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About Human History
It is difficult for us to conceive of the concept of being that is not tied, as we are, to the shackles of time. When most people think of God as “eternal” they don’t think of an existence outside of time. Instead they simply think of a being that has lasted a long time and which will continue to last. Unfortunately, this is not the meaning of an “eternal” at all.
The Nature of Time
Before we can discuss history, perhaps we should start with the nature of time.
Returning for a moment to out discussion of the larger universe, we have understood since Einstein that time is tied to the physical universe. Time is simply a dimension of that universe like height, width, and breadth. We are free to move through the three dimensions of space in any direction. We are constrained in our movement through time in that we move only one direction—from the past to the future. It seems like we move through time at a steady pace, one second after another. However, scientifically, we know that this is simply an illusion. How fast we move through time depends on how quickly we move through space. Our “space-time” pace remains constant relative to everything else in the universe. This means that the faster we move through space, the slower we move through time, relative to everything else in the universe. At the speed of light, progress through time stops relative to the rest of the universe.
If we could ride a light beam, we could travel all over the universe instantaneously. Everything outside of our light beam would be just one big, frozen blur as we moved through it. A ball through empty space would appear to be a solid bar extending solidly through space, following the course it traveled. If we imagine the entire universe extending through all time, it would “appear” from somewhere outside of it as a giant star, originating at a center (the point of the big bang) and extending outward, in rays that become more distant as that galaxies move apart from each other. There would be no motion, since motion itself takes place in time. Instead of moving from one point to another, an atom viewed from the timeless perspective of seeing all time at once, would appear at every point it would ever occupy. This is not quite the eternity of God, which is even more complex for reasons addressed later, but it gets us closer at least in conception.
From this timeless perspective, we can ask ourselves how different experiences of time would look. For example, Would a ball moving quickly through space look differently from one moving slower? If we assume the universe has a fixed life span, the “length” of a fast ball would be greater than the “length” of a slower ball since the faster ball would cover more space in a limited about of time. The slower ball, however, might appear more “solid.” Since it would occupy each point in space somewhat longer, it would block light for somewhat longer. Everything that is moving (which is everything) would appear extremely transparent since light would also pass through the same points in space for almost all of the time of the universe. Matter would just be a hazy blur fogging up space. At every point outside of small ball of the first few moments of the big bang, empty space dominates matter in the universe.
In this strange, frozen universe, large objects like galaxies or even planets controlled by gravity would make very regular objects. A spinning galaxy would be a solid disk, but moving out through space, that disk would appear to be a “solid” bar. Within this “solid” bar, we could perhaps see the course of a single star, spiraling through the bar of the universe. A planet circling that star would appear as a corkscrew filament wrapping the corkscrew of the star.
Looking more closely at an earthlike planet and factoring out its spin and motion through the universe, the surface would appear to be a mix of ground and water, as the movement of continents and seas blurred them together. Growing things would tinge area with green. Examining a location more closely would show the shadows of every grass, bush, and tree that grew at the location. If we could see a single tree among this mess, we could see every stage of growth a once, from a sapling till the time it fell. Animals would look even stranger. Since they move, even a small mouse would cover more space than the giant oak. Its life path would appear to be a tangles mass of courses as it moved from one place to another. Every moving creature would life line in the shape of a tangled network that contained all its paths upon the earth.
A human life is much more difficult to evaluate from this point of view. Like an animal, our lives are a network of movements, but the greater part of our lives is not what we do. What we say and often what we think, that is, our intensions make up a greater part of our lives. A complete timeless view of a human life would include not only seeing a person as a child, adult, and old person, but hearing every word they said and every thought they had. It is fun to look at any person, from the worst villain to the greatest hero, and imagine what this complete view of his or her life would look like. It lessons the importance of a few key events that usually define villainy or heroism and instead puts everything in the viewpoint of the everyday trends of their lives and everyday interaction with people.
The Record of History
How do we discuss human history as a whole from this timeless point of view? When people say that God has a plan from humanity, it doesn’t mean that he is waiting for it to unfold. From the perspective of eternity, the creation is there. There is no before or after. It is all there, every moment accessible. When the John writes in his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” he is expressing the universe from the perspective of a time-bound creature. For us, there was a beginning, but God takes in all of time at once. God exists outside of this four-dimensional time-space apprehending all eleven or twelve dimensions of its dimensions at one.
With this in mind, it is almost silly to try to capture God’s perspective in human words. From our perspective, something may have happened two thousand years ago, but from the divine perspective, that moment and this moment are one with the moment of creation and the moment of ending. From a divine perspective, human history and all other history of the universe was fashioned as a piece, all together, outside of time.
As time-bound creatures, our tendency is to judge history like people by the dramatic moments. We have a difficult, if not impossible time, evaluating history by gradual changes over time, by all the little daily events that add up to make the vast abundance of our lives. We see the moment, perhaps the death of a child, but we don’t usually see this occurrence’s effect over time except in rare cases like that of John Walsh, who was inspired by the death of his child to start a television show tracking down criminals. These repercussions of events are hidden from us in the future, and we can see them in history only if they were some how "recorded" for us to find.
Despite our limited access to its archives, human history is in some ways the definitive record of the way the world works. Many histories may have been possible at the emergence of our species, but our race took only one, specific course. Our forefathers and mothers made certain choices and didn't make others. The effects of their choices became our history. To the degree we can uncover our history, we don’t have to imagine how people might behave over time. We have a physical record and, (for the last several thousand years) a written record of how humans choose and the results of their choices.
The Success of Religious Belief
Some of the earliest graves of Homo Sapiens contain offering and equipment apparently intended for the afterlife. We cannot know the specific beliefs of these people regarding God, but we do know that they believed that human consciousness was bigger that the perceptual world. The goods that they left with their dead were much rarer, harder to manufacture, and more valuable then than now, so their belief was costly. If we assume that there were also people at the time that did not believe in an afterlife, these non-believers would have had an economic advantage over believers simply because they would have the use of materials that believers were burying in the ground. A social Darwinist view seems to indicate that non-believers should have emerged over time as the “successful” competitors for the land.
This, of course, was not the case. From what we can tell, belief in an afterlife becomes more popular over time, not less so, despite the economic costs. More importantly, we can look at what happened as people developed civilizations and started recording history. We could compare the relative success of “non-religious” civilizations to those that were “highly-religious” except for the fact that there appear to be no non-religious civilizations. All forms of early civilizations were not only religious, but what we would certainly describe as highly religious. If there were any civilizations that were materialistic, in the modern sense of believing only in the physical world, then they didn’t survive long enough to leave a record.
We should note that something else very significant happened at the beginning of civilization: the invention of writing. My personal belief is that writing allowed the creation of civilization because it preserved knowledge from generation to generation. It allowed the law of the ruler not only to be preserved and transmitted over distances. The invention of writing was the invention of civilization. The fact that kingdoms began to appear was not a coincidence, but the necessary result.
There is, of course, a connection between writing and religion. Religion was a gift from the gods, a religious artifact. Reading and writing were not general skills. The king didn’t necessarily read and write. Reading and writing was the province of the priests. Initially, there was little distinction between writing and math, which, along with observation of the heavens, was also part of the practice of religion. In other words, learning about the universe and preserving that knowledge for future generations began as a religious practice.
Still, let us take the “modern” view. All of these early civilizations were religious because they were “primitive.” They lacked the science to describe the universe and explain its existence without relying on a God or gods. Perhaps some mental defect in humans—our consciousness perhaps—craves the divine so people accept religious experiences and explanations. In this were the case, what would we expect from human history? If indeed, a materialistic view of the world was more accurate, we would expect that, as civilizations became less religious, more materialistic, they would become more successful. After all, religion is expensive in time and energy that could be better employed elsewhere. We should see a general blossoming of civilization as religion is forgotten.
Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true. Many long-lived civilizations from Egyptian to Roman pass through various stages of alternating piety and indifference regarding religious belief. Periods of devotion were characterized then, as now, with morality, personal virtue, and a general distrust of earthly pleasures. Periods of “liberation” were, of course, characterized by a weakening of morality and embracing of earthly pleasures. Which of these periods were associated with the rise and which with the decline of the civilization involved? We know the answer. Consistently, the weakening of religious value is associated with the decline and fall of civilizations. Not once and a while, but over and over again.
Still, we can find good “non-religious” explanations for this fact. It does not necessarily demonstrate that the nature of the universe (or, in a word, God) supports religious civilizations and abandons irreligious ones. Virtue and what people call “morality” are just practices that are more productive in the long-term. They protect us from disease and addiction. They make certain that children are born into families that care for them. “Sinful” practices produce short-term pleasure, but are generally destructive long-term. So, as societies fall into decadent periods are more likely to decline.
The Difference in Eastern and Western Paths
Then in looking at the rise and fall of civilizations, we might note that there is a curious pattern in the relationship of religions to earthly empires. In general, all major religions last a very long time, that is, for a good share of recorded history. Islam is that baby of the groups at only 1300 years old. A whole group of religions, Christianity, Buddhism, and Taoism are from 2,000 to 2,500 years old. The elder religions are Judaism and Hinduism which both stretch back to the beginning of written history more than 5,000 years ago.
In comparing the course of eastern and western religions and civilization, we notice two dramatic differences.
First, there is a difference about how religions were outmoded. In the west, we have a number of dead major religions. The well-developed and ancient religions of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome no longer exist. These religions were outmoded by Christianity and Islam. Over time, people of the west choose monotheism exclusively and only monotheistic religions remained. In the east, the polytheistic religions tended to absorb one another and blend together. Buddhism and Taoism did not put an end to the older Hinduism. This makes sense in from what we know of polytheistic religions in the west which added new, regional gods to their general pantheons readily. Hinduism itself might be considered a polyglot of early polytheistic beliefs. Interestingly enough, however, all three monotheistic religions came from the same roots and consciously worship the exact same personal God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.
The other difference is how long a given earthly empire lasts, especially after the emergence of monotheistic religion. In the west, the polytheistic Egyptian and Roman empires lasted a long time. However, after the emergence of the dominance of monotheism, starting say 1,500 years ago, we don’t see any long-lasting empires. Religions, as always, continued on, but we saw no more thousand year empire. In the east, this never happened. China, Japan, Thailand, and others have empires lasting almost as long as their religions. The Chinese Empire founded in the third century BC is basically the same empire ruled by China today. The Japanese Emperor traces his root back to the founding of Japan as a decedent of the a goddess of the Shinto religion. These empires resulted from the same consolidation represented by Greece and Rome in the west at the end of the Iron Age, but they remained. Their rulers may have changed from era to era, but the changes of dynasties did not much change their character, boundaries, or bureaucracies. In the west, meanwhile, we emerged with monotheism into an almost constant state of conflict.
Looking at this objectively, we might say that something changed about human civilization when Christianity was mixed in. Older major religions were, for the first time, getting abandoned and the tendency toward stable empires seemed to have been reversed, but, for a thousand years after the introduction of Christianity, nothing interesting seemed to happen resulting from these changes except for the general chaos in the west that we call the dark ages.
The Introduction of Printing
Then, something very interesting happened. The printing press was invented. We will assume that it was just a curious coincidence that the first book printed was a Bible and that, like the invention of writing, it was first used as a device for spreading religion, in this case, from the priestly class to the common man. What we cannot deny is that the invention of the printing press changed the world as dramatically as the invention of writing. For the first time, information was not only preserved and moved easily, but now it was duplicated cheaply, made available to everyone, regardless of class. b
The immediate effect of this was the Renaissance. Shortly there after, we had the Reformation. The printing press led directly to the acceleration of science and learning and exploration leading, more or less directly to the modern era. The reformation led to the new world, and, more or less, to the modern era.
Interestingly enough, the printing press had been invented in China at least several times before it was invented in the West. However, in every case, the Chinese Empire repressed the device, as it did all scientific advances, in the interest of keeping the empire stable. Those stable empires that existed outside the reach of Christianity were invested in keeping things stable. On the other hand, the chaos of the dark ages had prepared a fertile ground for the acceptance of the revolution.
As I’ve said, the apparent role of religion as a driving force in the development of civilization may have nothing to do with the interaction of God with his creation. Religion may just be a psychological affliction that just happened to play an important role in human development.
The Perception of Divine Actions
I heard a speech recently by a college professor from New College in London. His theme was about how science was working to eliminate superstition, you know, like religious belief. His method was to lump the religious with those who believed in fortune-telling, psychics, and every other paranormal fraud. At the end of his lecture, he tried to show how Hume’s version of Occam’s razor debunked all superstition. Hume stated that in choosing between two opposing propositions, we should choose the one that offers the least contradiction with what we know is true.
As an example, he choose a “miracle” that happened at Fatima in 1915. By this time, the visitations had become famous and a crowd of 70,000 people had gathered. They didn’t see the Virgin Mary, but, at the end of the visitation, the entire crowd saw the sun suddenly rush towards them, zooming closer and closer until it seemed almost to strike the earth. Then, just as suddenly, the sky was back to normal.
Now, our professor did not dispute the fact that 70,000 people saw this. He admitted that it was well documented that they had. He “proved” that this was not a supernatural occurrence by the fact that no one else on earth saw the sun move, so that sun hadn’t moved. Hence, there was no miracle. Using Hume’s logic, it is easier to believe 70,000 people were mistaken that it is to believe that the rest of the earth’s population was mistaken; therefore, no miracle had occurred. He was certain that this scientifically addressed the entire problem and that he didn’t have to address the fact that 70,000 people had apparently all apparently been mistaken about something so obvious.
For me, this is typical of the religious skeptic. 70,000 people experienced something, but let’s prove that what they thought they saw didn’t happen so we can dismiss it. A real scientist would have asked the next question. The sun didn’t move, what is it that they all saw and what could cause that?
It is my personal theory that Divine action always acts ways that are ambiguous. We are always left the choice to believe. Even when we have no explanation for something other than divine action, people, like this college professor will find perfectly rational reasons to choose another explanation. This nature of choice is in itself a mystery worth considering.