Once it was decreed that humans could continue to exist in another form after death, the seeds of the gods had been planted. As philosopher Sam Harris noted in The End of Faith: “A single proposition—you will not die—once believed, determines a response to life that would be otherwise unthinkable.” Since deceased family members were believed to exist after death, it was logical to ask for their help and ancestor worship thus developed. This became increasingly elaborate and ritualized until ultimately a few very powerful ancestors broke through the celestial ceiling and were viewed as gods. This apparently occurred independently at several places in the world but could not be confirmed until written records became available.3
Our ability to integrate past, present, and future markedly improved our ability to plan and led directly to the agricultural revolution. As populations increased and became urbanized, driven by this revolution, secular authorities created rules and laws, and then aligned themselves with the gods to enforce them. Thus emerged the first religions, which invested the judicial, economic, and social needs of communities with the authority of the gods. As states and civilizations grew larger, so did religions. The influence of gods and religions was directly dependent on the influence of the civilizations to which they were tied, a pattern that continues to the present. Figure 8.1 represents these events schematically.
FIGURE 8.1 The origins of gods and religions.
The brain evolution theory thus posits that gods, and later the formal religions that are tied to the gods, are products of the development of the human brain. Contemporary brain studies, as detailed in the foregoing chapters, confirm that our cognitive skills were acquired in the same order in which the brain areas associated with these skills evolved, thus providing anatomical support for this theory. Just as Darwin viewed a belief in “spiritual agencies” as having led to a belief in gods, so Tylor saw a belief in “the independent existence of the personal soul … in a Future Life” as having led to both gods and religions. As Tylor summarized this development:
This great belief [in the continued existence of the soul] may be traced from its crude and primitive manifestations among savage races to its establishment in the heart of modern religion, where the faith in a future existence forms at once an inducement to goodness, a sustaining hope through suffering and across the fear of death, and an answer to the perplexed problem of the allotment of happiness and misery in the present world, by the expectation of another world to set this right.4
The brain evolution theory can thus explain both why the gods emerged and why they emerged when they did. Based on parallel evolution, it can also explain the independent emergence of gods at different places on earth. Finally, it can explain how the judicial, economic, and social needs of communities became joined with the spiritual needs of communities. The secular and the sacred developed together, each supportive of, and dependent on, the other.
Several other theories have been suggested to account for the origins of gods and religions. There is considerable overlap among these theories, and many scholars of the origin of gods and religions utilize more than one of the theories. At the risk of oversimplification, these theories are briefly summarized.
SOCIAL THEORIES
Social theories of the origins of gods and religions rely heavily on the work of Émile Durkheim, a nineteenth-century French thinker who is often cited as the founder of modern sociology. Durkheim believed that the origin of gods and religions lay not in spirits and dreams but rather in social structures and institutions. “The true nature of religion is to be found not on its surface, but underneath.… Religion’s key value lies in the ceremonies through which it inspires and renews the allegiance of individuals to the group. These rituals then create, almost as an afterthought, the need for some sort of symbolism that takes the form of ideas about ancestral souls and gods.” For Durkheim, “religion is something eminently social” and has its origin in the functions it serves. Indeed, gods are not essential for religion. For Durkheim, “religion and society are inseparable,” and in his book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1912, he defined a religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”5
Durkheim strongly influenced most contemporary social theorists of religion. One example is New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade. In The Faith Instinct, Wade argued that “the evolutionary function of religion … is to bind people together and make them put the group’s interests ahead of their own.” Thus, said Wade, “groups with a stronger religious inclination would have been more united and at a considerable advantage compared with groups that were less cohesive.” A religion, said Wade, “creates circles of trust whose members may support one another … [and] shapes members’ social behavior, both toward one another (the in- group) and toward non-believers (the out-group).” A similar note was sounded by Barbara King, an anthropologist and primatologist at the College of William and Mary, in Evolving God. “Religion,” she argued, “is built fundamentally upon belongingness,” which she observed to be a powerful need in primates. Out of this need arose religion: “An earthly need for belongingness led to the human religious imagination and thus to the other-worldly realm of relating with God, gods, and spirits. From the building blocks we find in apelike ancestors emerged the soulful need to pray to gods, to praise God with hymns, to shake in terror before the power of invisible spirits.”6 David Sloan Wilson, an anthropologist at Binghamton University, is another prominent social theorist who emphasizes the social advantages of belonging to a religion. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, he cited as examples newly arrived immigrants who, by joining a church, can obtain help with such things as “buying a vehicle, finding housing, obtaining job referrals, baby-sitter referrals, Social Security information,… registering children for school, applying for citizenship, and dealing with the courts; the list of material benefits goes on and on.” Social benefits also accrued to the temple followers of Enki and other gods in ancient Mesopotamia and thus have been inherent in the organization of religions from the beginning.7
Like other community organizations, religions do, of course, provide social benefits for their adherents and fulfill important social needs. This has been true since the emergence of the first recorded religions in Mesopotamia, as described in chapter 6. The question, however, is not whether religions fulfill social needs but whether this is the origin of gods and religions. Among some social theorists, gods are not prominent. For example, in The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade claims that “gods may not always be essential to an effective church.” Under such theories, Thor and Zeus appear to have been stripped of their thunderbolts and instead appear as policemen or community organizers.8
PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR THEORIES
Prosocial behavior theories of the origin of gods can be regarded as a special type of social theory. The core of such theories is that humans are being watched by the gods, the eye in the sky who sees and knows everything. Such theories stress the importance of gods and religions in enforcing social rules, morality, and group norms and suggest that “religion was invented to perpetuate a particular social order.” Very useful in this regard is a belief in a god who sees and knows everything. The classic experiment that demonstrated the utility of such gods was an “honesty box” in a university coffee room, in which people were expected to deposit money for drinks they took. Over a 10-week period, the “honesty box” was decorated on alternating weeks with either a picture of flowers or a picture of a pair of eyes. During the weeks in which the eyes were used, almost three times more money was collected than during the weeks when flowers were used. The researchers concluded that “images of eyes motivate cooperative behavior because they induce a perception in participants of being watched.” Interestingly, when a similar study was carried out on primary school children, the eyes had no effect on their behavior, presumably because the children had not yet acquired mat
ure cognition.9
Three recent books focus on this theme that god is watching you. All three begin with the importance of theory of mind, as discussed in chapter 3, as the basis of religious belief. Once hominins acquired a theory of mind and understood that other people, as well as the gods, also had thoughts and emotions, they began an inevitable journey toward the formation of religions. In The Belief Instinct, Jesse Bering, a psychologist at Queen’s University in Belfast, states it clearly: “God was born of theory of mind.”10
This theme is carried forward by Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, and also by Dominic Johnson, a biologist at Oxford University, in God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. Both books claim that the concept of gods arose out of the theory of mind and our belief that the gods are watching us. Such a belief inclines us to cooperate with our fellow hominins; the more we cooperate, the more successful our group will be economically and socially, and the more of our genes will be passed on.11
Johnson suggests that the gods arose to satisfy our need to explain good and evil and the meaning of life: “Our brains are wired such that we cannot help but search for meaning in the randomness of life. It is human nature.” To satisfy this need, we invented gods: “Human societies have invented gods not just once but thousands of times.” By watching us and knowing what we are doing, the gods exert a positive force on us by promoting cooperative behavior: “The basic idea is that supernatural agents work like Big Brother looking over our shoulder, ever watchful, figures of both fear and awe that suppress our self-interest and make us more cooperative and productive.” Such societies would have been more successful, according to Johnson, and thus evolutionarily more likely to pass along their genes to the next generation.12
Several other writers have stressed the importance of gods and religions in promoting moral and prosocial behavior. In A History of God, former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong argued that “without the idea of God there is no absolute meaning, truth or morality; ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a whim.” Another contributor to such thinking is sociologist Robert Bellah. In his Religion in Human Evolution, he defined religion as “a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community,” and he described how shared communal activities such as play, ritual, and myth led to formal religions as societies became increasingly complex.13
Another variation on viewing religion as a mechanism for promoting social behavior was suggested by Boston University psychologist Patrick McNamara. In The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, he focused on the effects of religious belief and practices on individuals. McNamara distinguished the “current Self” from an “executive Self” and an “ideal Self.” “Religion,” he contended, “creates this executive Self by providing an ideal Self toward which the individual can strive and with which the individual can evaluate the current Self.” Religious practices “are aimed at transforming the [current] Self into a higher, better Self.… Religion is interested in the Self because it seeks to transform the Self.” McNamara described how religious practices affect the brain through a process he called “decentering.” The ultimate goal of religion is thus to improve individual behavior and promote social cooperation, since “the executive Self is a social Self and is a master of social cooperation.”14
It seems obvious that gods do play some role in promoting prosocial behavior, although the magnitude of that role may be debated. The question, however, is not whether the gods promote prosocial behavior and cooperation but rather whether that is the origin of the gods. Did the gods arise because of Homo sapiens’ need for meaning and promotion of prosocial behavior, as prosocial theorists argue? Or did they arise in response to Homo sapiens’ understanding of death and an afterlife, as this book argues, and then acquire a prosocial function later?
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COMFORT THEORIES
The best-known psychological theory of the origins of gods and religions was put forth by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, our need to create gods as father figures arises from the unconscious need to resolve our Oedipal complex. This need arises in childhood when males wish to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, just as the Greek king Oedipus did. Thus, for Freud “religion arises only in response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses,” and once people have resolved their unconscious conflicts thorough psychoanalysis, they will have no further need for religion.15
Although Freud’s theories of religion fulfilling unconscious needs have been discredited, many contemporary theories emphasize the role of religions in fulfilling both conscious and unconscious needs for comfort. It is obviously comforting to look forward to going to heaven, being reborn, or entering some other form of afterlife rather than having to accept death as the end of one’s existence. In most religions, the afterlife is portrayed as being very attractive. In the Mormon religion, for example, the Celestial Kingdom, which is the highest of the three levels of heaven, was described by the prophet Joseph Smith as having “beautiful streets … which had the appearance of being paved with gold.” There, the faithful would dwell for eternity.
According to one Mormon scholar, “Each of us will look like ourselves, except that flaws, including potbellies, warts, deformities, and the like, will be gone, and a perfected physical figure—the very figure of our premortal spirit now clothed upon with immortal matter—will be ours.” People will live in the Celestial Kingdom as families, and “those who died as babies and children will be raised to maturity by their exalted parents, in family chains that extend back to Adam and forward to forever.”16
Most scholars of religion who regard the promise of an afterlife as an important factor in the origin of gods list it as one of several factors. Thus, Robert Hinde, a British zoologist at Cambridge University, wrote in Why Gods Persist: “Belief in a deity is related to a number of human propensities, especially understanding the causes of events, feeling in control of one’s life, seeking security in adversity, coping with fear of death, the desire for relationships and other aspects of social life, and the search for a coherent meaning in life.” Similarly, David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledged in The Accidental Mind that “religion provides comfort, particularly in allowing people to face their own mortality.” He then gave equal weight to other advantages of religions, specifically that “religion allows for the upholding of a particular social order” and “religion gives answers to difficult questions.”17
A neurochemical variation on the comfort theme was developed in God’s Brain, by Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire. They contended that “the experience of uncertainty and of facing the unknown” leads to chemical changes in our brains “that produce aversive physical and psychological states.” As a reaction to such stress, our brains automatically regulate the brain’s neurochemicals to produce what the authors call “brainsoothe.” Religion is a major means of achieving “brainsoothe” by three mechanisms: the social aspects of religion produce pleasure by upregulating serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine; religious rituals relax the body; and religious beliefs simplify “the complexity of existence and social life.” Thus, to understand religion, we need “to look at what religion does for the brain.” The authors argue that “religion is to the brain what jogging is to the legs … a form of socioemotional and institutional exercise for the organ in our head.”18
Some scholars have denied that a fear of death and a desire for an afterlife are especially important for the development of religion. For example, Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington University, argued that “the common shoot-from-the-hip explanation—people fear death, and religion makes them believe that it is not the end—is certainly insufficient because the human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear.” Boyer appears to categorize a fear of death as simply one of many human stres
ses and fears. Similarly, Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University, claimed that some religions do not have an afterlife as part of their belief system. Therefore, he argued, “the lack of an afterlife, or of a happy one, found in many religions thus undermines two chief forms of the wish-fulfillment [comfort] theory: that belief is motivated by desire for immortality, and that it is motivated by a desire for posthumous retribution.19
To suggest that a fear of death and a desire for an afterlife are the most important factors in the emergence of gods is not to deny that other aspects of gods and religions are also comforting. As Hinde noted: “It is comforting to believe in a powerful entity who is on one’s side, and who will intervene if appealed to.” A belief in gods also suggests that someone is in control and that events have meaning. This is especially comforting in times of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tornados, or typhoons. Gods are also comforting when people are faced with the deaths of loved ones or the random deaths of innocent children, or when good people are struck by lightning or a falling tree on their way to church. As Hinde noted: “Perhaps such issues can be encapsulated in the proposition that religious systems provide ‘peace of mind,’ a coherent view of the world, giving a semblance of order to a wide range of human experiences which might otherwise appear chaotic.” As stated by Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Religion enables human beings to make peace with themselves and with the formidable and mysterious universe into which they are flung by some power greater than themselves.”20
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Page 23