The Inven­tion Of God, by Bill Lauritzen

Arthur C Clarke called him “some kind of genius.” I recently got the chance to inter­view Bill Lau­ritzen, the author of The Inven­tion Of God — which is a fas­ci­nat­ing book that looks at how reli­gion began — and how our ances­tors inter­preted the nat­ural world as some­thing supernatural.

What was the ori­gin of your beliefs and how were you raised as a child? Did that affect how you feel about reli­gion and science?

I was lucky because I never went to church as a child and my par­ents were agnos­tic, so that helped me to have an open-minded belief sys­tem.  It made me very curi­ous about reli­gion — because I wasnt exposed to it.  My father was a busi­ness man and my mother was a jour­nal­ist, both fairly well edu­cated.  Niether one went to col­lege how­ever, my mother was self — edu­cated, and that had a big influ­ence on me.  She was a very curi­ous person.

What led you down this path as your got more curi­ous? Any sin­gu­lar event?

One impor­tant event of great sig­nif­i­cance was in 1992. I went to a total eclipse in Hawaii, and I was more impressed by the vol­canic struc­ture of the island and see­ing the lava turn into solid ground before my eyes — that had a big influ­ence on me.  It even­tu­ally led me to explore other vol­ca­noes around the world and I real­ized how impor­tant they are in reli­gion and mythol­ogy.   In Hawaii, you can walk right up to the lava flow — there were no park rangers hold­ing you back.  Hawai­ian vol­ca­noes are called shield vol­ca­noes, and later on I vis­ited cone vol­ca­noes — which are more explo­sive — in South­east asia and Indone­sia.  One vol­cano in par­tic­u­lar was Kraka­toa, which exploded vio­lently in 1883.  The Child of Krakatao is now grow­ing and will even­tu­ally explode.  These are things the ancient peo­ple saw, and this affected their mythol­ogy and their worldview.

So your line of think­ing is that we didn’t have the tools to explain nat­ural phenomena?

We didnt have the elab­o­rate, sophis­ti­cated sci­ence. Ancient peo­ple were proto-scientists.  They didnt even have a word for reli­gion.  Their proto-science…It was a model of the world around them, and that devel­oped later into alchemy…And finally into chem­istry and physics.

Before elec­tric­ity, vol­ca­noes were one of the few sources of light in the world.  You had light­ning, the sun and moon, fire, and vol­ca­noes.  Prim­i­tive man tried to fit all this together into some whole cohe­sive the­ory, and basi­cally came up with fire, air, earth, and water as a prim­i­tive sci­ence — which then led to the peri­odic table that we have today.

What are your the­o­ries about prophets — the peo­ple that claimed they spoke to God?

Well, it’s pos­si­ble they thought the vol­cano was a God of the under­world, because they saw lava turn­ing into land, and the land becom­ing fer­tile and grow­ing things — they saw this hap­pen, so they might have assumed it was a creator.

Have you thought that were might be an impend­ing war between sci­ence and religion?

Nobody knows the future, but cer­tainly there is con­flict going on between the reli­gious right and the rest of us, and I dont know that it will result in vio­lence, but I do see social upheaval — pri­mar­ily due to the great wealth inequal­i­ties, and as a result of the poli­cies of the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tions.  Again, nobody can pre­dict it, but it will be inter­est­ing.  Peo­ple need to demistify these myths and defeat the fundamentalists.

Whats the best way to edu­cate peo­ple in a way that doesn’t offend them, and still allows them to be spir­i­tual, but to not be ostra­cized by their fam­i­lies and community?

My orig­i­nal intent with the book was not to offend peo­ple, but I don’t know how well it does that because I’m not read­ing it from a reli­gious view­point.   I don’t know that reli­gion will ever be replaced with some­thing else — I’m begin­ning to think that some form of reli­gion is inevitable, and it is pos­si­ble we could replace it with some­thing more ratio­nal. That’s some­thing im explor­ing right now.  There are a lot of seri­ous sci­en­tists try­ing to fig­ure out why reli­gion exists in the first place and why it evolved.

Do you see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence becom­ing some­thing like a God?

That is pos­si­ble, of course peo­ple who know what AI is, I don’t think they are going to wor­ship them.  Per­haps com­mon peo­ple would, and it is pos­si­ble AI could declare itself a form of reli­gious leader.  Our con­cept of God keeps evolv­ing, and you can always trump some­body elses con­cept of God by cre­at­ing a big­ger con­cept of God.  Some­one says Big Bang, then some­one says “Well who cre­ated that?”  We are here to do the best we can and develop mod­els for the world around us…and to pre­dict the best we can what will happen.

Have you done any research about ancient con­tact with extraterrestrials?

Of course, I’ve done research in that area, and the peo­ple who pro­pose those ideas usu­ally get all the pub­lic­ity, but the books debunk­ing their claims, they don’t get any pub­lic­ity at all.  Peo­ple are always look­ing for an easy way out — that some moth­er­ship will come down and take us away.  Its eas­ier to believe in some­thing like that than to study sci­ence and physics and make a break­through your­self.  And then, who knows, actu­ally build a star­ship.  That would be the way to go — instead of wait­ing for some­body to res­cue you from your situation.

Why is reli­gion more pop­u­lar than science?

Think about how many Chris­t­ian bands and Chris­t­ian radio sta­tions there are.  How come there are no athe­ist or sci­ence radio sta­tions?  Reli­gion pays no taxes, which is ridicu­lous.  It is also a lot eas­ier to under­stand — its pretty sim­ple. There’s one book to read instead of a thou­sand.  It takes hard work to learn sci­ence.  Church, you know,  you just show up every Sun­day, sing some songs, and go out to lunch afterwards

Do you think that sci­en­tists are too busy actu­ally work­ing on sci­ence to care about mar­ket­ing? Or are there too many dis­parate branches of sci­ence to cre­ate a cen­tral­ized message?

Sci­ence is more com­plex to under­stand, so I dont know that sci­ence will ever have that level of pop­u­lar­ity.  Every once in a while, they make a break­through and sim­plify things like New­ton did, but it still takes a lot of work to under­stand it.

When you think about reli­gion, it’s actu­ally a very intel­li­gent idea as a con­cept in his­tory — have you ever thought that reli­gious lead­ers are actu­ally very intel­li­gent and are good at the sci­ence of mak­ing peo­ple believe things?  

I don’t con­sider them true sci­en­tists — because they dont have high eth­i­cal stan­dards in report­ing facts and results.  They are more like really good busi­ness­men.  It’s never the une­d­u­cated peo­ple at the top.

What is your opin­ion on the future of education?

Good ques­tion. I see our country’s true sal­va­tion is edu­ca­tion, not reli­gion.  We need to start using the inter­net more, and make it avaible to every­one in the inner cities.  That may be my next book. It is a key thing that will keep our coun­try strong and I dont think we are doing nearly enough in that realm.

Bill Lau­ritzen

William Lau­ritzen is a dis­tin­guished grad­u­ate of the Air Force Acad­emy in Col­orado Springs.  He received a B.S. in psy­chol­ogy and grad­u­ated near the top 1% of his class.  He was named “The Out­stand­ing Grad­u­ate” in both psy­chol­ogy and philosophy. The Air Force sent him to an accel­er­ated pro­gram to get a master’s degree in indus­trial and orga­ni­za­tional psy­chol­ogy at Pur­due. At the age of 22, he received a master’s degree in Indus­trial Psy­chol­ogy from Pur­due, spe­cial­iz­ing in Human Engi­neer­ing Design. He was assigned to design and eval­u­ate cock­pits for jet air­craft, which he did for two years.

He wrote a paper on the Buck­min­ster­fuller­ence mol­e­cule in 1994, and has cre­ated sev­eral inno­v­a­tive designs and insight­ful arti­cles which com­bine cog­ni­tive sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, geom­e­try, geo­desic domes, arche­ol­ogy, anthro­pol­ogy, geol­ogy, oceanography,education, ancient Egypt, eco­nom­ics, and other subjects.

His designs include a new way of pre­sent­ing and teach­ing the Eng­lish alpha­bet (still under devel­op­ment), a new num­ber sys­tem (a base-12 color-coded num­ber sys­tem with new sym­bols), an edu­ca­tional word game (still under devel­op­ment), and Spacehenge.

Lau­ritzen teaches sum­mers for the Cen­ter for Tal­ented Youth of Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity. He lives in Los Ange­les and New Mexico.