One of the first to emerge is the so-called Enlightenment concept of the origin of religion. It was formulated and promoted by the French Enlightenment philosopher Paul Golbach, who devoted a great deal of work to the atheist struggle. According to his concept, religion arises for three reasons: fear, ignorance, and deception. I think I am not mistaken when I say that the modern atheist, who may not even be familiar with the works of Holbach and his associates, is in agreement with these ideas.
According to the Enlighteners, primitive man was ignorant because he had only recently emerged from the animal state. At the same time he lived in terrible and incredibly difficult conditions. And because he was constantly exposed to all kinds of dangers and natural disasters (drought and floods), because he was exposed to disease and sudden death everywhere, he was in constant fear. He did not know how to get out of this fear, until a cunning and deceitful man took advantage of the situation and offered the man a way out – religion – in exchange for respect, financial prosperity and, in the end, power. He called himself a priest, began to manipulate and manipulate other mysterious terms that he himself had invented, and began to pronounce various spells, to practice sacrifices and other actions in order to subjugate people who did not know what the cause of their suffering was. The people at the time could not explain the phenomena from which they suffered, and the deceiver said to them, “All because you do not honor the gods, do not sacrifice to them.” This is how religion came about.
This simple argument seems really convincing to many atheists, and its persuasiveness is sustained not so much by its theoretical depth as by its psychological component. After all, this concept presents the believer as a cowardly man, an illiterate man, a gullible man.
By the way, as I pondered this concept, I was reminded of the famous trinity of the Coward, the Jackass, and the Experienced from the movies by L. Gaidai. After all, this is the image of the enlightened understanding of the emergence of religion! One is a coward – afraid of everything, the other is a dunce – knows nothing, and the third is the experienced, he can not be fooled, he just leads the whole company, which can not get out of this or that situation reasonably. And this is the favorite argument of atheists, that all believers are illiterate, and only the illiterate will go to church, but scientists are atheists.
How convincing is this concept?
It is possible to imagine the situation of ancient man and draw a different conclusion: being in a dangerous situation, man will never invent some non-existent gods, spirits, and so on, but will strive to overcome the situation. If he gets into a storm – he will resist it, if there is a drought – he will dig wells or take some other action, about which he knows better than we do, but he will not invent spirits, which, naturally, will not help him if they do not exist, as atheists believe. So this theory, though “beautiful,” as it seems to many, is utterly helpless, as confirmed by philosophers of later times. Already Ludwig Feuerbach, the German philosopher, Karl Marx, also a German philosopher, had refuted the viewpoint of the Enlighteners and put forward their own explanations.