Superstition News - How Belief in God(s) Evolved in Human Culture

[left caption]

[Right caption/credit]

Christian church service

Why Do People Believe in God? | Psychology Today

From the point of view of an Atheist like me who realised religion was nonsense at the age of 9 and have been an atheist ever since, the fact that grown adults believe in a magic man in the sky who magically makes things happen does seem incredible.

It gets even more incredible that grown adults believe that, although omniscience and having a perfect plan for our individual lives, he needs to be told of bad things that need to be changed because he either doesn't know they're happening or doesn't know they are wrong.

And yet, for most people in the world, the answer seems obvious: Because it’s self-evident that God exists. From the point of view of the believer, the really puzzling question is how anyone could not believe.

Shinto shrine in Kyoto, Japan

So why do so many grown adults believe in at least one god, or if they're Hindu or Shintoist, or one of the other polytheist religions, several gods?

According to a 2018 article in Psychology Today by David Ludden, PhD, professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College, religion is an evolved feature of human culture and there was a time when people didn't believe in gods.

In his article he makes the following key points:

• Early in the history of humans, nobody believed in a god of any sort.
• Religious belief is considerably lower in developed countries compared with the underdeveloped world.
• Believing that God has a plan helps people regain some sense of control, or at least acceptance.

Tibetan Buddhist shrine

As an evolved feature in human culture, there must be strong selection pressure for belief in god(s) to have become almost universal with gods being believed in by most people in all cultures and Atheists being in the minority.

To understand how the belief evolved it helps to consider two aspects of evolution; the ultimate cause and the proximate cause:

• Ultimate cause explains how a behaviour evolved in the first place.
• Proximate cause outlines the conditions in which that behaviour will be performed.

For example, birds fly south for the winter because doing so increased their survival and produced more offspring (ultimate cause) but the trigger for doing so is not to increase the number of offspring but because the day-length is shortening (proximate cause).

So, what is the ultimate case for the evolution of belief in god(s) and what proximate causes have given rise to so many different forms of that belief in terms of religion and religious practices?

Temple to Ganesha, Goa, India.

The proximate cause was almost certainly the problem of enforcing group behaviour to reduce freeloading as the population grew, in a species that is almost uniquely co-operative in its behaviour. In a small group where everyone knows everyone, standards of ethical behaviour can be imposed by peer-pressure and the quid pro quo of one good turn deserves another, and free-loading is not tolerated, resulting in exclusion and the danger of isolation and group rejection. In Maslow's hierarchy, safety and affiliative needs are enough to enforce conformity.

But as the group gets larger, it becomes more difficult because free-loaders are harder to detect and monitor so peer-pressure is reduced, and essential group cohesion is degraded. There is then selection pressure favouring the belief that there is some unseen agency watching your behaviour and issuing sanctions on behalf of the group. Conformity can be left to these assumed agents and group cohesion is maintained by a common belief in these agents.

The tendency to assume agency where none exists evolved because there is a clear advantage in mistaking agency where none exists than in failing to assuming agency where it does exist. The benefit of assuming a leopard is making the bush shake is far greater than the cost of assuming it is a leopard when it's only a breeze. This imbalance between cost and benefit of wrongly assuming agency is strong selection pressure for evolving the tendency to falsely assume agency.

This tendency to assume agency can simply be transferred to an assumption that an invisible agency is making things happen when there is no obvious clear cause. We then apply that sense of agency to the behaviour of others in terms of intention and judge them accordingly. If someone steps on your foot accidentally, it's easy to forgive them, but if they do it deliberately, that requires an explanation...

In fact, we often resort to type and assume agency in the form of intent to other people's behaviour where there is none. Road rage is a prime example of assuming someone cut you up deliberately rather than assuming they simply made a mistake. Speaking personally, I used to suffer from road rage until I learned that it makes for better driving than to assume the other driver just made a mistake. You then tend to help them mitigate their mistake rather than allowing the situation to escalate into bad driving and abuse, and you just as effectively show you're a better driver than they are.

And, because we readily (and usually wrongly) assume agency we tend to see the natural world in terms of intentional agency. Beliefs in water sprites and woodland spirits, in ghosts and specters, and other animist beliefs, is widespread in hunter-gatherer societies, but these tend to be unorganized and shamanistic.

Early agriculture (burial chamber of Sennedjem)

But then, about 15,000 years ago, humans developed agriculture which can sustain a much larger population on the same area of land than hunter-gathering. But agriculture depends on a settled existence rather than the nomadic life-style of hunter-gatherers. These settlements quickly grew into towns and cities with food supplied by farming the surrounding countryside and it was then that humans began to form organized religions as the means of imposing group conformity and the cohesion needed to ensure coexistence of people who were now mostly strangers to one another.

The ultimate cause of belief in god(s) - the tendency to assume agency - now had the proximate cause of ensuring group cohesion and cooperation between strangers maintained by organised religions and religious practices.

Professor Ludden's article was based on a research paper by University of California at Irvine psychologist Brett Mercier and colleagues who divided proximate causes into three types, cognitive, motivational, and societal.

• Cognitive: People who think analytically tend to be less likely to believe in god(s) than people who rely on intuition. Intuition takes much less intellectual work than analytical thinking which involves learning and processing information, so it is not surprising that recent research shows that Atheists and agnostics tend to be more intelligent than religious people.
• Motivational: Affiliative needs are a powerful motivator, coming just above the physiological needs, such as food, shelter and safety. People who are socially isolated tend to be more religious, taking comfort in the belief that they are not alone. Also, the fear of impending death can motivate people to believe in god(s), or rather to allow an intuitive belief to predominate over analytical belief. The old saying that there are no Atheists in Foxholes may be just an exaggeration of the real situation when a person abandons reason in extremis and tries the irrational when the rational is failing. Another way of looking at that is that those in foxholes are those who believe they need to take cover because no invisible friend is there to protect them. In effect, those who take cover in foxholes are those who think behaving like Atheists is the sensible course of action in the circumstances.
  
  Motivational factors include the need to conform to societal norms. In a society where the majority are religious, many people will claim to be religious even when they aren't. Many people who regularly go to church on Sunday do so, not because they believe in god(s) but because they are expected to do so and risk social isolation if they admit to Atheism. As the Pastor Project shows, there are very many priests who continue to preach and practice as believers when they have lost faith because they have no other way to earn a living and risk losing everything if they admit to being Atheist.
• Societal factors: Religious belief tends to be higher and more fundamentalist in deprived or under-developed societies and lower in the advanced economies. In that respect, the USA is an outlier, tending to be fairly highly religious with a substantial number of fundamentalists, leading some to categorize the USA as having a first-world economy with a third-world culture. Japan, which has one of the world’s highest standards of living has only 4% of the population who admit to being religious. Before WWII, Japan was highly religious being a mixture of Shintoist and Buddhist with worship of the emperor being the state religion. This has changed radically as Japan recovered and rebuilt its economy.
  
  
  

  Derelict abandonned church, UK
  Similarly, much of Western Europe is now regarded as 'post-Christian', with non-believers and religiously unaffiliated being the majority in many countries. As the balance has tilted towards non-belief, the distrust of Atheists has also diminished as more and more people have Atheist friends and relatives to the extent that a poll a few years ago in the UK showed that Atheists are more trusted than religious people, even by some religious people.
  
  As Mercier, et al, point out the major difference between Japan and Western Europe on the one hand and the USA on the other is in the provision of universal health care in Japan and Western Europe compared to the USA's privatized, laissez-faire approach. The safety net of socialized health care has reduced the tendency to have to rely on the intervention of benevolent god(s).

Interestingly, as societies progress and people abandon the proximate cause of organised religions that are the triggers for belief in god(s), they still retain the results of the ultimate cause - a belief in some form of controlling agency in the form of undefined belief in 'something' being behind everything, expressed as spirituality and new-age mysticism.

It's beginning to look very much like organised religions and religious orthodoxies were transient phenomena as society progressed through urbanisation and industrialisation to a post-industrial, informed and educated society.

Sadly, there are still a large number of intellectually lazy people who eschew learning and analytical thinking and feel that their ignorant intuition is the best available measure of reality - and they'll do whatever is needed to impose their ignorant superstition on others and suppress any counter-argument.

Abstract

Belief in a god or gods is a central feature in the lives of billions of people and a topic of perennial interest within psychology. However, research over the past half decade has achieved a new level of understanding regarding both the ultimate and proximate causes of belief in God. Ultimate causes—the evolutionary influences on a trait—shed light on the adaptive value of belief in God and the reasons why a tendency toward this belief exists in humans. Proximate causes—the immediate influences on the expression of a trait—explain variation and changes in belief. We review this research and discuss remaining barriers to a fuller understanding of belief in God.

Mercier, B., Kramer, S. R., & Shariff, A. F. (2018).
Belief in God: Why People Believe, and Why They Don’t.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(4), 263-268. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418754491

© 2018 Association for Psychological Science.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

---

Advertisement

Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It

This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.

Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle

Advertisement

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link