The biology of religion

It seems likely that homo sapiens was a religious creature - that is, religion emerged early in humanity's history. Recent scepticism by some is balanced by the wide range of orthodox and unorthodox religious views by others, views on the paranormal, the soul, magic, life force and above all evil forces and entities, so loved by pulp writers and films.

Why is this? The core reason is simple. Early humans developed language which at some point became complex enough to ask Why? Small children do this early enough. The trouble with children is that some questions are too difficult to answer at their level, or so the adult thinks. The trouble with humanity was that they had insufficient knowledge to answer accurately cosmological or existential questions. So an earthquake needed an understandable cause, and was understood as an  'act of God'; jealousy needed an explanation, so evil spirits provided good explanations, as also they did to explain disease and death. Whether personalities live on after death, and in what form, produced all sorts of theories about ancestors. Over-excited causality about the origins of the world produced creator deities and origin myths.

It is hard to test this out. Anthropology may help. The San Bushmen of southern Africa (see my paper) are modern humans who have lives wilderness lives with technology derived from nature (stone, wood, leather) whose ideas were not modernised by western education. Their stories have been paintakingly archived over the past hundred years.  When they looked at the stars, they saw not the 3D with huge distances, but the 2D star pattern as presented. So too must early humans. They interpreted the sky intelligently, it the light of their own understanding; and they observed and studies landscape, prey animals and food plants. So they were systematic scientists. They studied the brain too, using the plant drugs they had tested and mesmeric dancing and rhythms, so altered mind states were part of their reality, rubbing shoulders with their dreams. Above all, life for them was a game of chance. They felt themselves caught in the cross-fire of hostile forces; the best they could do is to have enough understanding to recognize it and dodge if they could. Bushman religion is hardly a religion at all, but an interpretation of natural life with supernatural explanations for the unexplainable. There were gods and they were feared, but they were not worshipped or even respected. What ritual was observable, the trance dance, was social and anti-religious (designed to chase spirits away).

So humans are hard-wired to wanting certain answers to questions, even if they have to subconsciously invent that certainty. All questions have answers, however improbable, as Douglas Adams would have said. In evolutionary terms, this is helpful because it helps to plan safety strategies rather than being unconcerned with danger. Humans are hard-wired to be anxious, and have evolved extraordinary ways of resolving this anxiety in order to live with it. Anxiety about socially unacceptable behaviour led to in-group morality, whatever the level of out-group violence. Therefore, humans are also hard-wired to be conformist and conventional. Stanley Milgrom, a holocaust survivor set up a famous (some would say infamous, but I disagree) experiment where experimental subjects were asked to give severe electric shocks to partners (actually actors, unbeknown to them). Two thirds would not resist the demands of authority (the researcher telling them to do it and not spoil the experiment) and administered shocks that would have been lethal. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiments similarly showed that two thirds not only followed orders, but many did so enthusiastically and sadistically. We are hard-wired to obey, and follow the crowd. As one who has always swum against the tide, ever since my three year old campaign to discredit Father Christmas, I find this hard to comprehend, but I recognize that, in evolutionary terms, in a different society I may have been dead before adulthood, just as any American white in a former generation would have been risking his or her life by protesting against lynching a black victim. German resisters against Nazism put themselves, and their families,  in great danger. The herd obeyed.

Nevertheless, we need to deal with this hard-wired obedience. Because of it, humans have been the most violent of species. Principles, standards, virtues, morals and human rights have all been tried.

For the origins, supernaturalism leading to spirits, powers and gods can be viewed as 'religion' but maybe just a set of assumptions. Where early religions (that is, 3000+ years before the present) organised themselves, such as Ra and Aton in Egypt, they were declarations of power. Assyrian gods supported military conquests. Formalised religion produced a group of 'us' who fought against 'them', as Yahweh's Elijah did against Baal, and as all Hebrew prophets did. The final editing of Hebrew Bible texts such as the Torah and histories, and the assumptions of Ezra and Nehemiah, show that after the return from exile in the 5th century BCE, a powerful elite tried to set an exclusivist agenda, even requiring foreign wives to be divorced.

Religions which followed are outside these comments, but I invite readers to consider power implications within the religions which survived, and also the resistance to power that some of them reveal. Ethical religion may be a way of taming the religious impulse which over centuries caused such damage.