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| Evolution explains more than our physical form. It explains our beliefs and behaviors too. Source: Donald Trung Quoc Don via Wikimedia Commons. |
Did Religion Evolve?
Disagreements between religious believers and evolutionary scientists can make both sides reluctant to answer the question of how religion evolved. While believers might deny the importance of evolution, scientists might conclude that religion is a wasteful enterprise that involves time-consuming rituals, nonsensical beliefs, and unnecessary sacrifice that couldn’t possibly have helped our ancestors to survive the crucible of natural selection.
More militant scholars might even repeat the insular view that religions are just a good way to control people, if their anthropological knowledge is limited to a couple of monotheistic religions.
Thankfully, most scholars now regard these views as limited at best and ignorant at worst. They know, for example, that every culture has supernatural beliefs or intuitions (even cultures that don’t use them for control), and every person is disposed to thinking about supernatural concepts like ghosts, post-death consciousness, lady luck, creationism, and karma (atheists just suppress them better). These dispositions make it extremely easy to develop a religious mindset.
The Supernatural Watcher Hypothesis
The only relevant question is whether religion evolved and is "hardwired" into our brains or whether it is parasitic on hardwiring that evolved for other purposes (such as threat detection, social communication, and ritualized behavior). Research suggests that it might be a bit of both.
This article presents evidence for the “religion evolved” position, which is reliant on something called the "supernatural watcher" hypothesis. This hypothesis states that believing in a watchful, punishing god causes people to behave in a more "moral" and cooperative way, which, in turn, causes their society to prosper and survive natural/cultural selection at the expense of less cooperative, more atheistic societies.
(Before my head is bitten off, it's worth remembering that what worked for humanity in our evolutionary history does not necessarily work today!)
Princess Alice, Ancestral Spirits, and Big Brother
The idea that gods are watching—ready to punish our transgressions—is ancient and perhaps universal when it comes to the religions of the world (see Dominic Johnson’s book, "God is Watching You").
Whether an omniscient, omnipresent god, or a giant Buddha perched on a mountainside, the belief that gods provide and enforce morality is widespread. So, how does this belief affect people's behavior? And how might it have benefited some societies?
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| Whether judgement comes from a cloud or a mountaintop, most cultures believe in divine surveillance. Source: public domain (left) and Andrew Martin via Wikimedia Commons. |
The notion of a watchful, punishing god affects people in the manner you might expect. For example, an experiment in which people were manipulated to think about God found that they tried harder on an unsolvable anagram task than a control group, and were more anxious about the results of the task.
This anxiety about being monitored appears to help people to behave morally. The scientist, Jesse Bering, performed an experiment (see video below) in which children were instructed to play a game. Some of the children were told that an invisible being called “Princess Alice” was seated nearby. Children who were told about Princess Alice cheated less in the game than the children who were not.
Other studies have found that people cheat less and are more cooperative when they think a supernatural being is observing them. For example, Jesse Bering also found that adults cheated less on a test (PDF) when they were told that the test room was haunted by the ghost of someone who had recently died there. Furthermore, he found that people think of the deceased as especially moral, which is consistent with what is found in many indigenous societies, where ancestral spirits are believed to monitor the living (rather than gods).
Another study found that people who were manipulated to think about God were more charitable in a game (PDF) than people who did not receive the manipulation, while another study found that religious people who view God as more punishing, angry, and harsh were less likely to cheat on tasks than people who had a more forgiving view of God. The experimenters summarized their findings as “mean gods make good people.”
The Evolution of Religion
Taken together, these studies suggest that people are anxious about the punishments that powerful, watchful gods and spirits may exact, and they behave more cooperatively and cheat less as a result.
In terms of human evolution, people succeed when they work together, which suggests that religious societies were more successful in our evolutionary history than nonreligious societies. This tendency would certainly explain why religion is so popular today and why all large-scale societies appear to have produced morally concerned gods.
As Jesse Bering explains below (see video), the reluctance of god-fearing people to cheat strangers may have helped religious societies to grow larger and to encompass more people than any one individual could possibly know personally, which would have provided significant advantages (e.g., in conflict with other societies).
Does the “Supernatural Watcher Hypothesis” Explain Religion?
As with most evolutionary explanations, the “supernatural watcher hypothesis” explains some of the “why” and none of the "how." It does not explain how religion first appeared, how it works in our brains, how beliefs are formed, or why people want to form these beliefs and perform the associated behaviors (worship, ceremonies, rituals, etc.).
The supernatural watcher hypothesis only explains why all of this was a productive use of our time and, therefore, why people who were disposed to religion (for whatever reason) kept being disposed. In other words, this mysterious phenomenon that we call religion happened to help certain people to survive and propagate their DNA, psychological dispositions, and cultural teachings in such a prolific way that these things almost became a human default.
Beyond that, there are still many questions to answer, some of which have been addressed by cognitive and emotional explanations for religion.
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