"How God got started", how god belief + basic reason + writing -> modern humans?

[Whateverist]

I just started reading a longish article titled "How did God get started" I found at an online site for a journal of the humanities and classics called Arion, published by Boston University since 1990.  I was impressed by the accessibility of the article and the richness of the ideas.  So I've excerpted a few bits that convey what I found interesting here.  I've only read the beginning of the article and up to this section of the article.  I'll need to ruminate on this a while before taking another bite. 

I'd love to be able to discuss it here with anyone who also finds it interesting.  

It isn't a religious site so the challenge for theists is likely to be greater than for atheists.  The article is primarily an attempt at piecing together early history and considering how that reflects on the development of human psychology and culture.  The part of the article preceding what I've excerpted considers the precedents leading up to the founding of Abrahamic religions which apparently happened concurrently with the emergence of written language and modern reason which is the main focus of this passage.  

I've underlined one passage I especially liked which likens the raw human capacity for symbolic logic in interpreting their environment to the capacity dolphins have for using sonar to do the same.  The raw capacity and use of symbolic logic when combined with authored texts and peer review blossom into science, technology and whole tradition of free rational inquiry.

GETTING TO ONE

Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity. The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, ...
Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes.
For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. 

This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar.   ... 
Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation. Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before.

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Like the tradition of faith, the tradition of reason was invented only once, although also like its religious counterpart it concentrates and amplifies a corresponding mental faculty that’s common to everyone.

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And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything.  ...  

Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane. And Plato’s student Aristotle put his own twist on the concept, conceiving of God as an Unmoved Mover—a conception that would later, like Plato’s Demiurge, profoundly influence Jewish and Christian theology.

Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition.  ...


So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. It’s surprising for us, looking back, that reason came first. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.

The full passage from which I excerpted the above:

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GETTING TO ONE

Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity. The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around 800 bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels. The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument. Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes.
For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them. In other words, Thales (whose name rhymes with “Hailey’s”) invented science, as well as the larger tradition of rationalistic inquiry to which science belongs, and which soon included other disciplines such as history.
This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar. Nor is it to say that neighboring civilizations such as those of Babylonia and Egypt hadn’t developed wisdom traditions that included much information about the natural world. Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies (of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader). Modern authorities believe that Ionia’s proximity to those older cultures did much to stimulate Ionian thought. But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation. Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before. Like the tradition of faith, the tradition of reason was invented only once, although also like its religious counterpart it concentrates and amplifies a corresponding mental faculty that’s common to everyone.
And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything. Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite. Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular. In his contribution to a groundbreaking book called Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (1999), the classicist Martin West calls these monist principles “mindless gods,” which suits them admirably.1
Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane. And Plato’s student Aristotle put his own twist on the concept, conceiving of God as an Unmoved Mover—a conception that would later, like Plato’s Demiurge, profoundly influence Jewish and Christian theology.
Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition. Philo, who was educated in Platonic philosophy and lived in the lifetime of Jesus, wrote, “God is One, but he has around him numberless potencies . . . ” Philo’s “potencies” would soon become the angels and demons (including Satan) whom early Christians would equate with the traditional gods of Greek polytheism as Christianity split off from this evolving Jewish tradition.
So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. It’s surprising for us, looking back, that reason came first. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.

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http://www.bu.edu/arion/archive/volume-1...t-started/