Spivey Essay Prize Results

Earlier this term forty Sixth Form pupils elected to participate in the Spivey Essay Prize, writing an essay under timed conditions on one of these three questions:

1. Discuss:

τῆς γὰρ ἀρετῆς τὰ καλὰ πράττειν μᾶλλον ἢ τὰ αἰσχρὰ μὴ πράττειν.

Virtue is displayed more in performing noble acts than in avoiding evil ones.

Aristotle, Nic Ethics IV.1.7

2. Discuss:

Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.

It was fear first created gods in the world

Petronius, Fragment XXVII

3. Discuss:

στάσις γὰρ ἔμφυλος πολέμου ὁμοφρονέοντος τοσούτῳ κάκιον ἐστὶ ὅσῳ πόλεμος εἰρήνης.

For civil strife is as much worse than united war as war is worse than peace.

Herodotus, Histories VIII.3

Harry E, answering the second question, is to be congratulated on winning the overall prize. 

Highly commended were Jonathan W, Millie B, Narayan M, Spencer T, Samuel P, and Marusia E.

Harry’s winning essay:

Was it fear, that first created Gods in the world? Well, it is easy to assume that all religion started in this way from the overwhelming fear of mortality by humans, in their growing intelligence which began to supersede the rest of the animal kingdom. However, looking beyond the dawn of humanity, it becomes apparent that fear was certainly not the only driving factor in religion’s birth.

 The epitome of human evolutionary instinct is fear, the strong emotional response to perceived threats which humanity developed in order to survive. Many would consider fear the strongest emotion because of how quickly and intensely it can be stimulated: in shock, panic, and horror – and its creeping, ruining, insidiousness: in anxiety, dread, and apprehension. At some point during the development of homo sapiens in their current form, a certain individual was the first of our kind to possess sufficient biological facilities to fully comprehend their own inevitable and all-too-imminent death.

The fear that arises from contemplating one’s death is familiar to any human, but it seems we often take it for granted. Take a moment to imagine it – if there is no afterlife (as may well be the case) then your entire consciousness may be obliterated at any moment; for you, all things will end at once, including time. For early humans this new thanatophobia inherent to mortality was an even bigger spectre to contend with, as in the pre-civilisation world death would be commonly seen and threatened the individual at every turn, that is, higher infant mortality rates, disease with no (or very little) concept of medicine, and threats by all aspects of the environment.

Here begins a prominent theory about the origins of religion. There is a high likelihood that, seeking some comfort and respite from the impersonal, apparently unjust natural system, humans began to convince themselves that there was some form of higher power which brought final, external justice to them beyond the grave. Once internalised, this idea would bring them a comfort and relief like no other, which could be interpreted as a spiritual, over emotional, reaction. In this way, the thought reconfirms itself, and the seeds of religion are sown. The specifics of different religions come later through cultural factors, and religious figures who claim to have had experiences confirming other details of the divine. But, at its root, religious thought can be assumed to have begun as a reaction to fear.

Retroactive confirmation can be found for this theory when the psychology of today’s religious believers or even agnostics is examined – the fear/comfort dynamic of religious thought is the only thing to have survived the Western “age of reason” and scientific revolution. In the turgidly ongoing and fruitless debate on the existence of God between theists and atheists, the one thing which most on the latter side do not attempt to argue against is the personal benefits of believing in a religion: faith offers believers security, and hope for eventual true peace– without any conviction that there is an afterlife, many of the billions of people in the world would be rendered depressed, despairing and feel that their lives had no purpose. We can see this in those who are disillusioned from their religion; people who, by their own rational thought process or otherwise, lose faith, tend to feel distraught and abandoned, as the safety blanket of eschatological belief is torn away from them. So, regardless of widely accepted empirical reasoning and scientific thought, religion is still seen as having merit for the positive emotions and sense of comfort it provides. A similar effect can be seen for some agnostics or theists with no specific religion – they find respite from death anxiety in the possibility of a deity or the immortal soul.

From this it seems clear that the defining principle of belief in God and core cause of religion is the dynamic between fear and relief of fear.

However, looking beyond what seems obvious to thinkers of today, there are a few other significant possible triggers for religion’s birth. Firstly, it would not be unreasonable to assume that in place of fear, curiosity may have given rise to religion around the time of the dawn of humanity as we know it. Those early progenitors, long before any semblance of science or history, even of language, would look to the stars above and the apparent miracles of the earth, and ponder and dream of possible causes for these fascinating things. With the emergence of complex communication, the early man would share his theories, and eventually dominant schools of religious thought would emerge, based on what seemed the most reasonable. In this way, curiosity and cognitive meditation on the nature of the world which humanity had been born into was another highly likely cause for religion’s creation.

Additionally, a deeper cause for this meditative thought may be aesthetic beauty. As Plato outlined, beauty can be recognised by all people, even I they haven’t been taught what is beautiful by parents or others. These inherent senses of the beautiful and the sublime may have conjured up ideas of the soul, or an intelligent designer, as opposed to the senses of fear. They also likely had used reasoning to form logical conclusions on religious topics as well, similar to what we understand as Paley’s analogy of the watch, but in an earlier form: something so beautiful and complicated which works so effectively must have been planned.

 We can assume (through study of native/pagan religions around the world in their forms prior to spread of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions) that many of the early religions were polytheistic, following the structure of classical pantheons like the famous Greek gods. In this system, each divine figure personified a certain powerful natural element – for example gods of nature, weather, love or other forces like these. This gave these people a logical system with which to make sense of the world and a sense of understanding – and prior to scientific reasoning becoming widely used it seemed to make logical sense that there was a powerful, sentient being controlling these otherwise unpredictable forces. Also, myths began to form around the creation of the world and humanity. This provides evidence against fear as a the progenitor of religion, as the first religions were not related to the afterlife but to elemental gods and creation myths. In fact, looking at Ancient Greek ideas of the divine for instance, these ancient religions did not offer comfort and were oftentimes brutal narratives – the gods here were petty, personal, and violent against humans, usually working to their own gain, and neither noble nor heroic. This exposes the flaw in assuming that fear drove the creation of religion – culturally, when we think of a god the usual picture is the omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God of Abrahamic theism who resides in heaven and justly judges the dead, but for most of human history this has not been the case.

Furthermore a different potential cause would have been ignorance or delusion. Many religious believers up until today cite personal revelation or divine communication as the reason for religion. This would have been even more prevalent in a pre-science world, as there would have been no understanding of things which can deceive the human senses and cause people to have these “visions” or revelations: optical illusions, effects of psychedelic drugs, hallucinations, dreams, schizophrenia/psychosis, may all have caused early people to believe they were coming into contact with the divine. They would have to believe their senses as no other ideas of deeper thought had been formulated yet. As well as this, religious figures such as preachers, prophets, self-proclaimed Demi-gods or godly incarnations could easily delude masses of listeners, through the conviction of their speech, manipulation, or just plain charisma. These cases fall into two categories: either they are narcissistic, deliberate, and systematic efforts to control masses of people by deluding them with lies and promises like eternal reward in the afterlife, absolution of sin, favour of certain gods in order to make people loyal to oneself, or simply results of one’s own psychosis – in other words, a person in a powerful social position who truly believes that they are related to the gods, chosen by the gods or something similar, leading the people to believe in the same things as them because they believe them to be true – they were doing so with good intent. In this way, ignorance/innocence, delusion, or conformity may have been reasons for the beginning of religion and belief in gods. 

In summation, it is easy to assume that fear was the sole or primary reason for the birth of religion, but this is an assumption too easily made that arises by factors such as cultural accustom to Abrahamic thought. When looking beyond the obvious, many more factors can be seen as possible progenitors of religion for early man. Primus in orbe deos non fecit timor.