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The origin of religion refers to the emergence of religious behavior during the course of human evolution. When humans first became religious remains unknown. However, there is credible evidence of religious behavior from Middle Paleolithic era (300-50kya).

Religion

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Main articles: Anthropology of religion and Indigenous religion

Though religious behavior varies widely between the world's cultures, religion is a cultural universal found in all human populations. Common elements include:

Primate behavior

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Further information: Chimpanzee spirituality, Paleolithic religion, and Sociobiology

Humanity’s closest living relatives are common chimpanzees and bonobos. These primates share a common ancestor with humans who lived four and six million years ago. It is for this reason that chimpanzees and bonobos are viewed as the best available surrogate for this common ancestor. Barbara King argues that while primates are not religious, they do exhibit some traits that would have been necessary for the evolution of religion. These traits include high intelligence, a capacity for symbolic communication, a sense of social norms, realization of "self", and a concept of continuity, [1][2][3]

Evolution of morality

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See also Morality and Evolution of morality

Dr. de Waal and Barbara King both view human morality as having grown out of primate sociality. Though morality is a unique human trait, many social animals such as primates, dolphins and whales have been known to exhibit premoral sentiments. According to Michael Shermer, the following characteristics are shared by humans and other social animals, particularly the great apes:

attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring ahout what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. [4]

De Waal contends that all social animals have had to restrain or alter their behavior for group living to be worthwhile. Premoral sentiments evolved in primate societies as a method of restraining individual selfishness and building more cooperative groups. For any social species, the benefits of being part of an altruistic group outweigh the benefits of individual selfishness. For example, lack of group cohesion could make individuals more vulnerable to attack from outsiders. Being part of group may also improve the chances of finding food. This is evident among animals that hunt in packs to take down large or dangerous prey.

All social animals have hierarchical societies in which each member knows its own place. Social order is maintained by rules of expected behavior and dominant group members enforce order through punishment. However, higher order primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. Chimpanzees remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. chimpanzees are more likely to share food with individuals who have previously groomed them.[5]

Chimpanzees live fission-fusion groups that average 50 individuals. It is likely that early ancestors of humans lived in groups of similar size. Based on the size of extant hunter gatherer societies, recent paleolithic hominids lived in bands of a few hundred individuals. As community size increased over the course of human evolution, greater enforcement to achieve group cohesion would have been required. Morality may evolved in these bands of 100 to 200 people as a means of social control, conflict resolution and group solidarity. Dr. de Waal argues that human morality has two extra levels of sophistication that are not found in primate societies. Humans enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. People also apply a degree of judgment and reason, not seen in the animal kingdom.

Religion is thought to have emerged after morality. Religion built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.[6] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.[7] [8]

Prehistoric evidence of religion

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See also: Paleolithic religion and Prehistoric religion

Paleolithic burials

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The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead. Most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their own species. Humans are therefore unique in their treatment of the dead[9]. Ritual burial thus represents a significant advancement in human behavior. Ritual burial represent an awareness of life and death and a possible belief in the afterlife. Philip Lieberman states "burials with grave goods clearly signify religious practices and concern for the dead that transcends daily life"[10]. The earliest evidence for treatment of the dead comes from Atapuerca in spain. At this location the bones of 30 individuals believed to be Homo heidelbergensis have been found in a pit.[11]

Neanderthals are also contenders for the first homonids to intentionally bury the dead. They may have placed corpses into shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones. The presence of these grave goods may indicate an emotional connection with the deceased and possibly a belief in the afterlife. Neanderthal burial sites include Shanidar in Iraq and Krapina in Croatia and Kebara Cave in Israel.[12][13][14][13]. The earliest known burial of modern humans is from a cave in Israel located at Qafzeh. Human remains have been dated to 100,000 years ago. Human skeletons were found stained with red ochre. A variety of grave goods were found at the burial site. The mandible of a wild boar was found placed in the arms of one of the skeletons[15]. Philip Lieberman states:

Burial rituals incorporating grave goods may have been invented by the anatomically modern hominids who emigrated from Africa to the Middle East 100,000 years ago.[15]

The use of symbolism

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The use of symbolism in religion is a well established phenomena. Symbolism demonstrates a capacity for abstract thought and imagination. Gods and many other spiritual beings are abstract objects that are often anthropomorphized. [16].

Artwork or the use of pigments is seen as evidence of a mind capable of religious thought. Steven Mithen states that the very first art is intimately associated with religious ideas. There is some evidence of ritual behavior from Middle Stone Age sites in africa such as one site in South Africa dated to 70,000 years ago. [17]. Pigments are of little practical use to hunter gatherers, thus evidence of their use is interpreted as symbolic or for ritual purposes. Several MSA sites in Africa indicate increased use of pigments, which are thought to relate to ritual activity, dating back as far as 100,000 years ago.[18]Upper paleolithic cave art provides some of the credible evidence of religious thought. Cave paintings at Chauvet depict creatures that are half human and half animal, a phenomenon commonly associated among shamanistic practices.

The evolution of the brain

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The religious mind is one consequence of a brain that is large enough to formulate religious and philosophical ideas. [19]. During human evolution, the hominid brain tripled in size , peaking 500,000 years ago.

Much of the brain's expansion took place in the neocortex. This part of the brain is involved in processing higher order cognitive functions that are necessary for human religiosity. The neocortex is responsible for self consciousness, language and emotion. According to Dunbar's theory, the relative neocortex size of any species correlates with the level of social complexity of the particular species. The neocortex size correlates with a number of social variables that include social group size and complexity of mating behaviors. With chimpanzees the neocortex occupies 50% of the brain, whereas with modern humans it occupies 80% of the brain. Robin Dunbar argues that the critical event in the evolution of the neocortex took place at the speciation of archaic homo sapiens about 500tya. His study indicates that only after the speciation event is the neocortex sufficiently large enough to process complex social phenomena such as language and religion.[20] -->

Tool use

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Lewis Wolpert argues that causal beliefs that emerged from tool use played a major role in the evolution of belief. The manufacture of complex tools requires, firstly, creating a mental image of an object that does not exist naturally before actually making artifact. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used, which requires an understanding of causality[21] Hence the manufacture of these tools represents the capacity to imagine gods and other spiritual beings that are not naturally occurring. [22].

Language and religion

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See also: origin of language and myth and religion

Religion requires a system of symbolic communication such as language to be transmitted from one individual to another. Philip Lieberman states "human religious thought and moral sense clearly rest on a cognitive-linguistic base," [10] From this premise science writer Nicholas Wade states:

"Like most behaviors that are found in societies throughout the world, religion must have been present in the ancestral human population before the dispersal from Africa 50,000 years ago. Although religious rituals usually involve dance and music, they are also very verbal, since the sacred truths have to be stated. If so, religion, at least in its modern form, cannot pre-date the emergence of language. It has been argued earlier that language attained its modern state shortly before the exodus from Africa. If religion had to await the evolution of modern, articulate language, then it too would have emerged shortly before 50,000 years ago. "[23]


Neolithic religions

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Main article: Neolithic religion

The neolithic revolution brought about significant changes in the role that religion played in human societies. Up until the neolithic 11000 years ago, all humans around the world lived as semi-nomadic hunter gatherers. The population density of these hunter gather societies was relatively low. As the pace of technological development intensified following the great leap forward the global human population began to increase. Begining in the Near East, populations abandoned the nomadic lifestlye and adopted sedentism 13,000 years ago. The subsequent invention of agriculture led to dramatic social changes to human societies around the world. Population densities increased and humans began living in settlements comprising thousands of individuals. The chiefdoms amd states that arose allowed for division of labor, both socially and economically.

Hunter gatherers societies normally practice animism, shamanism and ancestor worship. Religion became an institution during this period and had several roles, chiefly, maintaining social order through the justification of social hierarchies[4]. A major technological advance that had a major impact on religion was the invention of writing 4000 years ago.Some scientists regard the Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt as the oldest know religious texts in the world dating to between 3300 to 3150 BCE.[24] [25] It is these factors that led to the development of the world religions during the Axial Age.


Psychology of religion

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See also: Psychology of religion, Evolutionary psychology of religion, and Neurotheology

Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just like hearts, lungs and immune systems, cognition has functional structure that has a genetic basis, and therefore evolved by natural selection. Like organs, this functional structure should be universally shared and should solve important problems of survival. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.

Psychological processes

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The cognitive psychology of religion is a new field of inquiry which attempts to account for the psychological processes that underlie religious thought and practice. In his book Religion Explained, Pascal Boyer asserts there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. Boyer is concerned with the various psychological processes involved in ideas concerning the gods. Boyer builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who first argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology, and purposeful human constructs about the world (for example, bodiless beings with thoughts and emotions) that make religious cognitions striking and memorable.

Cognitive studies

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There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a Spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.[26][27][28] Sch mechanisms may include: the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (aitiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life, etc.[29]

Religious persons acquire religious ideas and practices through social exposure. The child of a Zen Buddhist will not become an evangelical Christian without the relevant cultural experience. While mere exposure does not cause a particular religious outlook (a person may have been raised a Roman Catholic but leave the church), nevertheless some exposure is required - this person will never invent Roman Catholicism out of thin air. One single person cannot invent a complex religious system like Roman Catholicism. Simpler religions like Scientology can be invented by one individual. Cognitive science may help understanding of the psychological mechanisms for these manifest correlations. To the extent that acquisition and transmission of religious concepts rely on human brains, the mechanisms are probably open to computational analysis. If all thought is computationally structured, then such an approach can also shed light on the nature of religious cognition. It is plausible to think that the physico-cognitive brain structures are the result of evolution over long periods of time. Like all biological systems, the mind is continually being optimised to promote survival and reproduction. Under this view all specialised cognitive functions broadly serve those reproductive ends.

For Steven Pinker the universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle. He thinks that adaptationist explanations for religion do not meet the criteria for adaptations, and that religious psychology is indeed a by-product of many parts of the mind that evolved because they aided survival in other ways.

Genetics

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Further information: God gene

Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the God gene hypothesis, states that some human beings bear a gene which gives them a predisposition to episodes interpreted as religious revelation. One gene claimed to be of this nature is VMAT2.



References

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  1. ^ Gods and Gorillas
  2. ^ King, Barbara (2007). Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. Doubleday Publishing." ISBN 0385521553.
  3. ^ Excerpted from Evolving God by Barbara J. King
  4. ^ a b Shermer, Michael. The Science of Good and Evil. ISBN 0805075208.
  5. ^ Videos of chimpanzee food sharing
  6. ^ Rossano, Matt (2007). "Supernaturalizing Social Life: Religion and the Evolution of Human Cooperation" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. ^ [Nicholas Wade. Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior. New York Times. March 20, 2007.
  8. ^ Matthew Rutherford. The Evolution of Morality. University of Glasgow. 2007. Retrieved June 6, 2008
  9. ^ Elephants may pay homage to the dead
  10. ^ a b Lieberman (1991). Uniquely Human. ISBN 0674921836. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  11. ^ Greenspan, Stanley. How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from Early Primates to Modern Human. ISBN 0306814498.
  12. ^ "The Neanderthal dead:exploring mortuary variability in Middle Palaeolithic Eurasia" (PDF). {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  13. ^ a b Evolving in their graves: early burials hold clues to human origins - research of burial rituals of Neanderthals
  14. ^ "BBC article on the Neanderthals". Neanderthals buried their dead, and one burial at Shanidar in Iraq was accompanied by grave goods in the form of plants. All of the plants are used in recent times for medicinal purposes, and it seems likely that the Neanderthals also used them in this way and buried them with their dead for the same reason. Grave goods are an archaeological marker of belief in an afterlife, so Neanderthals may well have had some form of religious belief. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  15. ^ a b . Uniquely Human page 163
  16. ^ "Human Uniqueness and Symbolization". This 'coding of the non-visible' through abstract, symbolic thought, enabled also our early human ancestors to argue and hold beliefs in abstract terms. In fact, the concept of God itself follows from the ability to abstract and conceive of 'person'
  17. ^ World’s oldest ritual discovered. Worshipped the python 70,000 years ago, apollon.uio.no, retrieved 2007-12-22 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  18. ^ Rossano, Matt (2007). "The Religious Mind and the Evolution of Religion" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  19. ^ Ehrlich, Paul. Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect. pp. page 214. ISBN 155963779X. Religious ideas can be traced to the evolution of brains large enough to make possible the kind of abstract thought necessary to formulate religious and philosophical ideas {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  20. ^ Dunbar, Robin (2003). "THE SOCIAL BRAIN: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  21. ^ Six impossible things before breakfast, The evolutionary origins of belief. ISBN 0393064492. with regard to hafted tools, One would have to understand that the two pieces serve different purposes, and imagine how the tool could be used,
  22. ^ Wolpert, Lewis. Six impossible things before breakfast, The evolutionary origins of belief. p. page 82. ISBN 0393064492. Belief in cause and effect has had the most enormous effect on human evolution, both physical and cultural. Tool use, with language, has transformed human evolution and let to what we now think of as belief {{cite book}}: |page= has extra text (help)
  23. ^ *"Wade, Nicholas - Before The Dawn, Discovering the lost history of our ancestors. Penguin Books, London, 2006. p. 8 p. 165" ISBN 1594200793
  24. ^ Budge, Wallis. An Introduction to Ancient Egyptian Literature. pp. page 9. ISBN 0486295028. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  25. ^ The beginning of religion at the begining of the Neolithic
  26. ^ A scientific exploration of how we have come to believe in God
  27. ^ Toward an evolutionary psychology of religion and personality
  28. ^ The evolutionary psychology of religion Steven Pinker
  29. ^ Religion's Evolutionary Landscape [[Scott Atran]] [[Ara Norenzayan]] {{citation}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)

Literature

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  • Churchward, Albert. (1924) The Origin and Evolution of Religion (2003 reprint: ISBN 978-1930097506).
  • Cooke, George Willis. (1920) The Social Evolution of Religion.
  • Hefner, Philip. (1993) The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
  • Hopkins, E. Washburn. (1923) Origin and Evolution of Religion
  • King, Barbara. (2007) Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. Doubleday Publishing. ISBN 0385521553.
  • Lewis-Williams, David (2002) The mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Thames & Hudson, ISBN: 0500051178
  • Mithen, Steve. (1996) The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-05081-3.
  • McClenon, James (2002), Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion, Northern Illinois University Press, ISBN 0875802842 {Reviewed here by Journal of Religion & Society)
  • Parchment, S. R. (2005) "Religion And Its Effect Upon Human Evolution", in: Just Law of Compensation ISBN 1564596796.
  • Reichardt, E. Noel. (1942) Significance of Ancient Religions in Relation to Human Evolution and Brain Development
  • Wade, Nicholas. (2006) Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. The Penguin Press ISBN 1-59420-079-3.
  • Alfred North Whitehead (1926) Religion in the Making. 1974, New American Library. 1996, with introduction by Judith A. Jones, Fordham Univ. Press.
  • Wolpert, Lewis. (2007) Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief. New York:W.W. Norton.

See also

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