Greek philosophers such as Xenophanes conceived of god as “the underlying reality that permeates all creation.” In ancient Persia, the prophet Zarathustra taught of “the very First and the Last,” the only god in the universe. The Pharaoh Akhenaten mandated the exclusive worship of Aten, suppressing that of the traditional gods of Egypt and shutting their temples.

Yet, while people kept imaging and worshiping gods in their image, a different understanding of the divine began to emerge - the notion of a singular god, a god without human qualities. The religions that we invent serve to legitimatize and support the communities that we live within. Moving from psychology to history, Aslan charts the development of ideas about the divine, as human beings projected their qualities - good and bad - onto the gods and their institutions upon the heavens. It is from this built-in intuition, he suggests, rather than from our desires and fears, that religious ideas such as the existence of gods first came into being. Aslan adds a further hypothesis: Human beings have universally believed that they have an immaterial soul distinct from their physical bodies.

For Aslan, the “compulsion to humanize the divine is hardwired in our brains.” Recent developments in cognitive theory suggest that certain religious ideas emerge from the workings of our nervous system, our innate tendency to attribute human causes to phenomena we encounter and to view other beings in the ways in which we see ourselves.

Reza aslan book