Religions And Their Source/1. Religions' Origins/1. Assumptions
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No one knows just how religious beliefs and practices began, but a plausible explanation is that such ideas and customs grew from the assumptions that early men and women would have had to make. Let me elaborate.
Everyone makes thousands of minor assumptions every day, and normally these all transpire unnoticed. We get up, dress, eat, do chores, go to work, return home, prepare a meal, and so on, continuously making subconscious assumptions that determine the way we act. For example, we assume that other people will behave in much the same way as they always have—and they do. We assume that the bus will arrive, that stores and offices will open, that we still have a job to go to—and we are usually right. Any incorrect suppositions we might make are generally inconsequential, and corrections are easily, and mostly subconsciously, made.
We make assumptions because we can never know all there is to know about any facet of our lives, or about any object or event we encounter. Our true state of ignorance is seldom apparent to us, but our lack of knowledge makes itself known every time there is an important decision to be made, one whose consequences might seriously affect us, or the lives of those we love, for instance. On these occasions we quickly discover how little we really know. Anyone considering marriage or buying a house for the first time, for example, knows this feeling. At such times we may temporarily be unable to make a decision, for fear of the consequences were we to make a “wrong” choice. When such feeling arise, we spend much time gathering and evaluating information, trying all the time to replace assumptions with accurate knowledge. Thus, although we rarely notice that every decision we make has its fringe of assumptions, such is the case.[2]
Early humans would have faced exactly the same difficulty. They knew even less than we do about the true state of most affairs, and making assumptions would have been the only way they could have made decisions. And—just as happens to the assumptions we make—after a while many of the useful assumptions they made would have become indistinguishable from facts.
