"Personal experiences" are not a good source for rational beliefs or reality. Many people have had the personal experience of being anally probed by aliens.
I've heard that response countless times, and it falls flat every single time. Everything, all thoughts and ideas about anything, are based upon subjective experiences. Even science.
I cited Gebser's work, which draws from those experts. Same with any philosopher. Check their references, there's usually a lot of them included in their published works. One does trust the integrity of the sources, as one trusts the author they are reading who draws from them.
Do you really want to consider "Where did we come from" an intellectual question. Three-year-olds ask where babies come from.
You don't think three years olds are developing cognitive intelligence yet? Such a question, is a question of a reasoning mind. Infants don't ask that question yet. And the same thing applies to our evolution. Like the stages of development we see in children, that is how we evolved as a species over millions of years. We aren't born fully developed, and we come into existence as a species fully developed either. I don't believe in creationism.
My point is, that religion cannot be reduced down to those questions. There is no evidence that supports that in what we see culturally, historically, or even in the present world which researchers have studied in the various fields which deal with human evolution, biological, cultural, societal, mental, emotional, cognitive, etc.
Magical how? Did man see magic in the wanderings of elk? How did that magic lead to worship and religion?
Gebser explains it somewhat in there. And yes, magic is an early form of how we as a species perceived the world. You can see that in young children today as a stage of development. Our stages of development we go through today, was created by millions of years of evolution. It's like a micro-timeline of a macro-history. Children move from magic stages, to mythic stages, to rational stages, etc. Just like our species has over the millennia.
Religions are, by definition, built around the worship of gods. No gods, no religions.
Not according to anthropologists. Animistic religions don't have gods.
Animism
"Animism is really more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it. It is not a form of materialism, which posits that only matter, materials, and movement exist. Nor is animism a form of monotheism, which posits a single god in the universe. And, it is not a form of polytheism that posits many gods."
Animistic religions come before theistic, or mythic stage gods, historically, as well as developmentally in children and human cultures. Gods come in later on in development. They are an developed view, based upon an early system of magic, which did not have gods yet. The magic is brought forward into the more evolved mythic stage. It is "transcended and included" into the mythic stage. But the religious impulse, is pre-mythic, pre-gods stage.
I have given some examples of the possible orgins of beliefs in gods. You disagree bu thave not provide any examples.
You haven't offered any support, other than a flawed argument, that God and religion came into being because we lacked a scientific understanding of the world. That's a very anemic notion that can't really offer much in way of evidence to support. It doesn't explain why non-theistic religions existed before mythic religions.
The religious impulse goes way deeper into our history, than the agricultural revolution changed the evolutionary course of religion from the more archaic and animistic forms of magic systems, to the more highly evolved mythic systems. It follow the movement from kinship systems, to ethnic systems, to much later cosmopolitan systems which brought all them together. How we view Reality, evolves over time, and modern research shows this in a cross-disciplinary studies. That's a lot of what you see with Gebser. I'd also point you Spiral Dynamics, and Integral Metatheory which is based upon these multiple-fields of research.
Spiral Dynamics
I'm really not much into the beliefs and pronouncements of philosophers. For every view taken by any, there are opposing views from many others.
Sounds sort of like the complaint about the truth of the election. We can't really know the truth, because everyone is saying something different. Fox news tells a different story, so we can't trust anything. There must be a problem with the election? With so many opinions, whose to know anything at all? Right?
Certainly, Gebser is not a cultural anthropologist. In any case, your link is to a review of one of Gebser's works. But even from there we see:
With the advent of the Cro-Magnons, man became a tool-making individual, also one who formed into larger social structures. As Feuerstein points out, it is clear from the archaeological finds that the Cro-Magnons had evolved a symbolic universe that was religious and shamanistic.
Again, no gods, no religion. Curiosity is innate in primates. Where did we come from, why do we die, what happens to us when we die would have been asked as soon as there was primitive language. You might also note that leaders never say "I don't know". How would you have answered: "Where did First Man come from"? Even today, millions of people believe the answer is GodDidIt.
Shamanism is an Animistic religion, which has no gods. That quote supports what I'm saying.
Now, if you just want to throw away the thoughts of philosophers and intellectuals and academicians because they have different opinions, then I suppose the Creationists are justified in throwing out evolution and science for those same reasons.