There is one theory that has always troubled me. That is the thesis put forward by anthropologists to explain the universality of religion. In its general form it follows the argument put forward in The Golden Bough, that man sees the universe as impersonal and subject to magic and then alter personalizes it, inhabits it with spirits and develops religion to tap into those spirits. However, at all stages, in both the theory of The Golden Bough and the more general theory, the universe is seen as anthropomorphic. Whether personal and swayed through religion, or impersonal and forced through magic, the universe is seen as populated with (mostly anthropomorphic) spirits.

What troubles me about this is the assumption that man would naturally assign anthropomorphic features to what he sees around him.

Pardon me if I sound like a feminist for a moment, but you can tell that most theorists are single men. Or at least men who spent little time raising children. Having spent a long time in the company of my son during his early years, I know one thing, assigning anthropomorphic traits is a very LATE development. Early in his life, no matter how many cute faces manufacturers put on his toys, they were objects. In fact, it was hard to get him to assign human traits to humans, much less to animals or things. In the early part of life, confronted with so much puzzling and UNLIKE himself, he naturally assumed most things that weren't him, and maybe his immediate family, were entirely alien. Now, at three, yes he does assign human traits to everything, but that took a long time to develop.

So, why would the most primitive aspects of culture be religious? Why would man assume that nature is like him,w hen all he sees convinces him that it is very much UNLIKE him? Granted, Frazier does get around this by assigning an earlier magical period, where man tries to experimentally control nature through sympathetic magic. But that introduces troubles of its own, as even in cultures which have retained their magical thinking, religious thought has also developed, which seems to argue that religious thought is a primary category of human thought, something contemporaneous with magical thinking, and thus not something that could grow out of magic. (Not to mention that The Golden Bough never provides a satisfactory explanation of how the mechanistic magical model could develop into the anthropomorphic religious model.)

Actually, there is a simple argument against the assumption that religious thought is a natural response to the unknown. Look at the earliest of human interaction, that with the animals around him. As some form of hunting seems to have been practiced from very early in human experience, and as man has always been subject to predation, animals were a fact of life for early man. So, if he used anthropomorphic traits to explain things around him, he would surely have used it to explain animals as well as the thunder and fire and rain. But that is not what we see in cave paintings, or int he rituals of primitive cultures. They clearly do not see the animals around them as "men in fur", but as another class of being, entirely separate from man. Some deities may take on the shape of beasts or have beast attributes, but there is no concept that animals are in any way akin to humans.

And so, if man does not explain the angry lion or the timid gazelle by using human attributes or creating human-like deities, why on earth would that be his first instinct to explain lightning or fire? Especially as those things are more different form man than animals are? It seems much easier to explain cattle by ascribing human motives to them than to describe water, yet man did not do that. All of which makes little sense to me.

Not that I have a better explanation for the universality of religious beliefs. I could take the easy out and say that G-d structured man such that religion is always present in his thoughts, but that would be making a number of assumptions I can't prove. However, my lack of explanation does not make my other arguments any less significant. I may not be able to explain away the universality of religious thought, but I can say that the assumption that it is natural to create deities to explain the unknown simply does not seem correct. I am not obligated to provide a better explanation to replace it.

POSTSCRIPT

One possible counter argument could be drawn from linguistics. There is some linguistic and genetic evidence that human populations were reduced to very small pockets at one or more times in the past. It is far from conclusive, but it is possible. (I am not arguing for or against population bottlenecks, simply mentioning it as a possible argument to explain this commonality.) If that is the case, perhaps the concept of religion arose among some groups prior to that time, and those groups were the sole ones to survive. As a result, religion was present in all human cultures due to common ancestry and not due to anything innate in human nature.

It is not easily proved or disproved, but it is more plausible to me than the assumption that men would automatically invent deities when confronted with the unknown.