Religion’s Evolution

Natural or individual belief in God is present in all human cultures. Religion’s function as a social glue seems to benefit from a combination of promises of future joys and the threat of upcoming afflictions. At the same time, we should be vigilant so that the secular foundations of our societies are not weakened.

Everywhere you go in the world, you meet people with more or less detailed ideas that somewhere there are one or more gods who are behind both their own and their group’s successes and setbacks. These ‘otherworldly’ forces usually require certain rituals and offerings to let their sun of grace shine upon their followers, but not on their enemies. Behind all that happens – both good and bad – the faithful see divine intervention. The intermediaries between them and their gods – usually a shaman, pastor, imam or other pardoned individual, almost always a man – explain why something has gone wrong, when it happened, and set out what sacrifices should be made to make the ‘otherworldly’ powers more sympathetic in the future and how thanks should be given for what good they have done.

Experiments have revealed that infants have an innate tendency to perceive everything that happens around them as being due to an ‘actor’. Sometimes they see such an actor, for example a mother or father, but sometimes not, which is when they react with worry and anxiety. When they are a bit older, they often fantasise together about one or more ‘actors’ who are given names, and who perhaps can be persuaded and influenced through their own actions. Approximately the same situation is also true of many adults who believe in the existence of one or a number of ‘actors’ with power over their lives. Gods see and hear everything and know everything that happens, and they hold the future in their hands.

Why has this tendency to either identify or otherwise come up with an ‘actor’ behind all unexpected events been built into our psyche? How does it benefit us?

In times when people often lived in perilous environments, where lightning-fast reactions to the sound of a broken twig or a splash in the swamp could be the difference between life and death, it was vital not to hesitate. It could have cost you your life to devote only a moment to check who the ‘actor’ really was. Even in less dangerous contexts, such as in a social conflict, natural selection could well have benefited the individual who responded reflexively.

Natural or individual faith in God – the idea that there is an ‘actor’ behind what is happening – seems to be present in all human cultures, albeit to differing degrees and in different versions. Of course, this does not mean that there are or are not such otherworldly beings. The reaction to tough life-situations giving rise to the idea of an ‘actor’ can be seen as one among many other behaviours that have arisen and been modified in the evolutionary adaptation process that has fashioned our particular psyche.

People have never lived alone but in groups. ”Solitude is strength” is one of the most idiotic of all the sayings. Compared with a group, a lone man has very limited knowledge and experience and is vulnerable to all kinds of hazards and, moreover, it is difficult to successfully reproduce alone. So fundamentally social are we that solitary confinement is considered such an inhumane punishment that only the worst of villains are subjected to it.

Many evolutionarily informed anthropologists and biologists argue that modern man – the one that Linnaeus named Homo sapiens – has a unique ‘cultural capacity’ to shift the pressure of natural selection from the individual to the group, or at least spread it on both levels. Not long ago, ‘group selection’ was a dirty term in the evolutionary biology debate, but no longer. Today, there are many who have accepted the idea that an individual’s reproductive success – the ‘currency’ of the Darwinian model – is highly dependent on his or her social environment. It is of the utmost importance for the individual to belong to a group whose members are willing to make sacrifices in order to increase the likelihood of the group’s competitiveness now and in the future. Such actions, which can be costly for the actor but – statistically speaking – benefit her or him in the long run are called pro-social. They cost from almost nothing (such as sacrificing a few seconds to help a disabled neighbour on the bus) to considerably more (such as to honestly pay your taxes or step up and risk your life to safeguard the group’s future prosperity – to take a few contemporary examples). In no species (at least among the vertebrates) has the social system – the group – had such a huge significance for the individual, as with us humans. It follows that group selection has been a more important feature of our species than in any other species’ adaptation to the world.

A major problem with advanced sociality is individuals who freeload, that is, who run away from pro-social costs, but who are happy to reap the returns, thereby increasing their relative reproductive success (‘fitness’ in evolutionary biology jargon), which means that the group will have a growing share of freeloaders and thus start digging its own grave. How to counteract this disastrous process?

Through the creation of invented group-specific norms that are ‘criminal’ to violate. Note that few crimes in today’s human societies are punished so mercilessly as treason against the country or, for that matter, against the gang. Lack of group solidarity must be identified and punished, and those who have alert eyes for such trends are rewarded by other team members, and rise in the ranks. Leadership usually means increased reproductive success – a major bonus.

For a group to survive in a world of competing groups, cohesion and solidarity are required. Of course, it is essential that pro-sociality only covers the group’s members. A sacrifice for a non-member is a bad investment, so too the failure to sacrifice for a member. Consequently, each individual must clearly signal the group to which they belong.

When evolutionary biologists talk about culture, they refer not only to the arts and their interpretation, but also to the sum total of the traditions that exist within any group of individuals that are transmitted from one to the other by ‘social learning’.

Culture as defined here also occurs in non-human species. But, for humans, culture has a far greater impact on individuals’ living conditions than in any other species. Culture is not an individual- but a social phenomenon. Man’s great cultural capacity both depends on and leads to natural selection to a greater extent than in any other species, picking and choosing even between groups, not only between individuals.

Something of a classic example of the interaction between heredity (genes) and environment (culture) that is really obvious and yet so often denied or misinterpreted is the human ability for language. Most scientists agree that man as a genetically anchored species has the ability to speak; we have a ‘language’ with properties that are unique to our species. All healthy people can talk to each other and do it well, but not, for example, chimpanzees or baboons. However, it is the social environment, the culture, which determines whether people of a certain area speak Swahili, or Spanish, or Swedish.

That so many varieties of religiosity emerged and persisted for longer or shorter periods of time depends, according to many scientists who have thought about it, especially on their suitability as markers of the group’s identity. Followers of all religions tend to emphasise their togetherness through emotionality and their affiliation through striking symbols. They claim to be God’s ‘children’, while the monks and nuns are called brothers and sisters. The term Movement of Brotherhood with a Christian association says it all. If you see everyone as each other’s ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, it becomes even more obvious to stick together. Often you can, from afar, identify to what religion a person belongs. When there’s a synod in Uppsala, it’s abuzz with people who, by their dress, highlight why they are in town.

Through the interaction of genetic selection on the individual level and cultural selection at the group level, humans seem to have developed a psychological piece of equipment that seems unique to our species: consciousness. The term is extremely difficult to define, but as one of its most characteristic components is the ability to perceive the passage of time. Every human being has a history and a future, the former remembered and the latter awaited with fear, anticipation and mixed emotions. An inescapable insight is that life will end one day, and this is perceived by most people as obvious. Many believe that our ability to see into the future and realise that life is short, has strengthened the personal belief in God, which often contains a promise of a good afterlife. In turn, this concept has increased susceptibility to institutionalised religion, which gives instructions on how to get a ‘ticket’ to paradise, with all its delights. To safeguard and spread your own church is a sure way to get such a ticket.

Those who formalised the natural or personal belief in God to ‘group religion’ are called theologians – a term that in this context includes all professional or self-appointed interpreters of the gods’ messages and also the mediators of communication between people and their gods. Certainly, they carry different names and use different approaches in different religions, but what they have in common is that they control religious expression so that the group’s mutual solidarity and ‘alien’ separatism is underlined. Orthodoxy is a central keyword, and deviations from the correct theory are perceived as sin. Terrorism is often motivated by religious differences, which have a remarkable ability to evoke and reinforce feelings of hatred and contempt.

From simple beginnings, numerous religious cultural variations have arisen, some are eventually embraced by hundreds of millions of people, but most disappear via a culling process that illustrates Darwinian selection at the group level. Religions that weaken rather than strengthen their supporters’ pro-sociality are knocked out in the constant struggle for living space and resources.

It is an interesting fact that, in all human societies, culture is part of one or another form of religion, that is, a belief in otherworldly forces or gods who have influence on human life and times and who, in many cases, may be asked to assist in difficult situations. In some cases, the gods are perceived as actually living and to be found somewhere in the environment, but more often as formerly existing on earth, but now resident elsewhere, perhaps in heaven.

General human behaviour can, with good reason, be seen as adaptations – adaptations that evolved because they increased the group’s, and its members’, continued existence and future prospects. But what benefits have resulted from religiosity for its practitioners?

Numerous are the researchers who have addressed this intriguing question. Among those who closely examined this problem include Edward O. Wilson, the 83-year-old (but very active) Harvard professor who has made so many pioneering efforts as an evolutionary biologist with a special devotion to the study of the emergence of different kinds of social behaviour. In his latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), he devotes a chapter to a discussion of the importance of religion for human sociality.

Wilson’s conclusion is, in brief, that religious beliefs, stories and rituals are a characterising feature of our species’ deeply rooted group behaviour (tribalism is a word he likes to use). Every religion emphasises to its followers that they are a selected group or ‘herd’ with special privileges. Their doings have divine sanction, and are therefore elevated above ordinary morality and law. When a group attacks, or is attacked by another group harbouring its members, the belief is, imprinted since a young age, that it has ‘right on its side’. To show loyalty and sacrifice for the other supporters of the same faith is as natural as the belief that those other religions are ‘pagans’, ‘infidels’, ‘apostates’, or ‘damned’ that obviously should be destroyed. In the Christian Bible, there are plenty of stories that today would be classified as examples of horrific genocide. But the writers represent such atrocities as righteous and justified acts that confirm a military victory over a contemptible enemy with a different religious persuasion.

Of greatest importance to a group’s survival in a world full of competition, of course, is discipline, and religious leaders often exert an extraordinary power over their followers. The flock is threatened with dire punishment after death if they do not obey while, on the other hand, they are drawn into battle by promises that, if they die in war, they will go to a paradise filled with pleasures of a kind they could only dream about on Earth. The gods are depicted not always as gentle and benign, but occasionally as angry and menacing, and countless ways to appease them have been invented by creative clerics, such as paying the said priests in money or in kind. Religions’ function as a social glue for groups seems best promoted through a combination of promises of future joys and the threat of future suffering.

To this day, religion plays an important role in the cohesion and differentiation of populations. Indeed, we humans, as Wilson writes, are incurable ‘tribalists’.

Are we now witnessing the rise of an aggressive ‘new atheism’? The answer depends on what you mean by that term. Interest in what are sometimes called the ‘ultimate’ or ‘existential’ questions certainly seems to be on the rise in some places in the world. Few, however, are those who want to prevent other people from calmly reflecting on these issues, worshipping their gods, listening to their earthly spokespeople and participating in religious rituals. However, many people, especially in the Nordic countries, see the need for vigilance and preparedness so that the secular foundations of our societies are not weakened by the increased influence of religious communities that have a strong drive to force society to follow what they see as divinely given, and therefore axiomatic, rules.

Even in comparatively secular Sweden, we see glimpses of ominous signs. As late as the 1990s, to the introductory chapter of the compulsory school curriculum was added a clause that teaching should be done ”in accordance with the ethics administered by the Christian tradition and western humanism” and in parliament and government now sit representatives of a party that not only cares about religion but believes that a certain religion should prevail. That attitude fits poorly into a society that guarantees all citizens their ‘cultural freedom’ so long as it does not encroach on that of others, or on the universality of human rights. True democracy can only exist in a country where all citizens have the same rights and obligations – regardless of what religion they profess. By violating this principle, they have abolished the democratic society.

Abundant experience suggests that increased religious diversity in a community may represent an increased risk of fragmentation – the relationship lies, so to speak, in its very nature. Few deny the need for integration of ethnic groups with different cultures, where often just the religious component is prominent. Can you imagine a different sort of group marker that can play the role that the religions previously had, so that a society arises where the sense of community trumps religious/cultural separation? The question is interesting – but the answer is uncertain. Since religiosity is demonstrably abated within nations whose citizens have high trust in the authorities and the state, and where economic differences are not too grotesque, one might imagine that in societies where these goals are prioritised (and at least to some extent achieved), the propensity towards cultural conflicts will decrease. International comparisons show that the Nordic countries are at the forefront of this development. A pious hope is that they continue in the same direction.

‘Aggressive new atheism?’ No. Intensified political efforts to reduce the risk of cultural conflict? Yes. Last but not least: a constant readiness to defend secular society against its enemies.