On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind

Conrad Montell

viduals lose their awareness of self and with it lose
their mortal fears. In such states, rather than adding
to awareness, imagination acts as a filter, a curtain,
or even as a screen, distorting, dimming, or obliter-
ating awesome perceptions. In such states, imagina-
tion serves to transport or sever the individual from
the sources of mortal fear. Historically, in literary
theory, “it was opposed to reason and regarded as the
means for attaining poetical and religious concep-
tions” (Holman/Harmon 1992, p241).

As it first evolved, imagination, undoubtedly,
would merge with older forms of illusion—in and
out of dreams. “In primitive stages of hominid spe-
cialization dream may not have occurred exclusively
or even mainly in sleep. For eons of human (or proto-
human) existence imagination probably was en-
tirely involuntary, as dreaming generally is today,
only somewhat controllable by active or passive be-
havior” (Langer 1972, p283). Langer gives support
to the view of the pioneering French psychologist
Jean Philippe who described imagination as a kind of
biological entity: “In the complexity of our mental
organization it is a sort of living cell, which main-
tains its life through manifold and diverse transfor-
mations” (Philippe 1903, p4). Whatever it physically
consists of, imagination most likely evolved with
Homo sapiens. Expressions of it are difficult or impos-
sible to detect from the monotonous tools and other
archeological finds from the long record of Homo
erectus, although it seems likely that at least gestation
of human self-awareness had begun by the end of
this period of some hundred thousand generations
of big-brained and potentially aware creatures who
became extinct 200,000 years ago. Mithen, ponder-
ing how little Homo erectus seemed to create with his
large brain, speaks of a “shuffling of the same essen-
tial ingredients” in their technology for more than a
million years, with only “minor, directionless
change” (1996, p123).

Imagination in Its Early Forms

The earliest artifacts that have been found to ex-
press imagination, those from the late Middle and
early Upper Paleolithic periods, express religious ac-
tivity having to do with death and mortality. The
earliest traces of beliefs and practices are of such re-
ligious form: Neanderthal burials seventy thousand
years ago and perhaps even older burials in China;
elaborate Paleolithic cave art drawn in dark, tortu-
ous, difficult to access recesses; evidence of animal
worship and of rituals associated with hunted ani-
mals; and other prehistoric evidence of the struggle
to understand and come to terms with individual
death and glimmers of mortality (Donald 1991;
Holmes 1996; Parrinder 1984). In historic times we
see this struggle for understanding expressed in the
earliest literature, in all known cultures. These cul-
tural products express the religious thought that
seems to be the primal focus of human imagination,
as we first encounter such imagination in salient
human behavior (Brown 1959; Dennett 1995;
Freud 1950; Hocart 1954; James 1936; Jaynes 1976;
Langs 1996, Langer 1982; Mithen 1996). I argue
that the imaginative parts of mind were naturally se-
lected in response to debilitations that paralleled
awareness of mortality. Imagination and compan-
ion devices to process and store its products in
memory evolved to mitigate that awareness, to dis-
cover offsetting information beyond the apparent
horizon, to sense a more favorable reality, and thus,
to make the emerging awareness of death more
bearable, and to make the aware individual more fit.
Although much of the prehistoric process may
never be known, evidence for this function of imag-
ination permeates history and contemporary hu-
man life. Donald describes the universal impor-
tance of religious belief within hunter-gatherer
societies, all of whom appear to have an elaborate
mythological system similar in principle:

“Myth permeates and regulates daily life, chan-
nels perceptions, determines the significance of ev-
ery object and event in life. Clothing, food, shelter,
family—all receive their ‘meaning’ from myth. As a
result, myths are taken with deadly seriousness: a
person who violates a tribal taboo may die of fear or
stress within days, or be ostracized, or put to death”
(Donald 1991, p215).

There is neuropsychological data to suggest that
“human beings have no choice but to construct
myths consisting of personalized power sources to
explain their world” (d’Aquili/Newberg 1998,
p191). Supporting this, a range of cultural products
reveals the primacy of mortal fears and religious
hopes in diverse societies throughout time and
throughout the world. Every known social group has
had a religion that includes some sense of immortal-
ity or some attempt to deny the reality of death
(Brown 1959). As one well-documented example,
Egypt, four thousand years ago, a society of some
seven million people, devoted the bulk of its surplus
and some of its essentials to the building of monu-
ments for its Pharaohs. To prepare dead bodies for
entry into an imagined next world, living bodies suf-
fered hunger in this world. There is evidence, in the
caves that housed them, that many of the hundreds

Evolution and Cognition ∣ 5 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1

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