Did civilization begin with the desire to worship?

Explaining the evolutionary advantage that accounts for the near-universal religious impulse in humanity has been a difficult challenge for those who wish to assert that bread making is the basis of our existence. How could we as a species establish such dominance on planet earth when we perpetually expended what looks to our contemporary standards as inordinate amounts of scarce resources on religious activity? Wouldn’t these ancient inhabitants of modern Turkey have been further along devoting their best minds and resources to improving hunting technology rather than carving figures and standing up stones?

Our way of thinking assumes that some ancient, pragmatic, atheistic tribe should have outperformed their religious competitors, who spent their days building elaborate religious sites, performing sacrifices and employing priests. The superior tribe would be expending their scarce resources building a better spear rather than spending time trying to connect with the great power in the sky. All evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Why is it that nearly every religion employs fasting as a means of relating to the transcendent? Should we retranslate another of Jesus’ famous sayings as “you can’t serve both God and food stuffs?”

David Bentley Hart says this about we moderns in his book,

“To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing – or, better, in nothingness as such. Modernity’s highest ideal – its special understanding of personal autonomy – requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose.”

What does it say about our civilization if we discover that the ground of civilization is in fact the religious impulse? Evidence again and again seems to indicate that the human being is not the thinking animal, or the tool-making animal, or the rational animal, but rather the worshiping animal.

Augustine was right: our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. The restlessness of our hearts, it seems, is what makes us the civilization-building animal.

Paul Vander Klay is the pastor of a in Sacramento, Calif. Read more on his and .