The evolution of religion

Religiosity has dominated human history. All known civilizations, I am told, have played host to some kind of religious belief system; and, despite the fact that many of these appear to have independent and isolated points of origin, supernatural beings, souls, and an afterlife have been persistently reoccurring themes. This has often caused people to wonder:

Why do humans tend to hold these kinds of religious beliefs?

Following, I give five easy answers to this great mystery, and provide you with your very own opinions on each. Anyone who can think of a sixth answer is to be immediately burnt at the stake.

1. Because these beliefs are actually objective truths.

That so many different people throughout time have acknowledged their existence implies that supernatural beings really do exist. After all, surely it is folly to suggest that human societies have repeatedly invented these beliefs purely by chance. Instead, it is thought that the commonalities of the many world religions points to the existence of a "Universal God"; and that their differences represent nothing more than discrepancies in the interpretation and expression of this fundamental truth.

What you think: You appreciate this logic, if only for the soothing effect it can sometimes have on interfaith relations. But you wonder if the best explanation for the similarities of the world religions wouldn't better account for their many dramatic departures.

2. Because these beliefs have played crucial, functional roles in human societies.

The commonalities of the many world religions is attributable to the fact that these beliefs have historically serviced universal human needs. For example, they have provided explanations for the mysteries of existence; helped us face incalculably complex situations; lent authority to political leaders; and helped to standardize our social behavior. Because all human societies have faced a similar set of problems, it is no coincidence that they then developed similar ways of solving them.

(Click here to hear Jared Diamond explore this possibility in detail.)

What you think: While this implies that religions have performed useful societal functions in the past, it also implies that religion is ultimately vulnerable to the loss of these functions - for example, to scientific and political advancement - with its only defenses being traditional and institutional entrenchment. You would argue that recent history has testified against this case. As Dean Hamer writes in his contoversial 2004 book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes,

"Even in China and the former Soviet Union - where powerful governments used every possible form of persuasion to replace God with Communism - more than half of the people retained their spiritual beliefs. Meanwhile, the forces of fundamentalism - whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim - are sweeping across the globe from South America to the Middle East to Africa."

3. Because these beliefs are in our genes. 

Here lurks the "God gene hypothesis", or the idea that people are genetically "hardwired" to be religious. In his book, Hamer speculates that natural selection has favored certain human genes because they instill a spiritual outlook in humans; and that this spiritual outlook manifests itself in human culture as religion. He even goes do far as to propose a gene, called VMAT2, that he says could be largely responsible for our tendency to religiousness. This implies that our religious ancestors enjoyed evolutionary advantages over their more secular rivals. What kind of evolutionary advantages might spirituality provide? There are two main schools of thought:

• Individual people benefit from religion because it makes us more optimistic, gives us strength of will, and helps us cope with tragedy, thereby making us less vulnerable to physical hardship and disease. 

• Groups of people benefit from religiosity because it fosters internal cohesion and a willingness among group members to sacrifice their personal welfare to the greater good, causing "God genes" to proliferate through a process that biologists call "group selection". 

What you think: The existence of many perfectly happy non-spiritual people would seem to argue against the idea that religion significantly brightens one's outlook, or increases one's enjoyment of life. Let alone to the degree that it might confer an evolutionary advantage. Further, your long-standing assumption that belief in an afterlife helps people to deal with tragedy is about to be badly shaken by the comedian Doug Stanhope.

At least the second idea, that religion might benefit people as a group, appears to have the support of some observational evidence. For examples, religion is often seen as a useful tool for the purposes of recruiting and inspiring soldiers; and religious peoples often come together to form major political forces (think the "Christian right"), while trying to attract a crowd of atheists has been widely compared to "herding cats". However, a major drawback to this idea is that the concept of "group selection" has been largely discredited in evolutionary biology. In other words: even if it is true that groups of people really do benefit from religiousness as a whole, you doubt that natural selection could possibly have translated this benefit into a "God gene".

(The God gene hypothesis has also proven vulnerable to the sort of criticisms evident in this little performance by John Cleese.)

4. Because human nature predisposes us to these beliefs.
Humans are indeed genetically predisposed to religiosity, but this predisposition has been only incidentally instilled: religious thinking is not so much a product of evolution as a byproduct of it. This implies that religious beliefs themselves might not have survival value, but that they arise from instinctual thought processes that do.

For example, it has been pointed out that humans instinctively subscribe to concepts like "mind/body dualism" (in a nutshell, this is the notion that the "mind" of a person can exist separately from their body). It is speculated that this instinct might have helped our evolutionary ancestors to mentally distinguish between the living and nonliving worlds - an ability of incalculable value in term of survival. Further, it is speculated that this instinct is largely responsible for the human tendency to believe in souls.

Possible evidence for this way of thinking comes from show business, where dualism-inspired plots run rampant. Remember all the ghost films you have seen? or those that feature some sort of "body-swapping"? Recently, this phenomenon happened in the movie Avatar; in this episode of the revived cartoon Futurama; and it is a reoccurring theme in the TV show Stargate: Universe, as just a few off-the-top-of-my-head examples. Tellingly, it appears that even very young movie-goers are perfectly capable of unblinkingly following a character's "mind" into multiple bodies.

(Click here to have Steven Pinker elaborate on this answer.)

What you think: Repeat after Steven Pinker.

5. Because these beliefs are good at colonizing the human mind.

Religion is not just an odd quirk in our mental architecture, but is in fact best seen as something that occupies this niche. Religions are not the result of purely genetic evolution, but of what the philosopher Daniel Dennet has called "cultural-genetic co-evolution".

In fact, it is speculated that cultural and genetic evolution are somewhat analogous. For example, if we view ideas - including religious ideas - as being entities that exist in a finite living space (a collective human mind) and which compete for reproductive opportunities (communication), it would seem to follow that they would then undergo a sort of evolution by natural selection just like wild animals do. The observation that popular ideas and animals evolve in very similar ways is what led Dawkins to coin the word "meme" (which rhymes with "theme" and is a kind of cross between "gene" and "memory") in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, meaning it to denote a theoretical unit of communicated information.

From this perspective, memes - including religious memes - could theoretically spread and thrive even despite their being entirely counterproductive to human survival. Because of this possibility, memes have sometimes been referred to as "mental viruses". (Also, both viruses and ideas are incapable of replicating themselves and instead rely on getting their hosts to do it for them.)

(Click here to see Dawkins talk briefly about this idea.)

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As you may have noticed, none of these five answers to the question of why people tend to believe in supernatural beings, souls, and an afterlife, are necessarily incompatible with the remaining four. I have grouped them separately here because it seems to me that each of these answers proposes a distinct mechanism to explain the historical and contemporary ubiquity of religious belief systems. As far as I know, any combination of these answers is possible, and I would be very surprised to discover that only one of them is "right".

In fact, I think my own ideal response currently involves a combination of answers 2,4, and 5. What do you think? Oh, wait...