This research will examine religious monotheism and its three major faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The research will set forth the context, both geographically and culturally, in which monotheism arose, and then discuss the human experience that appears to have informed religious development as a central form of custom and practice and as a core system of belief, culture, and society.
If the evidence of texts designated as holy scripture is that religion is as old as the earth itself and that, according to Judaeo-Christian tradition, it can be dated to the creation of Adam and Eve. But religion also has other historical and geographical roots that can be traced to the Paleolithic period, the geological time period in which development of human life within the familiar meaning of the term has been identified. Human life is associated with four paleontological periods known as the Quarternary Hominidae, with the first or basal Quarternary starting at a maximum of 3 million and a minimum of 1 million years ago ("Human Life" 211-212). Hominids of the basal and Early Quarternaries, which include examples of Homo erectus, are not generally considered "culture-bearing" creatures in the modern meaning of the term (Robinson 439). However, the earliest human species, Australopithecus africanus, 3 million years ago had anatomical, environmental, and behavioral similarities to modern Homo sapiens (Robinson passim; Day 1045). But even if Australopithecus is a transitional genus (Ardrey 33ff), evidence of "predatory transition," such as food storage and weapon use (Ardrey 334-5), points toward an organized mental capacity.
The evidence of modern experience of rationality is that what can be reasoned is uniquely in human beings susceptible of psychological abstraction, which can be connected to the psychological provenance of religion. Indeed it seems likely that Paleolithic human ancestors developed mythic-religious belief and behav...