Deities in Worldbuilding
The Divine and Polytheism in Emergent Narratives
The calendar tells me it is Darwin Day¹, which is a celebration of science, but I will take it to talk about evolution and religion. For some Christians (and also some Muslims), these two are in conflicts with each other since they perceive there a contradiction between them. But for most people these ideas can be reconciled with each other.
While I am an atheist, I have to say I find religion fascinating. And even though some religious people will claim that I hate their deity or would worship something in place of a deity, I can say that neither is the case. For me atheism is like being apolitical or being asymptomatic, neither do these things say that a person being that claims there are no politics or no illnesses that can have symptoms not do they secretly are still political or have the illness nevertheless. For a full disclaimer, I am also agnostic, as in I don’t know if some deities could even exit, and apatheistic, as in even if such entities would exist, it makes no difference to me, since they seem not to interact in any measurable way with our reality. This does not mean I have faith in the theory of evolution, or want to be a deity myself, or I would do so just because I want to sin.
This article is more about fiction than history, science, or theology, but I will look at these nevertheless. Just take my opinions on the religious aspects here with a grain of salt, and dome the favour not to read any malicious intent into it when you, dear reader, are in disagreement. I am always interested in having a conversation to learn how others look at the world, thus feel free to…
Evolving Divinity
The idea of the divine has changed through history, with in prehistorical times the line between spirits and deities not even existing, and some might say that all the supernatural ever was is nothing more than hyperactive agency detection² and thus a survival instinct. Convergent thinking similar to the late Theory of Evolution had people already in ancient times coming up with that all supernatural phenomena must be like branches of a tree and led to a single source.
In evolution this would become later the LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, while in theology this would become the supreme being. In neoplatonism this godhead was framed as emanating everything from within itself. The Catholic Saint Thomas Aquinas later adapted this for Christianity by adding the ex nihilo part to it.
Top Down Divinity. Again, this article is about worldbuilding and fiction, and so we can frame this idea of a single monotheistic deity as any other top down design approach. Most notable the (in my humble opinion — horrible) idea of the hierarchy of being³, also known as great chain of being, is an outgrowth from that philosophy, which taints mythology in the western world for a long time.
The appeal in such a worldview is easy, it provides a structure and a feeling of order in an otherwise unpredictable world. Religion as cure for uncertainty, as I wrote in my article about horror. This however creates the issue, that stable situations are bad for storytelling, because the lack movement and thus are boring. Which is why get the antagonists like Satan / Iblis (إِبْلِيسْ), along with a host of demons or djinns. And with all that moral questions sneak into the worldbuilding, but we keep the ethics debate for later. Instead let me propose a different approach to worldbuilding the divine:
Bottom Up Divinity. Here we do not start with an emanating divine source, but might put the divine at the other end of the temporal arrow and have it be the emergent divine. This is more closely to how evolution works, by not being already perfect in the beginning, but a process of accumulation. Some apologists might argue against such a notion in favour of having a first cause, but a chain without a first term is mathematically not really an problem, especially when it comes to the limit behaviours around the time of the big bang, which accordingly to the Theory of Relativity and the likely sigularity back then would curve the spacetime so severely that or all intents and purposes those first moments would be an eternity anyway.
This however should be done with caution, especially in this approach it would be wrong to assume a destination. Since evolution has no goal, and neither should then assumed that a particular divine outcome would be guaranteed. That is the same misconception that gave us social Darwinism and Nazi ideas of the coming race.
Instead let us look further back into history and how polytheism evolved. Polytheism seems to have been the norm in ancient days, even Judaism began in that manner. With the expanding influence of the Proto Indo-European peoples many cultures adapted a henotheist mythology, usually with a male deity of sky, sun, or weather as the divine patriarch. These religions were always tied to the ethnicity, which the super-religions later abandoned, like in Buddhism or Christianity, forming the equivalent to a superorganism.
Well, of course one could say that religions already provide the social cohesion to make any society a superorganism already, but by including a larger population without the need for a given ancestry the religions could grow beyond the limits of recreation. Thus unifying people and with this allowing the divine also to grow.
Yet the tribalism in our species will prevent a truly unified world religion for some time longer. But in fiction we can surely already explore such ideas, either set in the future through science fiction or in the past as some fantasy myth, especially if the divine is there real and could actually interacted with. But with all this talking about societies we can progress to the next topic…
Morality and the Divine
The conflation of the divine with ethical concerns is probably as old as religion itself is. And the folly in that has been discussed already millennia ago as the Euthyphro dilemma⁴ can attest. However through an evolutionary lens which considers moral behaviour as beneficial trait for a social species and the belief in the divine also as a beneficial survival trait, these can be combined. Even though this would be more of a philosophical anti-realism approach than some people might like, since usually the people who try to reconcile these are more of a philosophical realism persuasion.
Society under Polytheism. This is something that I see one so often poorly in worldbuilding, since to often people grew up with a monotheistic paradigm an thus project certain ideas they do not understand onto polytheism. Particularly that it gets frame as a norm that people would pick a personal patron deity, which is simply not how this works. Sure, some priestly folks dedicated their lives to a single deity when they serve at that deity’s temple. But the common person would not do that, and so deities would not be about a profession either, like a sailor would not limit themself to praising only Poseidon but worship depending on situation, like bringing an offering to Aphrodite when they want to court someone. And there we get to a crucial difference, in polytheism the deities are involved in everyday life, their favour is part of a reciprocal dynamic. The deities are not removed creators, they are active agents in the world.
That is why pluralism can thrive under polytheism as it can under a secular society. And the same is then true or atheism, since social cohesion is not based on piety but on empathy. Of course atheism can be viewed negatively as not participating in the reciprocity with the deities and thus also not as being part of society. Thus atheism would only be an issue if the stability of society comes into question. This what caused the issue for Socrates, while society at large did necessarily treated the deities as being real. Anyway, my point here is that atheism always existed, even in societies that assumed the deities to be real, and so we can have atheists in a fantasy worldbuilding projects as well. Even if that just means the atheist does not worship any deities but feels comfortable to walk their own path in life without relying on supernatural aid or superstitious rituals.
The Maturing Divine. In contrast how Christianity treats the texts it inherited from Judaism, YHVH was not depicted as an absolute entity, but as limited and often had to learn things. The great deluge narrative could be read as iterating design for example. But we have in earlier in Genesis the story about the forbidden fruit, which is still in the moral framework of reciprocity, and thus the lesson was never about the fruit, but about the social contract which was broken. Hence YHVH could not anticipate it and learnt about moral behaviour along with the humans in the garden. Which is then how the Torah proceeds, with tales of reciprocity between the chosen people and YHVH. And the more the narratives came to the current time of the writers the more removed became their deity.
This is where the Buddha and the Christ become interesting, since both dealt with the distant divine in their own ways, and both centred their teachings on the reciprocity with the being around them instead of those in some distant realm. Siddhartha Gautama with life in general to gather the karma to escape Samsara, and Jesus more just with the follow human beings. Both talk about empty divine worship and how important it is to have empathy.
The lessons sadly get forgotten, overshadowed by tribalism. And we see that repeated in fiction over and over again too. With savours defeat the cosmic evil instead of liberating us from our tribal nature. That is why the hero’s journey always rings hollow, it is made out to be a fight, when the solution would be compassion.
This is where I leave it today. Sure, I could talk about how I apply this in my Veitstanz setting, but that has to wait for another time. Since the exercise was only about the divine along with morality are more emergent properties than innate to reality. Both are great for narrative purposes and horrible when used to justify atrocities against other humans. And dehumanisation will be also a topic I will address in future posts as well, but for now I thank you for reading my musings.
References
Hyperactive Agency Detection, article in the Neurologica blog
Great chain of being, Wikipedia article
Euthyphro dilemma, Wikipedia article