Over that last two years, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the sacred. First I collected a list of things that people say correlate with our treating things as sacred, and then I looked for general theories that could explain why humans might have a behavioral pattern with these correlates. In the story I prefer (a story proposed by others, extended by me) humans long ago evolved a general capacity that functions primarily to bind groups together by their shared view of certain special things. Different groups treat different things as (more vs less) sacred, and it matters less what a group treats as sacred than that that group treats the same things that way.
I recommend DS Wilson's book Darwin's Cathedral on this topic, along with the relevant parts of Haidt's The Righteous Mind. They make a compelling case that religiosity evolved to foster collective action. And true believers don't have to go through the kind of cost-benefit calculation they otherwise would when thinking about whether to contribute to public goods.
I’ll add another option from my faith tradition (LDS). Rather than an ancestral longing for God, we have a longing for God derived from each individual’s pre-mortal experience with God. We all lived with Him as spirits in a pre-mortal existence and now, though we don’t remember that, we naturally have an innate yearning to return to His presence, and to experience a spiritual connection with Him on Earth.
we know ourselves as makers, we forget ourselves, and make the hole we keep digging, it's the same shape as us, then we call it the creator, we worship ourselves, in shame we pretend it is another, much much later we invent faith as a loyalty test for empire
Is there something about my question that you did not like, thus you did not even attempt to answer it? I smell a bit of faith based thinking around here.
also I admit…. that often hope is faithed, and so often faithed until people make it, that peeps think that hope and faith are the same, while I abjure these practices, I sometimes forget others do not assume the same framework when I poeticise along my commentary... sorry
I see the stars as being sacred, not because I worship them, but because they're a manifestation of the pure energy of the universe from which we came; actively live in; and will return to once we die. Our ancestors seemed to grasp this better than we do now, which of course explains why cosmic symbolism appears throughout various religions and why the ancients always focused on the sky--it's where we came from billions of years before.
"Sacred geometry" is another example of this: specific, intricate patterns and shapes that appear throughout history, religion, nature, and the cosmos. They're linked to us, down to our very microscopic makeup. Truly sacred things is anything that remind us of our true nature, where we came from and who we really are: expressions of the universe.
Then mathematics and science are the language of the universe. We're just here to discover all of it. (Which is really just the universe discovering itself.)
Humans, like other social species, evolved mechanisms to promote group cohesion and group cooperation. The mechanisms that support this are as complex as the rest of us; some evolved via natural selection but many are cultural methods to solve the problem of how to bind group members. I suspect belief in sacred objects is a cultural invention. Professing belief in a sacred object is an example of wider practices (such as performing rituals) whose goal is to convince your group that you are a true believer and thus a group member in good standing. Group members then get group membership benefits. The purpose of sacred objects can't be revealed because then it could more easily be gamed.
The first paragraph of the post covered that theory. The rest of the post is an attempt to understand what the alternative theory is, the one preferred by those who reject your theory, and to evaluate their reasons for rejecting it.
Robin, your insightful post on "Truly Sacred Things" illuminates the complex relationship between human evolution and the concept of the sacred. I've been following your posts on this topic and noticed an intriguing area for further exploration: the intergenerational aspects of sacredness. Specifically, the role of age in shaping and perceiving what is considered sacred seems to be a missing piece in the current discourse.
The journey through different life stages significantly alters our perception of sacred concepts. Older generations, with their wealth of experience and connections to tradition, often view sacredness as a legacy, a link to the past that must be preserved. This perspective is crucial in maintaining the integrity of sacred beliefs.
During the rebellious years of youth, there's a natural tendency to question and challenge established norms, including sacred beliefs. This period of life is marked by exploration, questioning, and often, the reshaping of what is considered sacred. It's a time when individuals start to form their own understanding of the world, which can lead to significant shifts in how sacred concepts are perceived and valued.
Younger generations, positioned at the vanguard of societal change, often reinterpret sacred concepts, reflecting the dynamic nature of human societies. Their fresh perspectives can challenge traditional views, leading to an evolution of what is considered sacred.
Considering these points, a deeper examination of how different age groups interact with and influence the concept of the sacred could enrich our understanding of its role in human societies. This intergenerational perspective might reveal the dynamic nature of sacred beliefs, showing how they are not only preserved but also transformed and revitalized, ensuring their relevance in an ever-evolving world.
They're extremely skeptical and don't believe in invisible deities or anything they cannot see personally. Attempts at Christianizing them all failed because once they learn the missionary hasn't met Jesus in person, and thus that this belief is from hearsay, they immediately lose interest. They also have almost no mathematical understanding, and don't care for it. On the flip side, they all claim they can see spirits, and when describing such spirits, their descriptions match as if they're literally seeing with their own eyes said spirits doing whatever, whereas Westerners looking at the spot they're all pointing to see and feel literally nothing at all.
I've observed some interesting things myself in different contexts. One that I find particularly intriguing are rites involving alcohol consumed by channeler-priests in African-derived syncretic religions down here in Brazil. Basically, when in channeling trance, "incorporating" an alcohol-drinking spirit, they gulp down massive quantities of hard liquor brought by the faithful, sometimes two or more bottles. Then, less than an hour later, once the presumed spirit "dis-incorporates", the channeler-priest shows absolutely no sign of drunkenness, being completely sober. They say the visiting spirit takes the liquor's intoxicating effect with them when they depart. This is a very usual sight and studied in academic papers and thesis published here, e.g. https://repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/10498 (no English version, alas). The tentative explanations vary a lot, but they're all speculative at best, and no one really knows what's going on with that, and with other unusual things seen in such contexts.
These are two examples of likely ancient sacred relations that still are going on. If you're interested in figuring out what the baseline sacred impulses from which others arise are, reading in depth about those would likely provide further insights.
Imagine if Everett had not discovered the error, and the corresponding effect on people's beliefs (typically perceived as knowledge, ~"because science")!
Thank you very much for linking your paper, it was a fascinating read! And good idea with the word "entity", I'll start using that one myself!
Two non-rigorous minor side-notes I think are worth mentioning:
a) Buddhism may have a correlate of the "Immediacy of Experience Principle", though in a much more complex way. In Buddhist logic a syllogism is only considered fully valid if there's a third term, called, if I remember correctly, an exemplifier, to ground the reasoning and prevent it from going wild. So for this to become valid:
"Where there's smoke, there's fire.
There's smoke over there.
Therefore, there's fire over there."
One would need to add to it so:
"Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Such as in a kitchen.
There's smoke over there.
Therefore, there's fire over there."
That might, maybe, perhaps, tentatively, suggest a remote shared requirement of concreteness that in many cultures, including hunter-gatherer ones, was dropped, but that others retained, the Pirahã foremost among these.
b) Pre-Statization Shinto, going back to pre-Buddhismification Shinto, down to pre-history, seems to have had something akin to the "do not tell others what to do" principle. At the very least, I remember reading about how the 17th-century scholar responsible for Shinto's revival, Motoori Nobunaga, argued Shinto didn't have any moral rules because different from animals, human beings don't need those: if someones is aligned with the spirits (kami -- entities?), they already know what to do; if they aren't, giving them rules will merely animalize them; so there's no point either way.
Government officials didn't like that line reasoning at all, for obvious reasons, and he was forced to backtrack and say he wasn't really saying laws should be abolished and rulers needn't be obeyed, but it's still held by esoteric branches, and an interesting tidbit all the same.
Sorry, J in JTB (Justified True Belief, from epistemology).
Rare is the human who can navigate these ideas without making an error, epistemology is *extremely* counter-intuitive, it goes against intuition and our cultural conditioning (in no small part due to "science" (scientism)).
Buddhism isn't particularly concerned with beliefs about the world. It has a set of goals and specific methods to reach those, which it encourages those interested to practice and directly experience whether they work or not. Some of those methods involve holding certain beliefs, but on a conditional basis, with the understanding those beliefs will be left behind as one progresses. It does believe one eventually reaches true beliefs, but that's only at the very end of the process, when boatloads of cognitive failures modes are fixed via said methods. In the meantime, any beliefs about the world are at best accessories.
But the most sacred thing could be yet discovered, right?
To use the analogy of sweetness = sacredness. We have evolved to recognize sweetness. But the sweetest thing can be a new invention. So the original sacred things that were important developed in us a sense towards the sacred. But the most sacred thing can be completely new.
The other option is an unexplained coincidence. Somehow we evolved sacred habits for other reasons, habits which happen to be well matched to the real sacred things.
It's a mysterious world we live in, and that's only considering the parts we have access to (some of which aren't even ~there, depending on the meaning one assigns to "are", which tends to be sub-perceptual in the first place)!!
Dr. Hanson, I've been following your "sacred" journey for a while now, and I have to say that I saw this conclusion coming. Here's how: your conclusion about the origin of the "shaper" is right on the edge of Islaamic creed. There are a handful of terminologies & definitions you used that Islaam wouldn't accept, but the direction these terminologies & definitions are heading in are leading you in a straight path to the Attributes of this "Shaper" (which is one of God's Names in Islaam, btw) that are established in Islaamic creed. Keep one thing in mind, though: *perfection* must be maintained.
This necessitates perfect hearing, sight, power, dominion, speech, and *knowledge*, and perfect knowledge takes care of your "must have had substantial experience" parameter in the following way: most ex-Christian atheists do not move beyond a Christian doctrinal concept of the parameters of the Shaper/Creator, so because Christians believe God didn't understand humans (which He created??) without becoming a human (??), ex-Christian atheists base their criticisms of the concept of the Shaper/Creator on that parameter (for example). So, an atheist will say something like "if God made Himself ignorant therefore..." because Christians taught them that God & ignorance (i.e. imperfect knowledge) can mix. But this *clearly*, *inarguably* contradicts perfect knowledge! Perfect knowledge = knowledge of *everything*, no exceptions, which means God/Shaper/Creator *by definition* understood exactly who & what we were when He "shaped" us, which goes back to your conclusion:
"For humans to have been shaped long ago" (yes) "to treat the sacred in its appropriate sacred manner," (which is what God in Islaam wants) "the sacred must have been around long ago," (yes, God is older than everything) "and important enough then to shape our natures." (yes, as the Shaper, this is exactly what happened) "That is, if the sacred is real, it must be big and ancient." (good starting point, which is what Islaam (not Christianity) asserts with intellectual, self-evident proof. You're right on the edge of Islaam).
After sucessfully/unsuccessfully experiencing the sacred/unsacred in uncounted attempts, I am currently living the SACREDNESS by recognizing that I as well as all of existence is Sacred... No more searching... THIS IS IT... ALL OF OF IT, VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE, KNOWN AND UNKNOWABLE IS SACRED...
There is a good candidate for such an ancient, conserved, powerfully shaping force: aesthetics
We know that deeply conserved aesthetic preferences encode not only a great deal of features relevant to survival, health, perfection and orderliness, but also features that could be considered evolutionary spandrels, and ones that are a result of runaway competitive spirals.
If sacredness-detection hitches a ride from aesthetic preference, then we would expect to see similar dynamics in how candidate sacrednesses could acquire wide recognition based solely on their ‘ring of sacredness-ness’, and a similar response of fashionability (or not) as a response to changing conditions (or not) (see, for example, Sarah Perry on the very novel advent of child-sacredness), whilst also enabling quite arbitrary idolatry (which can be purposed for the social cohesion role), and also for the aesthetic evaluation of entirely personal and internal metaphysical stances.
The god shaped hole is the shape of our attentional schema. The way mammalian conscious attention is wired means its contents are in constant flux, unsatisfactory, and without the possibility of direct human control or apprehension. We posit the existence of something that is the inversion of these properties: permanent, wonderful, and a human shaped controller.
"In which case..." care to elaborate? What about these properties (the"case") makes their existence "unlikely"? They're clearly defined, you understand what they mean...what's missing to make them/their combination "unlikely"?
Regardless of whether one is a Christian or a Buddhist or a New Atheist, modern humans' worldviews and narratives of what is important are filled of abstract concepts.
Sacred objects, in any tradition, serve a purpose of making these intangible things feel concrete.
The group evolution thing sounds like it makes sense too, but it seems to me like observed behaviour around sacred objects is fully explained by us being beings who value abstract things yet are built to work with mostly tangible ones.
I'm also not claiming to have cracked the puzzle of why some things but not others are sacred. I'm merely asserting something which does the same job as the evo psych explanation you mentioned.
But then my thing suggests that puzzle is equivalent to the puzzle of why some things are fundamental to people's worldviews, but not others.
I recommend DS Wilson's book Darwin's Cathedral on this topic, along with the relevant parts of Haidt's The Righteous Mind. They make a compelling case that religiosity evolved to foster collective action. And true believers don't have to go through the kind of cost-benefit calculation they otherwise would when thinking about whether to contribute to public goods.
I’ll add another option from my faith tradition (LDS). Rather than an ancestral longing for God, we have a longing for God derived from each individual’s pre-mortal experience with God. We all lived with Him as spirits in a pre-mortal existence and now, though we don’t remember that, we naturally have an innate yearning to return to His presence, and to experience a spiritual connection with Him on Earth.
it's only god-shaped after you throw it in, not before
How might one come to know such things without resorting to (falling victim to) faith?
we know ourselves as makers, we forget ourselves, and make the hole we keep digging, it's the same shape as us, then we call it the creator, we worship ourselves, in shame we pretend it is another, much much later we invent faith as a loyalty test for empire
Is there something about my question that you did not like, thus you did not even attempt to answer it? I smell a bit of faith based thinking around here.
so I'm bad at poetry...
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/to-build-a-better-world-we-should
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-the-heresy-and-obedience
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/fideism-reason-and-the-gap-that-is
and
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/sister-wendy-on-love-as-an-obedient
also I admit…. that often hope is faithed, and so often faithed until people make it, that peeps think that hope and faith are the same, while I abjure these practices, I sometimes forget others do not assume the same framework when I poeticise along my commentary... sorry
I see the stars as being sacred, not because I worship them, but because they're a manifestation of the pure energy of the universe from which we came; actively live in; and will return to once we die. Our ancestors seemed to grasp this better than we do now, which of course explains why cosmic symbolism appears throughout various religions and why the ancients always focused on the sky--it's where we came from billions of years before.
"Sacred geometry" is another example of this: specific, intricate patterns and shapes that appear throughout history, religion, nature, and the cosmos. They're linked to us, down to our very microscopic makeup. Truly sacred things is anything that remind us of our true nature, where we came from and who we really are: expressions of the universe.
And so some say: a God! ;)
I wonder if it is true what they say....do you wonder that?
Sure. If "God" is whatever the essence of the universe is, then we are not only products of God but are also God.
But then, where does *reality* fit into this model?
Then mathematics and science are the language of the universe. We're just here to discover all of it. (Which is really just the universe discovering itself.)
I mean, they understood how stars can be used for navigation and time keeping...
That too.
Humans, like other social species, evolved mechanisms to promote group cohesion and group cooperation. The mechanisms that support this are as complex as the rest of us; some evolved via natural selection but many are cultural methods to solve the problem of how to bind group members. I suspect belief in sacred objects is a cultural invention. Professing belief in a sacred object is an example of wider practices (such as performing rituals) whose goal is to convince your group that you are a true believer and thus a group member in good standing. Group members then get group membership benefits. The purpose of sacred objects can't be revealed because then it could more easily be gamed.
The first paragraph of the post covered that theory. The rest of the post is an attempt to understand what the alternative theory is, the one preferred by those who reject your theory, and to evaluate their reasons for rejecting it.
Might patterns of clustering of belief in unsubstantiated beliefs like this be another example of this same psychological phenomenon in action?
It certainly seems possible to me...I'd even classify it as "likely".
Robin, your insightful post on "Truly Sacred Things" illuminates the complex relationship between human evolution and the concept of the sacred. I've been following your posts on this topic and noticed an intriguing area for further exploration: the intergenerational aspects of sacredness. Specifically, the role of age in shaping and perceiving what is considered sacred seems to be a missing piece in the current discourse.
The journey through different life stages significantly alters our perception of sacred concepts. Older generations, with their wealth of experience and connections to tradition, often view sacredness as a legacy, a link to the past that must be preserved. This perspective is crucial in maintaining the integrity of sacred beliefs.
During the rebellious years of youth, there's a natural tendency to question and challenge established norms, including sacred beliefs. This period of life is marked by exploration, questioning, and often, the reshaping of what is considered sacred. It's a time when individuals start to form their own understanding of the world, which can lead to significant shifts in how sacred concepts are perceived and valued.
Younger generations, positioned at the vanguard of societal change, often reinterpret sacred concepts, reflecting the dynamic nature of human societies. Their fresh perspectives can challenge traditional views, leading to an evolution of what is considered sacred.
Considering these points, a deeper examination of how different age groups interact with and influence the concept of the sacred could enrich our understanding of its role in human societies. This intergenerational perspective might reveal the dynamic nature of sacred beliefs, showing how they are not only preserved but also transformed and revitalized, ensuring their relevance in an ever-evolving world.
Anthropology provides interesting sources of confusion on this topic. One I find fascinating are the Pirahã people of the Amazon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people
They're extremely skeptical and don't believe in invisible deities or anything they cannot see personally. Attempts at Christianizing them all failed because once they learn the missionary hasn't met Jesus in person, and thus that this belief is from hearsay, they immediately lose interest. They also have almost no mathematical understanding, and don't care for it. On the flip side, they all claim they can see spirits, and when describing such spirits, their descriptions match as if they're literally seeing with their own eyes said spirits doing whatever, whereas Westerners looking at the spot they're all pointing to see and feel literally nothing at all.
I've observed some interesting things myself in different contexts. One that I find particularly intriguing are rites involving alcohol consumed by channeler-priests in African-derived syncretic religions down here in Brazil. Basically, when in channeling trance, "incorporating" an alcohol-drinking spirit, they gulp down massive quantities of hard liquor brought by the faithful, sometimes two or more bottles. Then, less than an hour later, once the presumed spirit "dis-incorporates", the channeler-priest shows absolutely no sign of drunkenness, being completely sober. They say the visiting spirit takes the liquor's intoxicating effect with them when they depart. This is a very usual sight and studied in academic papers and thesis published here, e.g. https://repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/10498 (no English version, alas). The tentative explanations vary a lot, but they're all speculative at best, and no one really knows what's going on with that, and with other unusual things seen in such contexts.
These are two examples of likely ancient sacred relations that still are going on. If you're interested in figuring out what the baseline sacred impulses from which others arise are, reading in depth about those would likely provide further insights.
Thanks for bringing up the Pirahã, whose lack of supernatural belief overlaps with other amazonian groups but may have some unique aspects. Daniel Everett and I wrote a short article on this, in link. Everett now suggests that the Pirahã do not believe in spirits; using the word spirits was a mistranslation; and their stance on spirits is complex. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371041508_Religion_Is_of_Reduced_Importance_When_Not_Needed_to_Solve_the_Problems_of_Social_Living
Imagine if Everett had not discovered the error, and the corresponding effect on people's beliefs (typically perceived as knowledge, ~"because science")!
Thank you very much for linking your paper, it was a fascinating read! And good idea with the word "entity", I'll start using that one myself!
Two non-rigorous minor side-notes I think are worth mentioning:
a) Buddhism may have a correlate of the "Immediacy of Experience Principle", though in a much more complex way. In Buddhist logic a syllogism is only considered fully valid if there's a third term, called, if I remember correctly, an exemplifier, to ground the reasoning and prevent it from going wild. So for this to become valid:
"Where there's smoke, there's fire.
There's smoke over there.
Therefore, there's fire over there."
One would need to add to it so:
"Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Such as in a kitchen.
There's smoke over there.
Therefore, there's fire over there."
That might, maybe, perhaps, tentatively, suggest a remote shared requirement of concreteness that in many cultures, including hunter-gatherer ones, was dropped, but that others retained, the Pirahã foremost among these.
b) Pre-Statization Shinto, going back to pre-Buddhismification Shinto, down to pre-history, seems to have had something akin to the "do not tell others what to do" principle. At the very least, I remember reading about how the 17th-century scholar responsible for Shinto's revival, Motoori Nobunaga, argued Shinto didn't have any moral rules because different from animals, human beings don't need those: if someones is aligned with the spirits (kami -- entities?), they already know what to do; if they aren't, giving them rules will merely animalize them; so there's no point either way.
Government officials didn't like that line reasoning at all, for obvious reasons, and he was forced to backtrack and say he wasn't really saying laws should be abolished and rulers needn't be obeyed, but it's still held by esoteric branches, and an interesting tidbit all the same.
Do Buddhists also take the T inJTB for free?
Sorry, but I don't know what "inJTB" stands for. I Googled it but didn't get far. Could you provide more details?
Sorry, J in JTB (Justified True Belief, from epistemology).
Rare is the human who can navigate these ideas without making an error, epistemology is *extremely* counter-intuitive, it goes against intuition and our cultural conditioning (in no small part due to "science" (scientism)).
Buddhism isn't particularly concerned with beliefs about the world. It has a set of goals and specific methods to reach those, which it encourages those interested to practice and directly experience whether they work or not. Some of those methods involve holding certain beliefs, but on a conditional basis, with the understanding those beliefs will be left behind as one progresses. It does believe one eventually reaches true beliefs, but that's only at the very end of the process, when boatloads of cognitive failures modes are fixed via said methods. In the meantime, any beliefs about the world are at best accessories.
But the most sacred thing could be yet discovered, right?
To use the analogy of sweetness = sacredness. We have evolved to recognize sweetness. But the sweetest thing can be a new invention. So the original sacred things that were important developed in us a sense towards the sacred. But the most sacred thing can be completely new.
Did I misunderstand?
The new more sacred thing would have to be much like some prior sacred thing, for our prior sacred habits to be appropriate to it.
Can you explain why this is *necessarily* true?
The other option is an unexplained coincidence. Somehow we evolved sacred habits for other reasons, habits which happen to be well matched to the real sacred things.
"The" other option, or *an* other option?
It's a mysterious world we live in, and that's only considering the parts we have access to (some of which aren't even ~there, depending on the meaning one assigns to "are", which tends to be sub-perceptual in the first place)!!
Dr. Hanson, I've been following your "sacred" journey for a while now, and I have to say that I saw this conclusion coming. Here's how: your conclusion about the origin of the "shaper" is right on the edge of Islaamic creed. There are a handful of terminologies & definitions you used that Islaam wouldn't accept, but the direction these terminologies & definitions are heading in are leading you in a straight path to the Attributes of this "Shaper" (which is one of God's Names in Islaam, btw) that are established in Islaamic creed. Keep one thing in mind, though: *perfection* must be maintained.
This necessitates perfect hearing, sight, power, dominion, speech, and *knowledge*, and perfect knowledge takes care of your "must have had substantial experience" parameter in the following way: most ex-Christian atheists do not move beyond a Christian doctrinal concept of the parameters of the Shaper/Creator, so because Christians believe God didn't understand humans (which He created??) without becoming a human (??), ex-Christian atheists base their criticisms of the concept of the Shaper/Creator on that parameter (for example). So, an atheist will say something like "if God made Himself ignorant therefore..." because Christians taught them that God & ignorance (i.e. imperfect knowledge) can mix. But this *clearly*, *inarguably* contradicts perfect knowledge! Perfect knowledge = knowledge of *everything*, no exceptions, which means God/Shaper/Creator *by definition* understood exactly who & what we were when He "shaped" us, which goes back to your conclusion:
"For humans to have been shaped long ago" (yes) "to treat the sacred in its appropriate sacred manner," (which is what God in Islaam wants) "the sacred must have been around long ago," (yes, God is older than everything) "and important enough then to shape our natures." (yes, as the Shaper, this is exactly what happened) "That is, if the sacred is real, it must be big and ancient." (good starting point, which is what Islaam (not Christianity) asserts with intellectual, self-evident proof. You're right on the edge of Islaam).
After sucessfully/unsuccessfully experiencing the sacred/unsacred in uncounted attempts, I am currently living the SACREDNESS by recognizing that I as well as all of existence is Sacred... No more searching... THIS IS IT... ALL OF OF IT, VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE, KNOWN AND UNKNOWABLE IS SACRED...
I surprised Robin didn't try to publish his article about this in a more prestigious sociology journal (or did he?).
There is a good candidate for such an ancient, conserved, powerfully shaping force: aesthetics
We know that deeply conserved aesthetic preferences encode not only a great deal of features relevant to survival, health, perfection and orderliness, but also features that could be considered evolutionary spandrels, and ones that are a result of runaway competitive spirals.
If sacredness-detection hitches a ride from aesthetic preference, then we would expect to see similar dynamics in how candidate sacrednesses could acquire wide recognition based solely on their ‘ring of sacredness-ness’, and a similar response of fashionability (or not) as a response to changing conditions (or not) (see, for example, Sarah Perry on the very novel advent of child-sacredness), whilst also enabling quite arbitrary idolatry (which can be purposed for the social cohesion role), and also for the aesthetic evaluation of entirely personal and internal metaphysical stances.
Really interesting topic.
The word in Hebrew for holy really means separate, sacred.
Evolutionary psychology isn't the only way to explain the world.
The god shaped hole is the shape of our attentional schema. The way mammalian conscious attention is wired means its contents are in constant flux, unsatisfactory, and without the possibility of direct human control or apprehension. We posit the existence of something that is the inversion of these properties: permanent, wonderful, and a human shaped controller.
In which case it is unlikely that such a thing actually exists.
"In which case..." care to elaborate? What about these properties (the"case") makes their existence "unlikely"? They're clearly defined, you understand what they mean...what's missing to make them/their combination "unlikely"?
“If the sacred is real, it must be big and ancient.” Truth.
Regardless of whether one is a Christian or a Buddhist or a New Atheist, modern humans' worldviews and narratives of what is important are filled of abstract concepts.
Sacred objects, in any tradition, serve a purpose of making these intangible things feel concrete.
The group evolution thing sounds like it makes sense too, but it seems to me like observed behaviour around sacred objects is fully explained by us being beings who value abstract things yet are built to work with mostly tangible ones.
A great many abstract things are NOT seen as sacred.
I'm also not claiming to have cracked the puzzle of why some things but not others are sacred. I'm merely asserting something which does the same job as the evo psych explanation you mentioned.
But then my thing suggests that puzzle is equivalent to the puzzle of why some things are fundamental to people's worldviews, but not others.