On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind
beliefs have detrimental consequences for ourselves
and others (Langs 1996). Ancient and still active
concepts such as faith, sacred, worship, as well as the
central concept of God, all with little or no direct
relationship to physical survival in the externally
sensed world have, nonetheless, led to life and death
conflict. Wars have been fought, and are even now
being fought, masses of people killed, because of dif-
ferences in religious belief. Undoubtedly, all this has
contributed to the dearth of scientific inquiry into
evolutionary sources of belief and the potential role
of imagination in the development of religious ac-
tivity. Many religious differences, at the rarely-ex-
posed marrow of belief, center on what continuance
there might be for an individual mind after death,
and on what behavior might influence such contin-
uance. The question appears to be as old as the men-
tal equipment required for asking it.
Imagination: Structure and Process
Unlike the information-seeking external senses,
imagination creates its own information: new and
sometimes distorted images of the natural world. It
is a basic human characteristic, more basic than in-
telligence, which is abundant in the animal world
(Bronowski 1977). As here described, imagination is
an aspect of mind that we know by its lexical mean-
ing: “the act or power of forming mental images of
what is not actually present; the act or power of cre-
ating mental images of what has never been actually
experienced, or of creating new images or ideas by
combining previous experiences; creative power”
(Webster 1996). It is the “employment of past per-
ceptual experience, revived as images in a present
experience at the ideational level” (Drever 1964,
p130), “the process of creating objects or events
without the benefit of sensory data” (Chaplin 1985,
p221). Stephen speaks of the existence of autonomous
imagining, “imagery so compelling, so powerful it
can even override all demands of external reality”
(1989, p56), imagery “experienced as an external, in-
dependent reality”, and propose that religious expe-
rience “is grounded in the psychological reality of a
special imaginative process operating outside ordi-
nary awareness” (p212). James describes that experi-
ence, “the convincingness of what it [imagination]
brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and
realized with an intensity almost like that of an hal-
lucination. They determine our vital attitude as deci-
sively as the vital attitude of lovers is determined by
the habitual sense, by which each is haunted, of the
other being in the world” (1936, p71).
It is useful here to distinguish between two funda-
mental mental attributes: intellectual and imagina-
tive. Compared to the intellect, imagination is a
more subtle mental phenomenon, seemingly impos-
sible to quantify (Eccles 1989). “The imaginative
process is the human capacity to evoke an image or
an idea in the absence of a direct perceptual stimu-
lus” (Rangell 1988, p63), “to make images and move
them about inside one’s head in new arrangements”
(Bronowski 1977, p24). Beres defines imagination
broadly, “as the capacity to form a mental represen-
tation of an absent object, an affect, a body function,
or an instinctual drive... a process whose products are
images, symbols, fantasies, dreams, ideas, thoughts,
and concepts” (1960, p327). Dennett speaks of im-
ages as existing within a phenomenal space that can
contain a god or heaven as well as a tangible object:
“Phenomenal space is Mental Image Heaven, but if
mental images turn out to be real they can reside
quite comfortably in the physical space in our
brains, and if they turn out not to be real, they can
reside, with Santa Claus, in the logical space of fic-
tion” (1978, p186). I suggest that for early Homo sa-
piens with emerging imagination (as for a large num-
ber of modern humans), real objects and “Santa
Claus” reside together quite harmoniously.
To all this I would add that, in relation to the
brain’s processing of external information, imagina-
tion functions as sensory-distorting perception. To
the extent that this perception leads to something
new that can be shared, we might call it “creative
imagination”. Here, individual processes are ex-
tended to those of a social nature: to the sharing of
illusions and the formation of new images as a social
process. Products of imagination are qualitatively
different from mere illusions, from that perversion
of sense-data which might occasionally have taken
place in pre-imaginative hominid brains (and in
those of other animals). With the advent of imagi-
nation, illusions would increase and assume new
forms and new functions. One positive function
would be to divert the individual from fearful
thoughts involving “self” and change. Koestler
speaks of this function as: “the transfer of attention
from the ‘Now and Here’ to the ‘Then and There’—
that is, to a plane remote from self-interest” (1964,
p303). In an imaginative state, a state identified as
Absolute Unitary Being, a state described in the mys-
tical literature of the world’s most ancient religions,
individuals lose their sense “of discrete being, and
even the difference between self and other is obliter-
ated” (d’Aquili/Newberg 1998, p195). Religious lit-
erature describes imaginative states in which indi-
Evolution and Cognition ∣ 4 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1