Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

One of the most intriguing books I've read on the origin of religion has been Stewart Guthrie's Faces in the Clouds. Guthrie offers the suggestion that our in-born, evolutionarily driven need to see people or faces, even where these are false positives, may have led to the concept of god/s. As a respectable academic, I am obligated never to agree completely with anyone, but Guthrie seems to be onto something here. When I'm jogging in the pre-dawn hours it is amazing how many people are about -- that is, until I get close enough to see that they are a small tree or a tall newspaper stand. We do see what we consider important everywhere. Ancient religions were quick to put human forms on dangerous, threatening, or awe-inspiring phenomena. Lightning and thunder became the purview of Baal. It is a natural defense mechanism: you can pray to or offer a tasty animal sacrifice to Baal and the terrible storm will stop. Of course, in time nature itself would take care of it too. Today people still look for faces in the clouds to allay their fears. But we also have a rudimentary understanding of the physics of our universe. When people are forced to choose between facts and faces, when fear or extreme desire comes into the equation, the safe odds are always on the faces. This book is worth the attention of anyone who has ever asked the question of where religion originates. As a sometime professor of religious studies, I found it difficult to set this book down.

Finally someone has addressed the subject in depth of how and why there will probably always be religiosity. I could not help thinking that even my cat needs assign life to it's toys to practice hunting for survival. Perhaps this is all necessary for living beings to believe first and formost in another being - to eat, to mate with, to fight or if not,to worship.

Guthrie, in this excellent book, offers a persuasive, if incomplete, explanation of why religious explanations are held to be true by so many if indeed they are not. His well-supported thesis is that the human mind's bulk of processing power evolved to process other human beings in our social environment and that this cognitive strategy of the social human animal has bled over into domains of reality that it isn't meant for, i.e. the domain of the natural sciences. A clear example for this would be the persistence of creationism in light of robust naturalistic theories of biological and cosmic evolution. People are predisposed to seek an anthropomorphic answer to things and when a normal human being obviously can't be the 'doer,' then a superhuman being is posited to have been the `creator.' It is easier to process information within a social context, even if that processing leads to a false conclusion. Guthrie even sees the (admittedly very primitive) rudiments of religion in our closest cousins the chimpanzee. He cites evidence from Jane Goodall where chimps have been observed to become angry with rainstorms. He sees this as evidence for the rudiments of religion because the chimps must be injecting social intentionality into the mindless storm - something we `higher primates' have done with Zeus and `his' Lightening bolts to our contemporary biblicists who say hurricanes are the social intentionality of Yahweh. It is a primitive and false and yet pervasive way for human beings to conceptualize our environment. Marshalling evidence of anthropomorphization from modern advertising, art, and literature, Guthrie ties it all together in his theory of religion. He sees that at its root, gods and religions are just the anthropomorphic perception lenses that we humans use to try and make sense of the world around us that doesn't share our minds, intentions, and emotions.

There are among fairly academic books books that should be read widely and never quite get the audience that they deserve. This is among the foremost among those that I know; as far as are the merits of it academically, it is also a very strong book. Setting this aside, because of its thought-provoking nature, this book deserves a cult following....Gutherie in it argues that people, for processes of biological advantage, have an innate tendancy to see 'people'-- faces in the clouds-- where they don't exist. I first read this book while studying religion at Columbia and was more impressed by it than any other I read for the particular class I read it for (excluding William James-- which is understandable....) It explains a lot. Its author is widely read and a persuasive writer, it has interesting pictures and really forces one to think about a lot of stuff. It really angered many of my more theologically minded classmates-- which for agnostics should be reason enough to read it....As a book of 'general reading', this is still an interesting book that should be read. It's really smart and a fun read. I'd definately recommend (in either case) to buy this book. It will make you think, or it will change the way you think about religion (and life....) How people percieve is really an avenue that needs much more exploration as far as it concerned the study or religion....

"Guthrie proposes that religion is basically an outgrowth of the natural human propensity, probably hardwired in by evolution, to interpret vague or random appearances anthropomorphically. That is, we naturally tend to see faces in clouds or the image of Jesus in a spaghetti ad. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary viewpoint since it would be beneficial to survival to have a perceptual strategy in which vague appearances were interpreted as (possibly hostile) humans. Better to think we see a glaring face and find that we're wrong than to miss seeing an enemy. Clearly, much of the human propensity towards religiosity could be explained in this way. Guthrie argues his case well." -- Keith M. Parson