I received an interesting selection of comments in response to that post on a God gene yesterday, including this:

“Of course, St. Augustine of Hippo said (to paraphrase) that each of us has a God-shaped void in our hearts and that we can only achieve completeness by filling that void with God. This is, of sorts, a religiously-tinged view of religion as a natural phenomenon. The idea that there is a God gene can be seen as an updated version of St. Augustine of Hippo.”

And this:

“I hope someone will give some credit to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav

Jung for this meme. Jung made a very convincing case for this throughout

his career — indeed he built his entire school of psychology and model of

consciousness on it. Jung felt that the religious instinct was a very

powerful force in mankind, and was responsible for the drive to artistic and

other forms of creative/symbolic expression. What is most interesting, IMO, is not the apparent universality of religious symbolism, but the fact that religious imagery at best only “points in the direction of” God. Thus, Jung speaks of “the God image” — a symbolic representation of God — rather than God Himself. Jung argued that what we see in the portrayal of deity, from (for example) the Old Testament and progressing through to the New Testament, and now into modern times, is not the evolution of God…but the evolution of the God image in the human psyche.”

Food for thought, certainly. as is the fact that I am now responsible for a post citing both Jung and Augustine of Hippo. Who’d have thunk it?