When somebody invents incredible stories and theories the onus is on such person to provide support for them.
The problem with this assumption is that as far back as man has any kind of written message discussing reality, there’s almost always some kind of concept of deity and the supernatural.
In this light, the evolutionary hypothesis of the development of religion does not explain the belief in a divinity very well to the point that it can be assumed that people were just ‘making things up’.
More to the point, man’s ancient history, recalling divers archtypes of ‘a fall of humanity’, seems to be a nearly universal consensus of a distant memory and not an later invention.
For example, Wilhelm Schmidt, a Jesuit professor at the University of Vienna, spent over 40 years (1912-1955) documenting and compiling evidence for what he called “primitive monotheism.” In 1931 he published his findings as The Origin and Growth of Religion. It was a book that revolutionized the study of religious anthropology.
Schmidt thought that such beliefs were the residue of a “primal revelation” of God to man. He felt that they were surviving forms of a once common knowledge of the one God (which through human fallenness and error has been overlaid by magic, animism, ancestor worship, spiritism, polytheism, and other forms of spiritual subjectivism). Schmidt continued to validate his thesis with continual research over the years. By 1955 he had published over 4000 pages of evidence in 12 large volumes.
G. K. Chesterton summed up the import of Schmidt’s ground-breaking studies:
There is very good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipations.
Primitive theologies of the one God always seemed to include some explanation of why He is no longer present. His departure is routinely regarded as a cosmic disastrous rupture in the natural fabric of things brought on by some fault or failure on the part of human beings. In some myths, the fault seems almost trivial, involving a technical error in the performance of some (now) obscure ritual, thus causing the universe to unravel and leave man spiritually marooned. In other forms of primitive monotheism, the failure is more morally serious, involving man’s betrayal of his duty to his creator, thus causing God to depart in sorrow and judgment.
The details differ, but all the myths tell a common story, and the story seems to be clearly a part of our common heritage. Ironically, the evidence of anthropology indicates that ancient man was more in agreement concerning the nature of our spiritual problem than we have agreed about anything since that time. The reason seems doubtless that their consensus was one of memory and not of opinion.
Schmidt’s work actually uncovered one momentous fact for all to see – namely, that humanity’s most ancient and universal assessment of its own condition is simply this: “God is not with us.” For whatever reason, God’s personal presence has been withdrawn from us. God’s absence is our problem.
Consequently, for atheism to rise up and state that everything heretofore religious is simply an invention of man is not supported by the commonality of these stories found all across the globe. And if atheism wants to assume that humanity is just making stuff up, they can do this all they want.
But they’re not proving anything by doing so.
continued…
