Religion isn't just about what’s up there. Honestly, if you look at the trajectory of human belief, it’s mostly about what’s right here—inside our own heads.
Reza Aslan’s book God: A Human History hits on a nerve because it challenges the idea that we were "made in His image." Instead, Aslan argues with a ton of historical weight that we’ve spent the last 10,000 years doing the exact opposite. We’ve been busy making God in our image. We give the divine our limbs, our cravings, our petty jealousies, and even our specific local politics. It’s a bit of a trip when you realize how much of "the eternal" is actually just a mirror of our own evolution.
The Instinct to Humanize Everything
Humans are weirdly hardwired for anthropomorphism. You've probably yelled at your computer when it froze or felt bad for a "lonely" stuffed animal when you were a kid. It’s a survival mechanism. Our brains are basically pattern-recognition machines designed to see "agency" everywhere.
Thousands of years ago, if a bush rustled, the guy who thought "That's a person or a predator" survived. The guy who thought "That's just the wind" eventually got eaten.
This hyperactive agency detection is the bedrock of God A Human History. We didn’t just see spirits in the trees; we saw spirits that thought and felt like us. When it rained, it wasn't just a weather pattern. It was a weather-god who was either happy with us or, more likely, extremely annoyed about something we did.
From the Caves to the Cathedrals
Think about Göbekli Tepe. It's this massive, mind-bending temple complex in modern-day Turkey that dates back roughly 12,000 years.
What’s wild about it is that it predates agriculture. We used to think people settled down, started farming, and then built temples. Göbekli Tepe flips that. It suggests we gathered to worship first. We built these T-shaped pillars that look suspiciously like human torsos. Even then, at the very dawn of what we call "civilization," we were projecting the human form onto the cosmic.
Aslan tracks this shift from "animism"—where everything has a soul—to "polytheism," where we created a whole bureaucracy of human-like gods. The Greeks were the masters of this. Their gods weren't just powerful; they were messy. They cheated, they lied, and they threw temper tantrums. They were basically humans with a "God Mode" cheat code enabled.
The Big Shift to Monotheism
The jump to one god wasn't as clean as Sunday school might have made it sound. It was messy and deeply political.
In God A Human History, the story of Zarathustra (Zoroaster) is a turning point. He was one of the first to push this idea of a single, universal spirit. But even then, we couldn't help ourselves. We took this infinite, formless "One" and started dressing it back up in human clothes.
Take the Hebrew Bible. In the earliest layers of the text, God walks in gardens. He gets angry. He changes His mind. He has "back parts" that Moses is allowed to see. Even as we moved toward a more abstract idea of divinity, we couldn't stop describing that divinity as a guy who gets frustrated when things don't go his way.
The Problem of the Human Brain
Our brains literally cannot process the infinite. It's too big.
To make sense of a creator, we have to make that creator relatable. This is what Aslan calls the "humanized god." We want a god we can talk to. We want a god who understands what it feels like to be sad or proud.
But there’s a massive downside to this.
When we give God our human attributes, we also give Him our human biases. If I believe God looks like me, thinks like me, and wants what I want, then anyone who is different from me isn't just my "enemy"—they’re God’s enemy. This is where the history of religion gets violent. It’s not that religion itself is inherently violent; it’s that we’ve spent centuries weaponizing our own human impulses by calling them "divine commands."
What Science Says About Your Brain on God
Neuroscience has some pretty cool insights into why God A Human History feels so intuitively right.
Studies using fMRI scans have shown that when people think about their own beliefs and when they think about God's beliefs, the same part of the brain lights up—the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the area associated with self-referential thought.
Interestingly, when you ask someone what a "stranger" thinks about a controversial topic, a different part of the brain activates. Essentially, for the average believer, "What does God think?" and "What do I think?" are processed in almost identical ways. We aren't just following a deity; we are following a cosmic version of our own conscience.
Pantheism and the Future of Belief
Aslan eventually lands on a concept that feels a bit more "modern" but is actually incredibly ancient: Pantheism.
This is the idea that God isn't a person sitting on a throne. Instead, God is the universe itself. The totality of everything.
If God is everything, then God has no personality. God has no gender. God doesn't "want" you to vote for a specific candidate or eat a specific food. It’s a way of stripping away the human mask we’ve forced onto the divine for millennia.
It's a tough sell for many because it's lonely. A "force" or "the universe" doesn't care if you had a bad day at work. But for others, it's the only way to reconcile the vastness of the cosmos with the idea of a creator. It moves us away from the "Celestial Dictator" and toward a sense of radical connection with every atom in existence.
Why This Matters Right Now
We are living in a time of intense polarization. Much of that is fueled by people who are absolutely certain they know what God wants.
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Understanding the "human history" of God is a reality check. It forces us to ask: Is this a divine truth, or is this just a human projection? When we see "God's will" lining up perfectly with our own political or social grievances, that’s usually a red light.
Actionable Steps for Exploring the Concept
If you want to dive deeper into how we've shaped the divine—and how it shapes us—start with these specific approaches.
- Read the Source Material with New Eyes: Pick up a foundational text like the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation myth) or the Iliad. Look specifically for "human" behaviors in the gods. You’ll see that their motivations are almost entirely based on status, honor, and revenge—the very things that drove ancient human society.
- Audit Your Own "Agency Detection": For one day, pay attention to how often you attribute "intent" to inanimate objects. When the light turns red right as you're in a hurry, do you feel like the universe is "out to get you"? Recognizing this mental tic helps you see how easily we build religious structures out of coincidence.
- Study Comparative Mythology: Look at the works of Joseph Campbell or Karen Armstrong (specifically A History of God). You'll notice that as human societies changed from nomadic hunters to city-dwellers, their gods changed too. Gods went from being "Masters of the Animals" to "Kings of the City."
- Practice Intellectual Humility: Whenever you feel a strong urge to say "God wants X," pause and ask if "I want X" is the more accurate statement. Distinguishing between personal desire and perceived divine mandate is the first step toward a more sophisticated type of faith.
The history of God is, at its core, the history of us. We are a species of storytellers, and God is the greatest story we’ve ever told. Whether that story is "true" in a literal sense matters less than what the story reveals about the people telling it. We look into the dark, vast expanse of the unknown, and we see a face. It’s a familiar face. It’s ours.