Religion. "Praise be to God." "Awakening the Buddha within." "Allāhu akbar." Just phrases at first sight.. But what comes to mind? Depending on your background or your personal situation, each of these might prime you with anxiety, or with comfort. Equally so, wars have been (and are) fought over whose way is ‘The Way’.
Then this title: Evolution of Religion? Should it not be Religion or Evolution? No, and we will explain why.
Among of the natural allies (or for that matter among the opponents!) of religion, the social sciences have often encountered great difficulties dealing with transcendental or mythical ideas, because of the own nature of these sciences and because of the ambiguities concerning religion. Also, as a result of the secularization hypothesis in the twentieth century in sociology, religion has become an often-ignored topic in the social sciences. A very brief and rough explanation of the secularization hypothesis holds that religion would disappear worldwide under the influences of modernization, as has been witnessed in Western Europe. However, this hypothesis is discredited as an overall explanation now by sociologists (e.g. Casanova, 1994), and in many social sciences a resurgence and reexamination of religious phenomena is taking place (cf. Barsalou, Barbey, Simmons, & Santos, 2005; Van der Veer, 2006). For our purposes, we want to examine what the function of religion is, from an evolutionary cultural perspective.
When discussing the topic of religion in the social sciences, a disclaimer appears necessary. As social scientists, we are not equipped to deal with questions about transcendence or with out-of-this-world phenomena. Quite frankly, it is not even in our interest to do so at this stage. Thus, we will not engage in any such theological arguments. Moreover, we will also not engage in the sociological issue to define what religion is from a theoretical perspective. Through our article, we hope to analyze religion, as religion per se is a fabulously interesting phenomenon from a cultural, psychological, or evolutionary perspective. Thus, in this article, we want to dig deeper into the why and what of the development of religion in terms of psychological and evolutionary perspectives. We will examine this through supplying a framework of the content of belief, on the necessity for people to believe in cause and effect, which we will attempt to unify with a needs-based perspective. We first attempt to explore the question as to why people participate in religious rites and traditions, then, we go into the questions as to why people actually would believe. By no means do we believe this analysis to be complete, but we hope to give some evolutionary background as to how and why religion developed as a social psychological construct.
The traits of religion: a framework
A vital question when looking at religion from a scientific, evolutionary perspective is ‘Why do people believe in deities?’ Through this question, we do not want to deny the possibility of the existence of a deity, but merely want to investigate the social psychological aspect; hence, we will analyze deities separate from transcendental theories. Based on Boyer’s (2003) approach to religion and deities in particular, we will propose the idea that deities should be approached from a mythic point of view: the tales told about the deity explain how people think about the deity and approach it. It is therefore important to know that deities are not the only myths people believe in – there are also legends, folktales and fantasies, for example. Boyer (2003) suggests that religious notions such as deities are just one example of a wide array of mythical or supernatural thinking, and discusses the features that allow supernatural notions to spread themselves. These features are based on evolutionary developed abilities, such as Social Exchange Theory and Theory of Mind. This makes religion (as a psychological construct) basically a by-product of pre-existing, evolutionarily shaped cognitive abilities. If this is the case, one would expect a certain universality of religious notions around the world, since one can assume that everyone possesses a similar set of cognitive capabilities, with the exception of mental disorders. Atran and Norenzayan (2004) extend this notion of universality in a framework of religion. While they focus on the properties of supernatural agents, we extend this framework here to Boyer’s (2003) notion of myths. In their framework, they propose that a) widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs in myths, such as supernatural agents, exist, b) that hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments are offered worldwide in relation to these mythical properties, c) that these mythical properties answer people’s existential anxieties, and d) that a), b) and c) are orchestrated in a ritualized, rhythmic sensory coordination.
On the acquisition of supernatural thinking: Agency - Why Examine Cause and Effect?
Why do people believe in myths? One possibility is that people are simply prone to see causal agents in an event, even when these agents are non-existent. Barrett (2000) mentions Guthrie’s ideas on a Hyperactive Agent-Detection Device (HADD) as a possible reason for imagining causal agents. The HADD could serve as an inbuilt or early-acquired) propensity for humans to understand any change in their environment as an action-response situation which is inflicted by an agent’s actions upon its environment. Seeing an agent behind actions certainly makes a lot of sense in a world that is both predominantly social and full of hidden predators. In a social world, most activity is centered around intentional agents (other people) and fosters understanding as to how actions lead to reactions, which is essential for our understanding of the world around us. In addition, intentional agents allow us to understand intentions: changes around us occur as a result of actions by an agent, with certain needs driving its behavior. Having the ability to infer an agent as causing a situation helps in survival: knowing that an action is linked to an agent allows us to predict its future behavior and to respond accordingly. However, this Agent-Detection Device could possibly lead to inaccuracy; the ADD could explain an agent’s action as being due to traits it possesses, while in fact the agent was forced by environmental factors (a situation that closely resembles the Fundamental Attribution Error). Take, as an example of how ADD would explain behavior; a candy machine. You want a chocolate bar, but the machine swallowed the coin. Just beyond your reach is an object you rightfully paid for, dangling on the edge, about to fall and become yours, yet almost willfully defying the laws of gravity. What would you do to get that chocolate bar? The same most people do: kick the machine. It’s a tried method which has had pretty decent results in the past, so what’s keeping you from giving that machine a nice firm kick and claiming what’s rightfully yours? But now imagine what happens when someone else happens to walk by and notices how you are kicking a lifeless piece of machinery. What will they think about your actions and about you? Research on the Fundamental Attribution Error tells us that people are highly likely to blame the actor for its behavior: so you kicked the machine because you must have some aggressive traits (Jones & Harris, 1967) even though the real reason you kicked that machine is because you know that this increases your chances of getting the chocolate! In a similar way the ADD could push us even further: it might even infer the presence of agents where there are no agents at all (or at least there is no direct proof to support the existence of the agent)! If that is the case, then the Hyperactive Agent-Detection Device might be directly responsible for our ability to create mythical properties such as supernatural agents in the world around us. People see events unfold, create meaning in these actions, and assume that these actions are caused by some sort of invisible agent.
Getting deeper into the matter: the power of counter-intuitive thoughts
We have now elaborated on a framework of religion and on agent-caused meaning. These ideas hint as to why people may see mythical actions in their environment. This raises the question, ‘Why do we use these mythical actions as a source to explain the world around us?’ An invisible deity (or, in fact, an existing person that has been mystified!) is beyond verification and diminishes the need to find other possible explanations, a situation which goes against science and, some would argue, even at odds with common sense. So what is it that makes people accept ideas and spread them? One particularly interesting answer describes the power of counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs.
What are these so-called counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs exactly? Kelly and Keil (1985) suggest that counterintuitive ideas are based on a simple awareness of differences in species, known as folk biology. Folk biology results from observations of our surroundings, which allows for an understanding of various entities in the world. With folk biology, people quickly learn what differentiates humans from other animals, plants and inanimate materials. These differences lead to ontological categories: primitive species-based categories which roughly divide the world into categories like dead matter, plants, families of animals and finally humans. Based on this hierarchy, it is possible to make various assumptions about specific individuals. For example, a cat is capable of movement. Furthermore, it requires food to keep itself alive, otherwise it will die. Based on these facts, people can also be pretty certain that a cat has certain intentional behaviors: it will move towards food, and possibly kill some other living being to feed itself with. It is unlikely, however, that one will ever see a cat give a lecture in astrophysics – although cats are living beings, somehow they keep failing to understand the intricate workings of aerospace engineering. Folk biology therefore does not just aid in categorization, but also allows one to build expectations around a species’ features.
Kelly and Keil suggest that humans have a sensitivity for situations where these expectations are wronged, or need adjustments – for example, if a cat were to suddenly walk right through a wall. One can still be fairly certain that most of our predictions about cats will suit this one, with the ‘minor exception’ that this cat is not material. According to Kelly and Keil, counterintuitive events are those where an object that was previously nicely ordered in one’s mind shows a minor deviation. Given these circumstances, it is likely that people will remember the entity better and pay more attention to it. Deviations should not be too big: a cat that walks through walls, can fly, eat nails, travel through time and give an astrophysics lecture on gravitational collapse does not fit into the category ‘cat’ and is, quite frankly, too bizarre for words. Counterintuitive features are considered to be more attractive to people than features that are either intuitive or features that are bizarre. Kelly and Keil give some indirect evidence of this preference for people for counterintuitive events by studying the popularity of stories about metamorphoses. An entity that turns into a completely different entity is definitely a counterintuitive event, but could possibly be a bridge too far. One can imagine a human transforming into another sentient being, but a human transforming into a cloud, or a lake? Surely humans will find that too far-fetched. And indeed, Kelly and Keil discovered that in the ‘Metamorphoses’ by Ovid and the ‘Tales of the Brothers Grimm’, both collections of popular stories, metamorphoses within ontological categories (human into dog) were far more common than stories about metamorphoses between ontological categories (human into lake).
Further research by Barrett and Nyhof (2001) and Boyer and Ramble (2001) extended this idea, demonstrating in both sets of experiments that human beings are more likely to remember counter-intuitive phenomena, even over time amounts of up 3 months, compared to bizarre or ordinary phenomena. In addition, by testing people in different countries (the USA, France, Gabon and Nepal) they showed that this effect was universal: in every culture studied, counterintuitive stories were remembered most. Based on this tendency for counterfactual phenomena to stick in the human mind and their potential to spread due to their attractiveness, we can relate it back the universal similarities between the religions of different cultures and to the belief in deities. Due to the attractiveness of counterintuitive events we can predict that certain stories will arise in each culture. These stories will contain counterfactual information and spread easily over the culture due to their attractiveness. This could serve as the backbone for myths, the belief in a deity or more general notions or beliefs. Interesting enough, we can also predict that all these stories will have certain general, universal features in common. These stories won’t be bizarre, or lack counterfactual information, as such stories are not attractive to people. As for the belief in deities, is it important to know that deities up until recently have all had human-like traits: they were basically super-powered humans. Deities therefore correspond perfectly to the idea of a counterfactual phenomenon: they are creatures with amazing powers, beyond those of humans, but can still be understood as an entity in a closely related ontological category. How deities are exactly viewed and categorized will be discussed in the next section.
If cows could worship…
This section will work the ideas presented above into a proposal on the category of deities. Such a proposal would explain why certain features can be found in every religious belief that involves a god. According to the aforementioned research, one can make various predictions about universal properties of myths. First of all, people are in need of intentional agents. Intentional agents cause changes in people’s environment, based on people’s needs and desires.
Second, due to their nature, intentional agents are clearly sentient beings. They are not as wild as animals, and they clearly seem to have conscious thoughts. So what would resemble an intentional agent most? Another highly sentient being. In many traditions, therefore, these intentional agents resemble the one species all cultures agree on as being truly sentient: humans.
Third, the above-mentioned differences should function at a counter-intuitive level, but not be at a bizarre level. Sure, let a deity crush a mountain between his fingertips, but at least let its mind function in the way humans do! In many myths, one can therefore see deities in ferocious battles, make passionate love to one another, give birth to the most beautiful children, and get lost in the world around them. The intentional agent, however, can be communicated to and be addressed, can respond to requests and can even accept gifts, to which he or she will respond accordingly – by rewarding you with favors. In every little detail, these deities act as human beings with the exception of their great powers. The claim that comic book heroes (who are often humans with supernatural powers) are the gods of the present day and that comics function as recorded myths might not be so far from the truth after all. That is, the same cognitive systems that created deities, myths and legends and caused their stories to be spread, could also be at work in the creation of superheroes and explain their immense popularity in most present-day cultures.
Case Study: Eheieh - the remarkable exception?
The original gods that men worshipped were clearly such super-powered humans. Only relatively recently did a tradition emerge that broke with this approach to deities. It was the first approach to a god as an all-seeing, all-powerful entity, perfect beyond perfection and too brilliant to behold: the God that rose from the Jewish traditions and was adopted by Christians and Muslims. Barrett and Keil (1996) note and acknowledge that the god from the Jews, Christians and Muslims has one unique feature compared to any other deity before: God is beyond recognition and categorization. All three of the Abrahamistic traditions have placed this agent on such a massive scale of power and perfection (often stating that humans are imperfect compared to this deity) that comprehension of the deity is absolutely impossible. This raises the question how such a deity still became so popular. After all, its traits are clearly of bizarre proportions when compared to the classic gods.
Barrett and Keil (1996) conducted research on the concepts of God among students and found out that people seem to apply two different schemata to this deity. Though on the one hand people agree that God is omniscient, omnipotent and beyond time and space (as is the official religious dogma), people will treat God in daily life as an enhanced human being. When asked to interpret various stories about God that had some ambiguity about God’s abilities, people generally gave God traits and abilities that were not omniscient (God would for example look the other way), nor beyond time and space (God could not see a rock if a herd of buffalo ran over it) nor all-powerful (God could only help one person at a time). So though officially the God of the Judaic tradition is believed to be all-powerful, perfect and beyond comprehension, he is no more so than any classic deity in people’s daily lives. Even when dealing with an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing deity, who exists beyond time and space and can read every thought ever conceived, people still have the urge to address this immense creature with explicit prayer, talking and rituals as if it was just a super-powerful human being who couldn’t hear you otherwise. A stronger example of how the categorization process shapes our deities is hardly available.
Mythical Properties Answering People’s Needs
As mentioned above, mythical explanations can potentially answer people’s existential anxieties. One route that often appears to be followed in answering as to why religions exists is a functional one; religions serve to answer human needs or motivations that are universal. A more extensive description of universal motivations has been given by Baumeister and Leary (1995). They claim that the implications of these motivations go beyond mere psychological functioning; in fact, if a motivation is truly universal, “it should be capable of offering viable and consistent interpretations of patterns observed in historical, economic, or sociological studies” (p. 499). We will discuss a couple of examples of fundamental human needs (following Williams, Forgas, & Von Hippel, 2005). This is by no means a complete discussion on fundamental human needs, but serves as an illustration as to what function religion can play in society.
Four of these needs are discussed in Williams et al. (2005), although we shall only mention two here to illustrate what these needs entail and how they relate to religion: (1) the need to belong, and (2) the need for meaningful existence.
Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue that humans have an innate preparedness to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of interpersonal relationships (the need to belong). As such, they contend, this is evolutionarily based: this capacity has survival and reproductive benefits. Prime examples of why the need to belong is fundamental are that if the need to belong is frustrated, people have a significant chance of dying at a younger age, suffer depression or anxieties, and have a poorer immune system. The need to belong might even prevail above other needs, as some theorists argue that the fear of death is a result of being socially excluded from others (Williams, Forgas, & Von Hippel, 2005).
Casanova (1994) gives examples of increased Brazilian and decreased Western European religiosity. Casanova (1994) mentions De Tocqueville, who predicted “new and expanded possibilities for the construction of communities of all kinds as voluntary associations” for the Western world, poorer Brazilian communities ‘used’ religion as a means of fulfilling the need to belong. Moreover, taking the perspective of overcoming the fear of death, the union with God after death in traditions of ‘the Book’ (i.e. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) could ultimately fulfill this need. In fact, unification with God could potentially replace the earthly problem of being socially excluded from one’s earthly environment.
Next, goal setting theorists posit that setting goals is at the foundation of human behavior – the need for meaningful existence (e.g. Austin & Vancouver, 1996). Crocken and Neur (2004) for example suggested that individuals who are trembled by fear lack clear goals; whereas other people who have increased levels of motivation possess a clear sense of meaning and purpose. Hence, a religious cosmology could answer the aforementioned existential anxieties, and instill motivation and clear meaning in religious communities.
Conclusion
In this article, we took a close look at religion and deities from a social-psychological point of view. We conclude in general that though religion is a widely spread phenomenon with countless differences in the details of each religion, certain traits of religion are universal.
First of all, present research has shown universal patterns and predictions about deities, how people structure the supernatural world and what traits their deities have. In general, these findings support and complement the general conclusion that deities are a construct created almost automatically (assuming that people have an awareness of cause and effect). These constructs are further expanded and colored by myths. The popularity of various myths is likely to be affected by our innate fascination for counterintuitive features. Based on these ideas, religions grow and aid people in fulfilling their second function: fulfilling powerful and universal needs such as giving a sense of belonging or meaningful existence, amongst others.
Many sociologists have long attempted to push through the secularization hypothesis – religions were to disappear as a function of modernization. According to the basic, universal psychological features we all hold, it appears that in some sort of form, religions are here to stay. Where would we as humans be without the rituals and traditions of religions? Even though they may come in different forms, it seems very unlikely that we will stop praising (a) god. Perhaps it will be a Buddha within, perhaps it will be Allah, but the basic cognitive structures and needs – they will remain what they are.
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