A natural history of morality and religion

Image by Institutnationaldhistoiredelart, licensed by CC BY 2.0

Could we explain the emergence of religion in the human history from an evolutionary/naturalist perspective?

I want to say yes, and I'll try to explain why. Most of my argument is based on an evolutionary account of the origins of morality, based on recent research on the subject. We need to start with the idea that the cognitive structures that social animals, and in particular we humans have evolved in our bodies (e.g. affection & care, gratitude, contempt, solitude, empathy, theory of mind, value judgments, logical thinking) emerge from an adaptive need. This is, they fulfill the need to conserve the dynamical system of social life in which humans exist. In other words, this means that these embodied structures permit to sustain and preserve life in community and the conditions that allow us to live together. Hence, these cognitive structures (such as love, care, empathy, solitude) prevent the community from disintegrating. With this kind of logic one can account for all the “embodied” morality in the individual, all the emotions and structures that we can feel and perceive in our bodies and minds, which make us moral beings able to care about others and make moral judgments.

In the interactions between individuals, things are somewhat different, but the main point holds: there are certain interactive moral relations (e.g. trust, honesty, punishment, cooperation, reputation, loyalty, reciprocity) that emerge since they are adaptive for the community (cooperating is better than doing things alone, because of the possible synergies). I would say that you can also trace these behaviors in the individual body, insofar as we have positive feelings when we trust, cooperate, when we are faithful and honest; and negative feelings when we are not. With this kind of logic one can account for the interactive morality.

Once these two foundations are in place as basic structures, new building blocks can be put on top of them. These new building blocks of morality can be “immaterial”, such as mythical ideologies (myths, religions, gods) and ideals/principles (justice, freedom, peace). And they can become materialized through churches, courts, writings (including the bible, the coran, the book of the dead, and so on.) and institutions (laws, judiciary systems, rights, the State).

Why would all these emerge, and in which historic order? Apparently, the two foundations listed above (the embodied and interactive morality) seemed to work pretty well for our human ancestors, but they showed flaws when human groups started getting larger in size. On a different topic, Merlin Donald (1991) argues that when language (just speech, not writing) emerged, one of its first and primary uses was oriented to mythical thought: this meant telling creationist stories about what reality is, how it came to be, etc. which functioned in order to develop what Donald calls “integrative thought”: the capacity of understanding distinct events and causalities existing in the world in a unified manner. This would be the archaic form of what we nowadays call a worldview. The unifier, in this sense, is whichever gods the culture created, which guaranteed the meaning of all events and to whom individuals were accountable for their moral behavior.

Most mythical structures have gods that are moralizing (concerned about good and bad behaviour), knowledgeable (aware of one’s thoughts and actions) and punishing (able to exact harm) (Johnson, 2016). What one can infer from this premise is that people in most archaic cultures may have thought about the role that a supernatural entity could play in fostering behavior relevant to the culture ("the good") and to deter behavior that is not aligned with the community’s interests ("the bad"). (Myths were quite flexible at the time since they were told through word-of-mouth). So, there one can account for the diversity of religions/myths and their adaptive power: they foster morally relevant behavior and deter "evil" behavior to a large extent, allowing for bigger human groups and for cooperation in these larger groups, at the same time as they are the basis for the emergence of integrative thought.

Once again, one can retrace mythical structures into the body: when humans consider a god as real, they have all kinds of feelings towards it since the god is the basis of a worldview and it guarantees meaning of all events (e.g. fate, elevation, gratitude, communion, fear of god, feeling observed, exaltation). In this sense, Donald noted that in the !Kung culture, people that infringed gods’ rules could even die from extreme stress and fear of eternal punishment. This feeling of meaningfulness is still largely present even in atheists, whenever we think that “things happen for a reason” or that there is some kind of Big Other (like destiny) that makes our life go in certain ways and not in others.

The notion of “cognitive load” is quite important here: having an omniscient god that could see and judge everyone was very useful for communities to stop spending time monitoring each other’s behavior to enforce social and moral norms. Having this almighty figure that did all the monitoring liberated time and energy for other endeavors. In other words, the cognitive load of enforcing moral behavior was passed on to the respective god, this immaterial entity that is told through language.

This was largely amplified with the advent of writing and architecture. For example, having a whole building such as a cathedral and texts like bibles and corans, religions become stabilized in time (the story doesn’t mutate through word-of-mouth) and it can be culturally transmitted from generation to generation (books and temples are “eternal”).

When it comes to the falseness or truthfulness of religious constructs, two things have to be said. For one, we know that gods can have real consequences in the bodies of individuals (they can even kill you, as in !Kung culture) as well as in cultural practices and the construction of the social space (as in churches, temples, influence in the State, etc.). Secondly, the naturalist/evolutionary view that I tried to introduce is largely explanatory of how humanly created gods appear in the history of humanity, so gods cannot exist independently of humans. All of these gods are real, but they are not intrinsically existent. As Zizek would put it, they are fictions that structure reality. The "existence" of gods is dependent on the people that believe in them, in their bodily, mental, and community experiences. Gods are real as long as there are people that consider them to be real, talk about them, feel them and behave accordingly to their moral ideology.

References

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Harvard University Press.

Johnson, D. D. (2016). Anthropology: Hand of the gods in human civilization. Nature, 530(7590), 285. Link here