I was half watching a documentary the other day concerning the idea of ancient extraterrestrial contact. Judging by the presenter's haircut, I would say it was made in the late '90s or early 2000s. Erich Von Daniken made a brief appearance. He seemed to be about 70 so, that timing seems right. The presenter seemed to be about 25. The hair.
The documentary was funny. It was built on the same misunderstandings of physical artifacts and unwarranted assumptions and assertions Von Daniken is known for. Those things aren't unusual in the UFO cottage industry and its subsets such as Ancient Astronauts.
As an almost throwaway thought, this guy tried to portray the pantheon of Greek Gods as a group of space-faring genetic engineers. His idea was, they manipulated the DNA of ancient hominids to create the Human Race, to be used as servants and slaves. He thought, one feature such genetic engineers would incorporate was the drive to worship.
Yes, yes they would. What better way to incorporate subservience?
There are several lists of the drives or instincts ranging in number from 3 to 18. They really boil down to fuck, fight or footrace. The innate will to anthropomorphize and then worship what we don't understand is very rarely mentioned. Is it really a universal drive such as 'fight or flight' or procreation? I happen to think it is. In an almost perverse way, I think it explains the drive of archeologists to ascribe religious significance to almost any example of monumental architecture but there are better examples just about everywhere.
'Just about everywhere'. That seems to make my point. The drive to experience transcendence and divinity is everywhere. As we grow in knowledge of our surrounding environment, so too do our gods. It stands to reason our gods would be as well-informed as we are. That's if, you believe that man creates our gods. If each person creates their own gods, it's little surprise so many gods are found wanting.
This guy believes the pantheon created urges and a narrative to spread a desired feature in those created. There's a thought. Not just genetic engineers but social engineers as well. If you've read much mythology, that seems like a stretch. Given 13.7 billion years and hundreds of millions of generations, Darwin starts to look like more of a sure thing than a bet made tens of thousands of years ago. Remember, evolution doesn't predict any outcome. Evolution observes concrete outcomes already extant. Darwin asks: What must have happened to produce what we can observe? Darwin doesn't ask, "What comes next?" Darwin does not even ask, "How come?" Does the sheer weight of time and mathematics allow for anything else short of supernatural intervention? Dispassionately, you have to believe something very like evolution is what must have occurred. Yet, we still don't want to.
Why not? Why the drive to have been contrived by something, anything greater than ourselves? We insist we are created in our god's image and then endow that image with a list of qualities no mortal could possibly share. Why?
Why this constant driving and striving for divinity? If there is something essential about it that makes it so ubiquitous and evolutionarily necessary, what could that possibly be? Unanswered questions that remain unanswered because not much thought has been devoted to them.
Oh, is that all?
