The Biological and Cultural Evolution of Religion

Why Does Religion Exist?

I’m an atheist in the strict sense of the word. I do not believe in an omnipotent being, nor do I put my faith in any sort of salvation or afterlife.

But I’ve found recently that I am not nearly as anti-religious as I once thought. Despite deciding in middle school that I was a staunch atheist, I went on to major in religion, a topic I found fascinating while rejecting the premise on which it was founded. I reflected on the appeal of religion, and why it is that I don’t believe in god while others do, and furthermore, why others believe in all varieties of god. I came to what seems an obvious conclusion: all human beings are capable of conceiving something greater than themselves, and therefore this ability must be a biological gift, perhaps a gene-mutation seized upon by natural selection that has allowed humans to be so successful.

This is one easy explanation for why religion is and always has been a fixture in human society. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have documented proof of organized religion, and even prehistorical archaeological sites have evidence of pre-religious or pseudo-religious practices — human burial, for example.

We have been gifted the ability to conceive of something bigger and better than ourselves. Accepting natural selection, there must be some value to this gift, and the history of religion and the evidence of pre-historical religious practices show us that for tens of thousands of years, our ancestors have held beliefs similar to the ones many cherish today. I would even venture a guess that our gorilla and chimp cousins, cowering under an intense thunder storm, may ask themselves who lives in the sky that gets so angry.

Survival and Unity

From the perspective of survival, the case for organized religion is easy to make. Early humans had to cooperate to survive. We are smaller and far less physically endowed than many of our would-be predators, and the small prey we can catch individually cannot sustain even moderately-sized groups. The earliest religions were centered on the spirits of the ancestors. As Jared Diamond points out in The Third Chimpanzee, in preliterate societies, the knowledge of ancestors could be the difference between life and death.

That the first recognizable religion is ancestor worship among small bands and tribes of early humans is thus unsurprising. A group of humans no bigger than an extended family would have been very reliant on the wisdom of its elder members, and the familial bond made the transition from living sage to spiritual deity quite easy. Grandparents shared their wisdom, died, and were remembered and venerated because of how important their knowledge had been to the well-being of the living.

This formula worked well as long as our tribes were not substantially larger than the extended family. There was never a question as to whose ancestors would occupy the pedestal of worship so long as there is only one set of ancestors. But as the combined power of human brains outpaced the ability of predators to kill us and prey to escape us, our ancestral groups began growing, and coming into competitive contact with each other. Groups that had once been no larger than families now began to consist of many clans, each with grandmothers as distinct as yours and mine.

From Grandpas to Gods

Political and cultural necessities were thus grafted to the human mind’s ability to conceive beyond itself. In order to form larger bands, the essential question of “whose ancestors” had to be answered. Early human beings had little in common, with bands far smaller than today’s nation-states waging frequent — if small — raids and wars against one another.

As our societies evolved, the manifestation of our biological gift evolved along with them. Ancestor worship in myriad bands coalesced into polytheism with the ancestors of different clans taking on the roles and personalities of different deities within a pantheon. This cultural evolution solved two problems for our early ancestors: it allowed them to form much larger groups by acknowledging importance and primacy of place of many ancestors, and it laid the foundation for permanent large settlements by implementing a system that, once established, would not need to reinvent deities frequently. In just a generation or two, the connection to the original ancestors would have disappeared, replaced entirely by the new pantheon, and thus a sustainable governing model. New societies were less likely to fracture along sectarian lines as new members were born into clans that accepted an entire pantheon, not just the original member that had represented its unique ancestry.

This shift, from ancestor worship to polytheism, may seem significant to people familiar with recent history’s more intense fanaticism, but our forebears wouldn’t have struggled with the mental acrobatics of such a transition. They were acting on needs of survival and the inherent pull of the biological gift which they undoubtedly felt even if they could not articulate it as such. It is precisely because early human groups knew the importance of their own ancestors for their survival that they recognized ancestor veneration among others, and it is precisely because they saw the wisdom in benefiting from the brains and collective knowledge of many ancestors rather than simply their own that they abandoned this early form of religion for one that expanded the size of their group and with it, their chances of surviving and prospering.

This trend is reflected in polytheistic cultures, which tended to be far more open and tolerant than the monotheistic societies that followed them. In his book God Against the Gods, author Jonathon Kirsch discusses how polytheistic societies were more likely to see the validity of other pantheons; they were aware that their own deities represented local knowledge and customs and were far less likely to dismiss the importance of unknown deities in unfamiliar places.

There is no better example of this than the world’s largest ancient empire, the Romans. At its apex, the Roman empire ran horizontally from the Atlantic shores of Western Europe across the Mediterranean and into the modern Middle East, and stretched vertically from North Africa into the wilderness reaches of Germany and East/Central Europe. In each of the regions, they conquered and subsequently governed, the Romans encountered people with different and diverse religious beliefs. And yet, Rome struggled little with religious rebellions. While the boundaries of the empire faced outside “barbarians,” and heavy-handed Roman governance at time caused domestic strife, very few of Rome’s internal governing crises had to do with religion.

Wherever they went, the Romans brought the imperial pantheon with them, and established it as a foundation of state in their new territory. But they were also careful not to ban or oppress the religious pantheons they found in place. First and foremost, Rome was concerned with peaceful and prosperous governance, not religious turmoil. In fact, it was not until Rome established itself in Judea that it found religious confrontation in the form of monotheistic Judaism. By recognizing and respecting other pantheons Rome was able to incorporate an array of tribes and peoples into the empire.

Ultimately this method proved untenable, paving the way for the spread of monotheism.

The Post-Polytheistic World

While polytheism did represent a step forward in the how we manifest our ability to conceive beyond ourselves, and how we use this gift for the betterment of our species, it ultimately became too unwieldy as a governing tool. Even before the Romans encountered the obstinate monotheism of the Jews, they learned the difficulties of governing an empire as vast and diverse as theirs. Embracing other pantheons worked as a trick to peacefully co-opt other groups into the empire, but it did little to ease the jobs of bureaucrats tasked with governing the myriad cultures under the imperial umbrella. Although religious pressures, even that of the Jews, didn’t cause Rome to fall, those religious discrepancies were an aspect of the instability that weakened Rome and precipitated her collapse. Governing an empire as large and diverse as Rome’s using a hodgepodge of local customs and beliefs was simply untenable.

But Rome’s interaction with Judaism was a portent of religion’s future. Although Judaism is not an evangelical form of monotheism, the benefit of a monotheistic society were very evident: monotheists rallied zealously to their cause. Whereas tribes opposed to Rome may have united in opposition against the empire, once conquered, many groups fell in line with Roman governance and customs. This trend made governance easier at first but had the dual flaws of being unsustainable over a such a large territory, and of being less than inspirational when it was necessary to rally denizens of so diverse an empire for the betterment of the whole.

Monotheism was an antidote to both of these problems. By replacing pantheons with a singular deity, the emperor Constantine tied Rome to God, and therefore made the empire’s umbrella much broader, if simultaneously less tolerant. Rome was no longer the seat of imperial power alone, it became the home of God’s agent on Earth as well. Allegiance to Rome no longer ensured merely temporal well-being, but also eternal salvation.

Rome collapsed before Christianity spread across Europe, and of course isms other than religion contributed to the fracturing of the world’s people into the distinct groups that we see today, but religion has and still acts as a primary identifying factor, allowing humans to find common ground through shared ideology.

Goodbye God, Hello…?

I have tried to make the case that religion as we see it today is a product of human biological functions, and more importantly, that there is value to our species in the underlying biological function: the ability to conceive of something larger than ourselves and organize ourselves around that concept. Everyone is capable of conceiving of a greater being, and it is no surprise that religious beliefs have and continue to hold sway given their importance to our species’ survival and success when viewed as a flawed product of an evolutionary gift.

From the first bands of proto-humans gathering around a fire for protection against predators to the fledgling civilizations competing against one another to the global empires spreading their influence to civilizations unknown to them, religion has been and continues to be one of the strongest identifying bonds for human societies. That we evolved to have, and indeed to need, this ability is no accident; that it has appeared as the religion we know is, for better and for worse, the historical record and the road we’ve taken to arrive at today.

The bigger question now becomes how we proceed armed with this knowledge. How do we view the underlying biological function as a gift of evolution that we can use to push humanity forward? I believe that monotheistic religion as the manifestation of this gift has, like earlier forms of the same mental ability, outlived its usefulness. It is time for us to move beyond an identifying concept of a deity and invest our collective cognitive gift in another intellectual vehicle that will satisfy our biological urge: Humanity.

The next iteration of our collective imagination must be even bigger and more expansive than the current variety. As much as an atheist may deny it, what they’re advocating isn’t the abolition of religion but rather a broader human decision to invest in a new vision of what is greater than us, something is even more inclusive, but scratches the same itch.

I firmly believe this new iteration of “religion” is not only possible, but already evolving. Not only are fewer people identifying as religious in the traditional sense, but communications and travel technology have shrunk the world in a manner that creates more exposure to others and fosters the tolerance that naturally follows.

Furthermore, the problems our species faces today are too large to be solved without cooperation and collaboration from myriad diverse stakeholders. Whereas a group of 15 humans could kill a mastodon while a group of three could not, similarly it will take the efforts of every country on the planet to resolve climate change, emission cuts by only one polluter — even a large one like the US or China — simply will not suffice.

Just like our long-gone ancestors we face problems that require larger and larger groups to fix. As the product of their biological gift evolved from ancestor worship into polytheism and finally into the monotheism we are familiar with today, they built bigger and more complex societies, solving old problems and creating new ones. As their ideological umbrellas expanded, so too did their ability to impact change. We now live in a world of global problems. From a worldwide economic structure to nuclear proliferation to global warming, there are no major issues that can be addressed by lonely actors.

Historically, a shared religious identification has allowed people of other differences to come together. For this reason, the underlying biological gift must necessarily be the one that propels us forward. For example, people also identify racially or ethnically, but no people have ever viewed themselves as inferior to another people, whereas everyone is capable of — and many do — finding a purpose more important than themselves. It is time we replace God atop the pedestal of mentally-manifested greatness and replace monotheism with a new concept that is more encompassing, the recognition that we all share a unique biological gift that is urging us to unite and see just how good we can be when we put our collective best foot forward as human beings.