The True Religion Has Existed Since the Beginning of History

Excerpted from the book A Historical Lie: the Stone Age

Another error of those who promote the deception that history and society evolved is the claim that religion—society’s highest value—evolved as well. This claim was put forth in the 19th century and was avidly defended by materialists and atheists. But there are no archaeological findings to justify it and it remains in the realm of speculation.

Nor is there any support to claim that humans of earlier ages practiced so-called “primitive” tribal and polytheist religions, and that true religion—the religion revealed to the whole of humanity since the time of Adam (pbuh)and based on the belief in one God—came into being only later. Some evolutionists try to portray this claim as a historical fact, but they are greatly mistaken. Just as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is a deception, so is the theory of religious evolution that takes its inspiration from him.

How Did the “Evolution of Religions” Error Come About?

About one and a half centuries ago, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was still in its first edition, the idea of evolution gained support among materialists and atheists. Some thinkers of that period assumed that every event in the human history could be explained by evolution, stating that everything began from a so-called basic, primitive stage and advanced toward greater perfection.

This error was applied in many areas. In the realm of economics, for example, Marxism claimed that such advancement was inevitable and that everyone would eventually adopt communism. Experience has shown that this was only a dream and Marxism’s claims did not reflect reality.

In the field of psychology, Sigmund Freud said that human beings were a highly evolved species but that psychologically, their actions were still motivated by the same drives as their so-called primitive ancestors’ had been. This major error has been scientifically refuted by psychological research, showing that Freudianism’s basic suppositions had no scientific foundation.

In the same way, the fields of sociology, anthropology and history have also been affected by the theory of evolution, but knowledge gained from discoveries in the last century have shown this influence has been counterproductive.

The common feature of all these evolutionary theories is their opposition to any belief in God. This is the philosophical basis behind the mistaken idea of the evolution of religion. According to the false claims of Herbert Spencer, a leading proponent of this error, early human beings had no religion. The first religions supposedly began with the worship of the dead. Other anthropologists who support the deception of religion’s “evolution” propose different accounts. Some say that religion has its source in animism (the attribution of divine spirit to nature); others think that it arose from totemism (the worship of a symbolic person, group or object). Another anthropologist, E.B. Taylor, believes that religion developed from animism to manism (ancestor-worship), polytheism (the belief in many gods) and finally ending in monotheism (the belief in one God).

This theory was put forward in the 19th century by atheist anthropologists and has been kept alive ever since, presented in various scenarios. But it is nothing more than a deception. As archaeological and historical evidence shows, contrary to what these scientists have proposed, from earliest times there was a monotheist religion that God revealed to humanity through His prophets. But at the same time, deviant, superstitious beliefs have always coexisted with the true religion. Just as today there are people who believe that God is the One and Only deity and lead their lives according to the religion He has revealed, so also are those who erroneously worship idols of wood and stone, or satan, or their ancestors as well as various spirits, animals, the Sun, the Moon or the stars. And many of these people are not backward, but on the contrary live in very advanced circumstances.

Throughout history, there have also been those who have not obeyed the precepts of the true religions revealed by God and tried to eliminate their moral values. The Qur’an tells us of some people who wanted to include superstitious beliefs and practices in the true religion revealed to them and ended up altering and destroying it:

Woe to those who write the Book with their own hands and then say “This is from God” to sell it for a paltry price. Woe to them for what their hands have written! Woe to them for what they earn!

Baqara:79

This is why, over the course of time, some who believed in the existence and unity of God and obeyed His commands abandoned true religion. In this way, deviant beliefs and practices came into being. In other words, contrary to what some have proposed, there has never been a process of religious evolution; but true religion was at certain times distorted, as a result of which deviant ones arose.

Distortion of the True Religion

In the 20th century important research has been done on the origin of religions, thanks to which it has become known that there is no scientific value in claims about religions’ evolution, and that such claims are only imaginary scenarios. Research into world religions by such leading anthropologists as Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt has shown that religions did not evolve; on the contrary, sometimes underwent distortion over the course of time. The results of Schmidt’s research were published in detail in the periodical, Anthropos.

Research done especially between 1900-1935 shows that claims about the evolution of religions are totally false, which led many anthropologists to abandon their evolutionary ideas. But despite all these scientific and historical facts, some radical atheists continued to defend this untenable scenario.

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