Is there an evolutionary / anthropological basis for religion?

[pinto]

It seems world wide there is evidence of some sort of expression over thousands of years. Among many disparate cultures. I've always wondered about that.

From the Polynesian archipelagos, to the Peruvian mountains, the lakes of Mexico, the broad swath of the current US, sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, Southeast Asia, China, the Indian sub continent, Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, etc.

Were the concepts carried along with migrations? Did they arise independently? What was the value?

One obvious thing I get is the rise of "recorded" representation in all cultures. Starting with hand prints, animal figures, hunters. Observations. Histories.

Did a growing objective sense of time play a part? A time beyond a singular birth and death? Some time beyond those parameters?

Was a third party, so to speak, needed to make day-to-day sense of it all?

Was a third party, a local person, needed to support that day-to-day sense?

Was a celestial third party needed, as is a common concept now, to ensure the course of things?

Rambling, but again I'm curious how it all came about.

[Brettongarcia]

1. reality was confusing; they used symbols

Or magical thinking

[pinto]

7. We routinely use symbolism to this day as a way to reflect reality. I think it has a value.

I don't think it's reality, per se, that is or was confusing. Symbolism may simply be the yeast that fills out the dough.

No clue what people mean about magical thinking, if it's meant as a slam. I know a pretty good magician. His take is that it is all understood by the audience and the magicians, as well. Most participants in some sort of religion would probably agree.

[okasha]

40. Every letter we type is a symbol,

whether of a sound or a concept. The twist, of course, is that a letter doesn't represent the same sound in different languages.

All symbols are culture-bound.

[Agnosticsherbet]

2. 70,000 years ago in Africa, humans worship with rituals at a Python idol

70,000 Year Old Snake God Discovered

They have founds sites as old and older in Europe.

Something that has been with us so long has affected or evolution as a species of social animals.

[pscot]

11. There seems to be a lot of speculation and inference going

in that article and Ms. Coulson's report. Has there been a peer reviewed paper on it?

[immoderate]

3. A combination of "pattern seeking" and "anthropomorphism" would cover it.

And imagination would do the rest.

--imm

[backscatter712]

49. Moths to the flame. n/t

[applegrove]

4. Myth held people together when they got into groups that were

bigger than 150 people. You no longer knew everybody and you didn't have a relationship with them. So how do you act? How do you share with them. What don't you do? Religion gave you a frame to live together.

[pinto]

36. Story telling seems to be one aspect that humans really developed over time.

In some sense, all life tells a story. Bees have their dance to pass on directions to local pollen sources, wolves have distinctive howls among packs, marine mammals apparently have elaborate linguistics, elephants have strong generational bonds and their own long shared histories.

[trotsky]

5. A question that is completely separate from others like:

Is religion true? (Is there any evidence at all of the disparate supernatural elements found in different religions?)

Is religion a good way to codify an ethical system?

Is religion necessary?

[pscot]

6. Chimps seem to be atheists

Not sure if that's definitive.

[cbayer]

8. There are other things that humans have that chimps don't,

so I'm not sure that makes the point you meant it to.

[pscot]

13. No point intended

other than that you have to start somewhere. I admit I'm firmly in the Dawkins camp, and have been for 60 years.

[cbayer]

17. Dawkins - a great biologist. 60 years?

Wow, what was he like at age 13? (this is tongue in cheek, no response expected).

[pscot]

25. BD

Before Dawkins.

[cbayer]

26. Ah! You were in the Dawkins camp BD.

Too bad you didn't get to the book first.

[pscot]

28. Mark Twain got there first

The nuns took their best shot, but they were no match for Huckleberry Finn.

[cbayer]

29. Mark Twain did it with style, didn't he?

Thank goodness they didn't have twitter.

Nuns, I know nothing about.

[trotsky]

9. Chimps and other animals also show signs of altruism and morality.

Without religion.

[okasha]

41. Ritual (or perhaps protoritual)

behavior has been observed among chimpanzees in the wild. That doesn't mean they have an idea of either transcendence or deity, of course, but it seems to be a step in the direction of affecting the physical or psychological environment through patterned behavior.

[pscot]

43. That would suggest a selective advantage

for the behaviours themselves. No cosmology required. Sort of like cheering in a football stadium without a game. Eventually somebody said, hey, there must be a reason we're doing this. Maybe it pleases some invisible being.

[Man from Pickens]

10. Just a hypothesis, but there may have been an astronomical basis

check out the Thunderbolts Project for some really interesting hypotheses concerning plasma cosmology and the possible implications for how religion developed in historical cultures http://thunderbolts.info

(WARNING: NERD TRIGGER ALERT)

[LiberalAndProud]

12. If so, I think it's backfiring.

If there was an evolutionary benefit for religion, it has surpassed it's shelf date. There are some concepts enshrined in religion that simply need to be revised.

7"As for you, be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it."

[trotsky]

14. Agreed.

There are many things that one might argue had an evolutionary basis - things that may have helped an individual's or a group's DNA propagate at one time but that we don't necessarily need to keep around today. Tribalism, xenophobia, rape, etc. We as a species need to grow past those things now. They cause problems and conflict and stress when they resurface.

[LiberalAndProud]

15. problems and conflict and stress

and war and famine and pestilence.

[pinto]

32. Just wondering about the antecedents. Including how did religion happen?

Whether it has relevance now is another matter and one worth discussing, imo.

Why did we create god?

[Brettongarcia]

46. memories of strongmen

[Geoff R. Casavant]

16. One theory I said basically said "yes and no."

There were developments in the brain that were advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, and religion came along as a side-effect of those developments. I believe it had to do with the "theory of mind," but I don't recall the particulars.

A better discussion is in Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion."

[Fumesucker]

18. I remember reading a story about some archaeologists who got hold of a time machine

They had this huge temple complex all mapped out and had determined the religious significance of most of the features, when offered the chance to use an experimental temporal viewer device they took a look to fill in the details that they couldn't figure out from the clues.

They were dead wrong about everything, all the features they thought were religious turned out to have secular practical reasons for existing.

As I recall the story was written by an archaeologist.

[LiberalAndProud]

19. The story I liked peered into the future

wherein archaeologists had imbued our humble toilet seat with significant religious properties.

[trotsky]

20. Considering the number of people who have gotten on their knees in front of one...

while chanting some variation of "Oh god, I'm so sorry, please help me", that doesn't seem all that far-fetched.

[LiberalAndProud]

31. A shrine to Dionysus it is.

Beg your pardon. Sorry.

[Fumesucker]

21. Hence the term "praying to the porcelain god"..

[Iggo]

22. I hope so.

And I think I'll leave it at that...lol.

[TM99]

23. Yes!

I have posited and theorized for decades now that 'belief' and 'non-belief' are not conscious choices. They may involve some aspect as do most of our psychological functions, however, there are definite biological, evolutionary, and instinctual things going on with regards to god(s), belief, and religion.

I already shared these links in a recent post on the subject, but here they are again to show some of the current scientific research on the topic:

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879179,00.html

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/08/evolutionary_st088461.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/belief-and-the-brains-god-spot-1641022.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/47/16784.abstract

http://www.issr.org.uk/latest-news/neuroscience-and-religious-faith/

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believe.aspx

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140117153635.htm

[IphengeniaBlumgarten]

24. I think all great apes are hardwired to respect...

... and fear the retribution of the alpha male (and female, too). With a little bit of abstraction, God is just a bigger Alpha Male.

[Anansi1171]

27. Undoubtedly! Query"Cargo Cults"and evolution of Curiosity-nt

[LynnTTT]

30. My view

It's all ego:
"Anything stronger or more powerful than me must certainly be endowed with some kind of magical power"
" It can't be possible that when I die, life will go on without me!"
" If I just do everything right, things will be right. If in spite of my efforts, the crops fail/my children die it must be someone (the devil's) fault.

[pinto]

33. With all due respect, those seem simplistic. Yet I get the gist, I think.

Don't get the first point at all.

The second is probably one common perception of mortality, I guess.

The third seems tied to some justification for blame. Someone, somewhere is at fault. That's kind of awkward all around.

(aside) I don't think ego's an impediment or negative aspect for us. Not inherently. I can think of many examples of ego, large egos at times, that were very positive contributions to society.

[Cartoonist]

34. Religion and earth centrism

I would guess that the belief that everything revolved around the earth came before a belief in religion. Only because I think religion requires a bit more imagination. The knowledge that the Earth is no longer the center of the universe is a fairly recent discovery in man's history. I feel eventually, we will reject god just as we reject the earth centric model. All it will take is a bit more science education. For men and women, something religion, in its last gasps is fighting.

[Warren Stupidity]

35. There might be an evolutionary basis for rape.

Thornhill and Palmer write that "In short, a man can have many children, with little inconvenience to himself; a woman can have only a few, and with great effort." Females therefore tend to be more choosy with partners. Rape is seen as one potential strategy for males for achieving reproductive success. They point to several other factors indicating that rape may be a reproductive strategy. It is during the potentially childbearing years that women most often are rape victims. Rapists usually do not use more force than necessary to subdue their victims which is argued to be the case since physically injuring the victims would reduce the chance of reproduction. Furthermore, "In many cultures rape is treated as a crime against the victim's husband."[5]

Anthropologist Edward H. Hagen states in his Evolutionary Psychology FAQ from 2002 that he believes there is no clear evidence for the hypothesis that rape is adaptive. He believes the adaptivity of rape is possible, but claims there is not enough evidence to be certain one way or the other. However, he encourages such evidence to be obtained: "Whether human males possess psychological adaptations for rape will only be answered by careful studies seeking evidence for such cognitive specializations. To not seek such evidence is like failing to search a suspect for a concealed weapon." He also describes some conditions in the ancestral environment during which the reproductive gains from rape may have outweighed the costs:

"High status males may be have been able to coerce matings with little fear of reprisal."
"Low status women (e.g., orphans) may have been particularly vulnerable to being raped because males need not have feared reprisals from the woman's family."
"During war, raping enemy women may have had few negative repercussions."
"Men who were low status, who were likely to remain low status, and who had few opportunities to invest in kin may have realized reproductive benefits that outweighed the considerable costs (e.g., reprisal by the woman's family)."

McKibbin et al. (2008) argue that there may be several different types of rapists or rape strategies. One is rape by disadvantaged men who cannot get sex otherwise. Another is "specialized rapists" who are more sexually aroused from rape than from consensual sex. A third type is opportunistic rapists who switches between forced and consensual sex depending on circumstances. A fourth type is psychopathic rapists. A fifth type is partner rape due to sperm competition when the male suspects or knows that the female has had sex with another male. There are varying degrees of empirical support for the existence of each of these types. More generally they mention research finding that at least one-third of males "admit they would rape under specific conditions" and that other surveys find that many men[quantify] state having coercive sexual fantasies. They, as have others, "propose that rape is a conditional strategy that may potentially be deployed by any man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiological_theories_of_rape.

Religiosity also might have an evolutionary basis.

So what?

[pinto]

37. Oh for crying out loud Warren. Come on. My post was simply a train of thought, not a treatise.

Not a study, not a grand postulation. A simple run of random thoughts. I could have made it clearer that I was thinking on the fly, so to speak.

So what? That's what.

I'll read the Wiki link a bit later. Sounds like it may be an interesting read.

You win this round, if that's the game.

[Warren Stupidity]

38. Sorry, I though you were trying to discuss something.

Next time just put a "just babbling" warning up.

Evolutionary psychology is a fairly new field and the issue of the evolutionary basis of religion has quite a lot of buzz around it.

There is however a tendency for the religious to make a rather peculiar leap from "evolutionary basis for religion" to "evidence of divine intervention" when actually the opposite is a somewhat sounder extrapolation.

[pinto]

39. No apology needed. You missed this - "Rambling, but again I'm curious how it all came about."

[trotsky]

44. Why do you and your close personal friend cbayer always obsess about things being a "game"...

where "points" are scored for "teams"? Now you and she are the ONLY people who ever bring crap like that up. Stop it. It's divisive and is intended to marginalize points of view.

As Warren pointed out, this is a discussion board. You post something, people are allowed to comment as they want. Another trait you and cbayer share - you get upset at those who don't follow the discussion as you want it to play out. Sorry that the Internet doesn't work that way.

[hrmjustin]

47. i have to say I find your post amusing.

You should rethink who is obsessed here and who else talks about teams.

[Warren Stupidity]

51. GOAL!

+1 for team God-Smacked.

The Godless Bastards are down for the count.

[LiberalAndProud]

42. Although I don't think there is one cause and there is nothing simple about it, I believe that

religion is closely linked with a sense of nationalism/tribalism. How it might evolve after (name the war here) has been won and the national deity of the triumphant tribe established as that which must be worshiped would be another interesting conversation to have.

We waged a war, we prayed, we won. (Name the deity here) was on our side and has established (his/her/their) supremacy.

Maybe I'm off the mark, but since we're just following a train of thought, these are things I think about.

[cleanhippie]

45. Yes, there is.

Well covered and explained in this book.

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/1250008808

[backscatter712]

48. I remember Dawkins proposing that religion is the result of an evolutionary side effect.

The analogy he used was why moths fly in circles around candle flames and other lights. It's obviously not optimal for the moth. Turns out it's a side effect of the moth's built in night-navigation mechanism - it flies with the Moon positioned in a specific spot in its vision, and in the absence of artificial light, that's how it flies in a straight line and gets places. With artificial lights, the moth is fooled into thinking that light is the "moon", and tries to fly with that light in a specific spot in its vision, resulting in it flying in circles.

Dawkins suggested that humans got religion through the same way, as an evolutionary side-effect, when humans evolved their big brains, capable of imagination, empathy, pattern-seeking and matching, thinking of things from other people's perspectives, and so on, the results were that humans created imaginary beings to explain things they couldn't work out for themselves, or that they didn't know enough about, thus deities were born.

[trotsky]

50. I remember reading that bit too.

Certainly makes a lot of sense and explains much of what we see about religion.

[pinto]

52. I think observation coupled with self awareness were key, in some way.

I like your mention of "imagination, empathy, thinking of things from other people's perspectives". Though maybe not a solely human attribute - I'm thinking of other tribal species that have some of those or similar aspects. Whales, wolves, elephants, other hominids, etc. - humans seemed to develop a questioning culture somewhere along the way.

Not the self awareness and interaction of others in the world, but that jump to Why? How come? I've read that our growing efficiency in obtaining food - it didn't have to be a daily 14 hour undertaking - gave us the time to develop more intricate social structures. More "free time". Maybe including the further development of language, "incipient" writing, artistic symbolism and generational interaction. A growing lifespan may have fostered a sense of time, in very personal terms, as more younger folks watched the demise of older relatives or members in the group.

Many religious, or faith based, concepts I'm aware of have that generational aspect. And an observed natural component beyond individual lives. The circle of life, the rising and setting of the sun, the seasonal changes.

I can see a foundation in all of that for positing some "other" into a big picture along with the personal.