Early Evolution of Religion

86:1.1Aside from the nat­u­ral wor­ship urge, early evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion had its roots of ori­gin in the hu­man ex­pe­ri­ences of chance—so-called luck, com­mon­place hap­pen­ings. Prim­i­tive man was a food hunter. The re­sults of hunt­ing must ever vary, and this gives cer­tain ori­gin to those ex­pe­ri­ences which man in­ter­prets as good luck and bad luck. Mis­chance was a great fac­tor in the lives of men and women who lived con­stantly on the ragged edge of a pre­car­i­ous and ha­rassed ex­is­tence.

86:1.2The lim­ited in­tel­lec­tual hori­zon of the sav­age so con­cen­trates the at­ten­tion upon chance that luck be­comes a con­stant fac­tor in his life. Prim­i­tive Uran­tians strug­gled for ex­is­tence, not for a stan­dard of liv­ing; they lived lives of peril in which chance played an im­por­tant role. The con­stant dread of un­known and un­seen calamity hung over these sav­ages as a cloud of de­spair which ef­fec­tively ec­lipsed ev­ery plea­sure; they lived in con­stant dread of do­ing some­thing that would bring bad luck. Su­per­sti­tious sav­ages al­ways feared a run of good luck; they viewed such good for­tune as a cer­tain har­bin­ger of calamity.

86:1.3This ever-pres­ent dread of bad luck was par­a­lyz­ing. Why work hard and reap bad luck—noth­ing for some­thing—when one might drift along and en­counter good luck—some­thing for noth­ing? Un­think­ing men for­get good luck—take it for granted—but they painfully re­mem­ber bad luck.

86:1.4Early man lived in un­cer­tainty and in con­stant fear of chance—bad luck. Life was an ex­cit­ing game of chance; ex­is­tence was a gam­ble. It is no won­der that par­tially civ­i­lized peo­ple still be­lieve in chance and evince lin­ger­ing pre­dis­po­si­tions to gam­bling. Prim­i­tive man al­ter­nated be­tween two po­tent in­ter­ests: the pas­sion of get­ting some­thing for noth­ing and the fear of get­ting noth­ing for some­thing. And this gam­ble of ex­is­tence was the main in­ter­est and the su­preme fas­ci­na­tion of the early sav­age mind.

86:1.5The later herders held the same views of chance and luck, while the still later agri­cul­tur­ists were in­creas­ingly con­scious that crops were im­me­di­ately in­flu­enced by many things over which man had lit­tle or no con­trol. The farmer found him­self the vic­tim of drought, floods, hail, storms, pests, and plant dis­eases, as well as heat and cold. And as all of these nat­u­ral in­flu­ences af­fected in­di­vid­ual pros­per­ity, they were re­garded as good luck or bad luck.

86:1.6This no­tion of chance and luck strongly per­vaded the phi­los­o­phy of all an­cient peo­ples. Even in re­cent times in the Wis­dom of Sol­o­mon it is said: “I re­turned and saw that the race is not to the swift, nor the bat­tle to the strong, nei­ther bread to the wise, nor riches to men of un­der­stand­ing, nor fa­vor to men of skill; but fate and chance be­fall them all. For man knows not his fate; as fishes are taken in an evil net, and as birds are caught in a snare, so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it falls sud­denly upon them.”