Francis Bacon said, "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted .... but to weigh and consider."

We talk about an "Act of God" when we do not understand the cause of the event or are unable to predict or prevent its happening. That kind of thinking has been described as creating a god of the spaces, filling up the empty spaces in our understanding with an image of a supreme father or being who controls and orders the universe. Each unexplained phenomenon was attributed to divine origin.

The Biblical heaven used to be envisaged as being in the sky (the heavens), until Galileo began to bring it within the orbit of human understanding. Slowly scientists have penetrated and are continuing to penetrate the mysteries of our earth and universe. Science is filling up the gaps in our understanding until the gods of the spaces have been drastically reduced.

We carry some image of our ideas pictorially. Even the idea of a void is a picture of the absence of anything, an empty space. I have asked many people who have stated their belief in the Biblical god, to put into words their image of him. To some he is a grandfather figure; after all their own father acknowledges him as "our father in heaven". To some, god is the supreme power to fear, someone looking for faults and who has to be appeased. To some he can be prevailed upon with difficulty to change his mind. I have not talked to anyone who has suggested that god has a sense of humour and could laugh at human mistakes. To most religious people, god seems to be a rather austere being who punishes those of whom he does not approve.

Dr. IE. Pfeiffer records in his book "The Emergence of Man" how an archaeologist, Ralph Solecki of Columbia University, excavated an ancient burial site in a cave in the Zagros Mountains of Iraq. He hit bed rock at a depth of forty-five feet. Seven Neanderthal skeletons were found, three of them were the remains of people crushed to death.

"At least one of the individuals, a man with a badly crushed skull, was buried in the cave with special ceremony. One Spring day about 60,000 years ago members of his family went out into the hills, picked masses of wild flowers, and made a bed of them on the ground, a resting place for the deceased. Other flowers were probably laid on top of his grave; still others seem to have been woven together with the branches of a pine-like shrub to form a wreath. Traces of that offering endure in the form of fossil pollen collected from the burial site, the remains of the ancestors of present-day grape hyacinths, bachelor's buttons, hollyhocks and yellow-flowering groundsels.

These findings, the graves and the patterns around them, mark a great change in human evolution. Death and presumably life, had become something special. No comparable evidence appears in earlier records, and as far as we know, men and the ancestors of men had always died like other animals before Neanderthal times, being abandoned when they were too weak to keep up with the band or wandering off to wait alone for the end to come."

Were such occasions 60,000 years ago the beginnings of belief in a hereafter or were they the mere display of human affection for an honoured member or leader of the tribe? We may never know the answer for certain. We do know that as the centuries went by, humans increasingly placed, not only flowers, but food and utilitarian articles in the graves of the deceased. This is an indication that the living were seeking to provide the dead with useful things to assist them on their journey into the next world.

It is submitted that religion arose because of human desire to understand and explain the world about us, to fill the gaps in understanding and to allay fears of the unknown. It originated in prehistory and over millennia has gathered myths and legends about it. Religion has also incorporated a great deal of sound folk wisdom which has become confused with religious moral teaching. We will discuss this more fully later and seek to show that ethics are a concern of sociology and the humanities. They stand on their own merit and are a basic human survival mechanism. Human ethics have very little to do with the appeasement of a god who is ready to punish disobedience. Indeed, the concept of a god is not a unifying social force but a divisive one, causing tension between believers and non-believers and between believers of different persuasions.

How did the idea of a superhuman being first arise? We shall never know, but there are several theories of interest. One explanation, involving the theory of Naturism was provided by Max Muller (1823-1900). Muller considered that the concept of god grew out of the personification of natural phenomena. Ancient people feared the phenomena they were unable to understand or control; fire, floods, earthquakes, or storms which decimated crops, uprooted trees and destroyed their livelihood. These forces were stronger than human beings; they were powerless to understand or do anything to control these forces. People wondered, was thunder the voice of an unseen superhuman being? So the ancients feared those forces and turned them into gods or goddesses of sun, rain, thunder, fire etc. They built myths and legends around these ideas and began to placate and worship their many gods in the hope of gaining favours or protection from the forces of nature. People created the idea of the gods, then attributed power to them. While the power of the gods and their representatives increased, the power of ordinary people decreased. The majority of human beings became emotionally dependent and subservient.

Another theory, suggested by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), is that the earliest form of religion was Ancestor Veneration. He suggested that when a powerful chief died, the people would wonder what had happened to his power. To witness the death of a revered person can often be an emotional moment of release or loss. The ancients hoped or feared that the dead leader could still perform good or evil. Another aspect of ancestor worship is the belief that humans have a spirit or soul. E.B. Tyior (1832-1917) called it Animism (Latin: anima - soul). He suggested that temporary loss of consciousness, dreams, fits and hallucinatory visions could cause ancient people to think that there was something in a human which existed apart from the physical body.

Yet another theory suggested by IF McLennen (1827-1881) and W. Robinson (1846-1894) was that Animalism or Totemism was the earliest form of religion. Totemism is rooted in the primitive sense of a deep affinity with creatures and things other than human. The theory was formed as a result of study of American Indians and Australian Aboriginals. These people included animals, plants and inanimate things in their ancestral mythology and named their tribes accordingly.

When we talk of world religions, we use the criteria of numbers of adherents. It is not a value judgement, a case of one religion being better than another. The five major world religions in order of age are, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. For our purpose we will include Judaism, not because of numbers of adherents but because of its importance in that it gave rise to both Christianity and Islam. We will briefly consider the non-Christian religions because they provide an interesting but different solution to the problems which Christianity seeks to address.

The beginning of Hinduism fades back into prehistory. Its most important sacred texts are the Upanishads, dated somewhere between the fifth and eighth centuries B.C. These provide the main source of the present-day theological thought of Hinduism. The Upanishads are written in Sanskrit, which is now a dead language.

The basis of Hinduism is the law of Karma and rebirth, a kind of automatic debit and credit system whereby the good and bad acts committed in life determine the ease or difficulty experienced in the next incarnation. Each person is considered responsible for his or her own state of being. The notion of original sin is not attributable to humanity as a whole, in the manner that Christian thought attributes the fall of Adam to all people. There is an awareness of good and bad, but not in the same communal sense. For the Hindu, the universe has no absolute beginning or end. It is a cyclical concept, a notion of a wheel of life and death followed endlessly by rebirth into the next earthly life.

In polytheism there are both good and bad gods, or many superhuman agencies. In monotheism there is one god and one superhuman agency. In the law of Karma and rebirth, there is no superhuman agency. By living each life as perfectly as possible, the believer in Karma hopes finally to reach the state of rest. The doctrine of rebirth eliminates the need for a divine controller of human destiny and provides an explanation for suffering. Blame can be placed on the individual for his or her present state of suffering.

Buddhism appeared in India in the sixth century B.C. as a doctrine of noble living. Later it declined in India and became prominent in China and the Far Eastern countries. The philosophy of Buddha is summed up in the Four Noble Truths. The first states that life is permeated with suffering and dissatisfaction. Second, the origin of suffering lies in craving or grasping. Third, cessation of suffering is possible through the removal of craving. Fourth, the way to cessation of craving is the Noble Eightfold Path. The practical side of the Buddha's plan to heal the world of suffering is found in the Noble Eightfold Path. This is: right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right contemplation. Neither the Four Noble Truths nor the Eightfold Path mention a god or gods.

Similarly, Confucianism did not originate as a theistic religion but rather as an ethical code of social behaviour. Confucius (551-497 B.C.) provided a blueprint for ethical living. He reformed and sys-temised earlier Chinese tradition into a coherent social doctrine which has influenced millions of people for two and a half thousand years. His original teaching does not mention god or gods.

While both Buddhism and Confucianism are basically concerned with aspects of human behaviour and thought, a measure of Hindu religious philosophy has filtered through to them also. Each of these present-day world religions has become theistic over the centuries. They have acquired rituals and now expect human devotion and dependency.

In contrast to the Hindu cyclical notion of an endless turning wheel of life and rebirth, Judaeo-Christian and Judaeo-Islamic religions have a lineal concept of time. They envisage a perfect beginning of the world, followed by a troublesome, unsettled middle, where good and bad are in conflict and religion is offered as the remedy for all ills. Finally, they believe there is to be a return to perfection when the world will end and the millennium of divine rule and happiness will be ushered in.

The Christian and Jewish Bible tells how the world is said to have begun. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth .... and God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good" (Gen.Ch.l). Very quickly we are introduced to the unsettled middle stage, the fall of humankind. Since Adam took and ate that apple in the Garden of Eden in defiance of god, all persons are said to be tainted with original sin. Every person now experienced the withdrawal of a holy god who could not look on sin.

No longer could people be trusted. Law was introduced, but the conflict between good and bad continued. Religious sacrifice was demanded as a means of achieving reconciliation with a god who was said to be holy. Many hundreds of thousands of animals have been slain over the years, in the belief that an angry god can be appeased by the shedding of blood. When the Christian philosophy appeared, it contained the ancient Judaistic teaching that original sin occurred with Adam and that a blood sacrifice was demanded by god for the remission of sin. Christianity considered that all human beings were inherently sinful. The sacrifice of Jesus was considered by Christians to be the all-time bridge of access to god. Gait. 4:4 tells us that "In the fullness of time God sent forth his son .... to redeem them that were under the law".

Finally, the end of the world is prophesied and the millennium of perfect peace and order is to be ushered in. The Christians are promised, that they alone shall enjoy eternal harmony and rest in the divine presence. Believers in the Islamic faith are also told by their holy Koran that they will occupy exclusive heavenly gardens and the favour of god.

It is interesting that the Christian religion has a great deal in common with the ancient Iranian polytheistic religion. The Iranians believed in opposing good and bad deities. The Christians have a good god and a bad devil or Satan. The Iranian god Mithra was believed to have been born from a rock. Jesus was believed to have been born of a virgin. Mithra became the defender and mediator between mankind and the higher deities. Jesus became the mediator between mankind and god the father.

Mithraism included a ritual of baptism, a sacred meal of bread and water, the concept of a blessed immortality for the followers of good, the divine judgment of the human soul in an afterlife and the personification of evil. The Christian faith embraces all of the above. Both religions comprise a dualism of a good god and an evil devil. It could be said that while one claims to be monotheistic and the other polytheistic, in essence both religions have the same philosophical foundation.

The Christian religion grew out of the Jewish religion and claimed the same god. It however, ended

up with a triune god or triunity of god the father, god the son and god the holy spirit. The final and complete rejection of polytheism was achieved as a result of the rise of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Islam spread much faster than any previous religion. The civilized world was ready for monotheism.

Each of the present day great religions has a different perception of the character of their gods or god and his relationship with a human person. One viewpoint cannot be considered better than another. Each belief is deeply engraved on the minds and hearts of its followers. We have all been influenced by the teaching of the community into which we happened to have been born. In the next chapter we will look at the difference between a belief system which has divine revelation as its authority and scientific investigation.