God Begat Civilization

History in the Remaking A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

What I find so fascenating about this is not that it is an "outlier" or that it "upends the apple cart" of archeological thinking as the artile directly states but that it is so logical when you think about it.

Think of all those neolithic cave paintings. Man was worshipping in those caves when he created those gorgeous images. Those were sacred caves. Creating that temple complex was the next logical step in the development of their religion. That the requirements for building such a complex begat agriculture seems simple evolution.

And if God, or the worship of God, begat civilization, so too did Art as the expression of that worship begat civilization as well.