he even argues that the tiered cosmos such as heaven and hell and their analogues can find their origin in the "common human proclivity to experience passage through a vortex. That commonality is wired onto the human nervous system and manifests itself in certain conditions of altered consciousness" (p. 168). I don't find this persuasive.
If Lewis-Williams had narrowed his intended explanatory depth to include mostly only the "imagistic" side of the "imagistic/ doctrinal" dichotomy Harvey Whitehouse has identified Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, I would have found him to have a much more sound argument. The "imagistic" types of religious practices are more often associated and founded upon altered states of consciousness and it is with this type of religion that Lewis-Williams' argument has the most traction. But the author seems to have forgotten this distinction after a brief mention on p. 184.
The final explanatory chapter, where he compares the experiences and visions/ art of Hildegard de Bingen with San rock art is compelling and sound. But to extend that into an explanation for more doctrinal religions or as a cause, rather than an effect of their ultimate origin in Hildegard's case, is overstepping precise argument in my estimation.
Foremost, the percentage of religious believers who experience altered states of consciousness is a non-majority. So, to offer some persuasive belief to someone without these experiences, one would have to give them something believable within their own mind that lacks these experiences.
The position that I find to be most accurate regarding a naturalistic understanding of religion is that mundane, everyday social cognition utilized outside the domain of natural causation is the bedrock of religious thought and the primary anchor in its persistence. In other words, the Machiavellian evolutionary history of human psychology predisposes us to seek social answers in matters of causation since the costs of false negatives are extremely high while the costs of false positives are extremely low when it comes to interpreting causation in the social realm. E.g. Mistaking events as unintentional instead of intentional can get you killed as in the signs of an enemy or vastly reduce your social standing as in not recognizing ambiguous acts of kindness and letting them go unrecognized. Doing the opposite, as in mistaking unintentional events as intentional, results in simply being wrong with little consequence other than wasted time. Gods and other supernatural agents are simply the (ultimately invented and culturally supplied) slot-fillers in the heuristic of interpreting causation in social terms. The role of altered consciousness, as I see it, would come later, filling in the cultural, doctrinal, and narrative specifics of religion.
I certainly would not deny the power and role of altered states of consciousness in explaining religion, but I would relegate it to a secondary position. A good example would be the Christian Saul turned Paul. This Christian Church forefather more than likely had some type of neurologically-based altered state of consciousness that played a role in his religious conversion on the road to Damascus and his resultant unflappable conviction. But his audience (at least the majority) would not have had such a life-changing experience. Therefore, all of his teachings and arguments, while motivated and started by his altered consciousness experience, would have to rely on other, more mundane mental propensities in his audience if they were to survive transmission. Moreover, it could be said that social cognition gives us the basis for religious thought, while many key figures in the history of religions like Paul or Mohammed - who more than likely experienced altered states of consciousness - gave us much of the specific teachings and doctrines.
To illustrate this, I will return to the example of tiered cosmos that Lewis-Williams seeks to explain via the pan-cultural nature of altered states of consciousness. This explanation may account for the structure or "geography" of this supernatural realm, but I'd not go as far as to say it accounts for the ultimate origin of afterlife beliefs. I'd argue in parallel with psychologists Paul Bloom Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human and Jesse Bering The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life that an innate "dualism" (a sort of naïve, folk dualism - not the systematized philosophical position) plays heavily into why people believe in an afterlife realm. Indeed, even explicit afterlife skeptics when tested in one of Bering's experiments, said that a dead man "knows he's dead now." This speaks of a baseline or intuitive cognitive constraint that makes it very hard to imagine the cessation of consciousness since it is paradoxical. How do you imagine, while conscious, the unconsciousness of another? It is impossible.
Examples like the previous inform my position that altered states of consciousness are a secondary concern in the endeavor of scientifically explaining religion. Lewis-Williams argues for them to have a more prominent role. I, obviously, dispute this.
That aside and as a general note about the book, it is polemical at times as other reviewers have noted. This did not bother me as a non-believer, but I could see it raising the hackles of other readers. Overall, I'd recommend this book to any serious scholar or student of religion (although any theological realist will find little comfort here). Even if the primacy of altered states of consciousness in explaining religions turns out to be unpersuasive (as I find it to be), the arguments herein are nonetheless thought-provoking and on the right explanatory trajectory.
4 ½ stars.
David Lewis-Williams has written an excellent book with "Conceiving God." It is learned, clearly written, and synthesizes (as any explanation of religion must) many fields of study to make its case. Covered here are a range of topics including the differences in the epistemological methods of science and religion as well as an interesting discussion on the history of science.
The author's specialty is archaeology and thus he brings much from this field into his book. His discussion of the Volpe caves is fascinating and persuasive. This was a welcome change from the often used examples in this field of ethnographies and recent written history. This merit allows the author to fulfill much of the titular promise of explicating the "Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion" since his thread of evidence leads further back along the homo sapiens timeline than many other authors in the field.
Central to Lewis-Williams' thesis is the idea that altered states of consciousness need explanation and that the explanations working hand-in-hand with the experiences is what led to belief in the supernatural:
"Even as other components of human consciousness were emerging (such as a sense of self), people were aware of two basic realms: they did not have to invent a realm of inner experience, dreams and visions. They merely had to deal with the weird, non-real experiences that their brains sometimes generated. And they did so by accepting the existence of a parallel realm where all this was happening, what today we call the supernatural. Belief in a supernatural realm thus formed in parallel with conscious perception of the material world, symbolic thought and the notion of a person as an individual distinct from other individuals" (p. 157).
Lewis-Williams argues that these altered states should be given primary standing in the explanation of religion; he even argues that the tiered cosmos such as heaven and hell and their analogues can find their origin in the "common human proclivity to experience passage through a vortex. That commonality is wired onto the human nervous system and manifests itself in certain conditions of altered consciousness" (p. 168). I don't find this persuasive.
If Lewis-Williams had narrowed his intended explanatory depth to include mostly only the "imagistic" side of the "imagistic/ doctrinal" dichotomy Harvey Whitehouse has identified Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, I would have found him to have a much more sound argument. The "imagistic" types of religious practices are more often associated and founded upon altered states of consciousness and it is with this type of religion that Lewis-Williams' argument has the most traction. But the author seems to have forgotten this distinction after a brief mention on p. 184.
The final explanatory chapter, where he compares the experiences and visions/ art of Hildegard de Bingen with San rock art is compelling and sound. But to extend that into an explanation for more doctrinal religions or as a cause, rather than an effect of their ultimate origin in Hildegard's case, is overstepping precise argument in my estimation.
Foremost, the percentage of religious believers who experience altered states of consciousness is a non-majority. So, to offer some persuasive belief to someone without these experiences, one would have to give them something believable within their own mind that lacks these experiences.
The position that I find to be most accurate regarding a naturalistic understanding of religion is that mundane, everyday social cognition utilized outside the domain of natural causation is the bedrock of religious thought and the primary anchor in its persistence. In other words, the Machiavellian evolutionary history of human psychology predisposes us to seek social answers in matters of causation since the costs of false negatives are extremely high while the costs of false positives are extremely low when it comes to interpreting causation in the social realm. E.g. Mistaking events as unintentional instead of intentional can get you killed as in the signs of an enemy or vastly reduce your social standing as in not recognizing ambiguous acts of kindness and letting them go unrecognized. Doing the opposite, as in mistaking unintentional events as intentional, results in simply being wrong with little consequence other than wasted time. Gods and other supernatural agents are simply the (ultimately invented and culturally supplied) slot-fillers in the heuristic of interpreting causation in social terms. The role of altered consciousness, as I see it, would come later, filling in the cultural, doctrinal, and narrative specifics of religion.
I certainly would not deny the power and role of altered states of consciousness in explaining religion, but I would relegate it to a secondary position. A good example would be the Christian Saul turned Paul. This Christian Church forefather more than likely had some type of neurologically-based altered state of consciousness that played a role in his religious conversion on the road to Damascus and his resultant unflappable conviction. But his audience (at least the majority) would not have had such a life-changing experience. Therefore, all of his teachings and arguments, while motivated and started by his altered consciousness experience, would have to rely on other, more mundane mental propensities in his audience if they were to survive transmission. Moreover, it could be said that social cognition gives us the basis for religious thought, while many key figures in the history of religions like Paul or Mohammed - who more than likely experienced altered states of consciousness - gave us much of the specific teachings and doctrines.
To illustrate this, I will return to the example of tiered cosmos that Lewis-Williams seeks to explain via the pan-cultural nature of altered states of consciousness. This explanation may account for the structure or "geography" of this supernatural realm, but I'd not go as far as to say it accounts for the ultimate origin of afterlife beliefs. I'd argue in parallel with psychologists Paul Bloom Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human and Jesse Bering The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life that an innate "dualism" (a sort of naïve, folk dualism - not the systematized philosophical position) plays heavily into why people believe in an afterlife realm. Indeed, even explicit afterlife skeptics when tested in one of Bering's experiments, said that a dead man "knows he's dead now." This speaks of a baseline or intuitive cognitive constraint that makes it very hard to imagine the cessation of consciousness since it is paradoxical. How do you imagine, while conscious, the unconsciousness of another? It is impossible.
Examples like the previous inform my position that altered states of consciousness are a secondary concern in the endeavor of scientifically explaining religion. Lewis-Williams argues for them to have a more prominent role. I, obviously, dispute this.
That aside and as a general note about the book, it is polemical at times as other reviewers have noted. This did not bother me as a non-believer, but I could see it raising the hackles of other readers. Overall, I'd recommend this book to any serious scholar or student of religion (although any theological realist will find little comfort here). Even if the primacy of altered states of consciousness in explaining religions turns out to be unpersuasive (as I find it to be), the arguments herein are nonetheless thought-provoking and on the right explanatory trajectory.
4 ½ stars.
January 12, 2018
I read 2 of the author's books- Inside the Neolithic Mind, and The Mind in the Cave, and found these excellent and formed the core of my archeological library. Conceiving God was an enormous disappointment. The cognitive origin part was scant. The major effort and thrust was Denying God, which became very tedious and repetitious, consuming the last 100 pages. Everyone hates the bad things that have happened in the name of any religion, not just him. His demand, in italics, page 117, "We must look to the material world for evidence that there is a spirit realm." is science's demand that God show himself to science, which isn't going to happen, so why go on and on about it? To be scientific, science has to acknowledge that science is one way of investigation, and there may be many others that we don't know about yet. We only recently gained cognition, and are yet children in the sandbox. Page 277 sums up the book: "When brave religious souls do enunciate what they believe to be the 'meaning of life', it turns out to be both trivial and unbelievable." That's the tone throughout the book. It was like reading a 300 page book on travel by someone who has never left the sofa.
June 26, 2021
Excelente descripción de cómo se generó la religión en nuestra mente
Gran cantidad de información histórica, buena narrativa y encadenamiento de los hechos con opiniones y conclusiones muy concretas. Trata de mantener respeto por las creencias religiosas, salvo en aquellos hechos que son incuestionables para la ciencia
Gran cantidad de información histórica, buena narrativa y encadenamiento de los hechos con opiniones y conclusiones muy concretas. Trata de mantener respeto por las creencias religiosas, salvo en aquellos hechos que son incuestionables para la ciencia
November 30, 2022
Two books in one: (a) an atheist's history of the science-vs.-religion story since Thales of Miletus, which isn't particularly something I needed from Lewis-Williams, and (b) a discussion of Paleolithic art in the Volp caves of the French Pyrenees, and a comparison of Hildegard of Bingen's medieval visions and those of San shamans in southern Africa -- sections that bolster Lewis-Williams' ideas about the neurological basis of religion, which is exactly what I was hoping for. So if you're a fan of "The Mind in the Cave" and "Inside the Neolithic Mind," ignore Ch. 1-4 and 9-10 (read Hitchens or Dawkins instead) and enjoy the rest.
One of L-W's notions was especially gratifying: that Stonehenge and other such monuments weren't "astronomical observatories" (ancient people hardly needed elaborate calculations to tell them when the seasons changed), but were created by the priestly or shamanic class to reinforce their privileged positions. This might point the way to reconciling his work with Julian Jaynes' suggestion, in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," that the ancient world was, to put it crudely, populated entirely by schizophrenics. Maybe it was only the thought leaders enjoying altered states.
One of L-W's notions was especially gratifying: that Stonehenge and other such monuments weren't "astronomical observatories" (ancient people hardly needed elaborate calculations to tell them when the seasons changed), but were created by the priestly or shamanic class to reinforce their privileged positions. This might point the way to reconciling his work with Julian Jaynes' suggestion, in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," that the ancient world was, to put it crudely, populated entirely by schizophrenics. Maybe it was only the thought leaders enjoying altered states.
February 19, 2016
His theory of why man conceived religion is not exactly what I expected, but quite different from anything I had ever been taught or ever figured out for myself. I'm not sure I agree with him and I still have LotS of questions, but I'm glad I read the book.
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