The Archbishop of Canterbury talking about art from the Ice Age and what I meant, in Episode 4 of “A History of the World in 100 Objects”:
“It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and I think that that’s actually a very deeply religious impulse, to be at home in the world.”
and…
“I don’t think that primitive human beings just had a ready-made word in their heads that sounded like ‘God’, and they immediately knew what it was. They were discovering how to be human in a world that was much more complicated because of their intelligence, and because of the new environmental challenges they were working with, and slowly the world - how should I say it? - almost reshapes itself. With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the ‘Old Testament’ is called ‘wisdom’, a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.”
I like defining the religious impulse as the attempt be human and at home in the world.