The topic of the evolution of religion

Aristotle said that for any well-defined topic, there has to be an object of study. What is the object of the study of religion? Well, for a start, it is not God, but the conceptions and roles that gods play in religion. If a God exists, that object of study is not available to us to empirically measure, experiment with, and model. What we must study is the religions themselves.

There appear to be several phenomena that fall under the rubric of "religion".

First, and this is, I believe, a matter of our western-centric history, religion is defined as an experience. Various folk have held to this - William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), took religion as a psychological phenomenon, but, as was common in the era, treated the protoypical religion as the western pietistic and mystical tradition. He defined religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." (31) What motivates this focus on feelings? Few religions make much of feelings as the core of their institutions. Mostly, and this is true even in the west, it has to do with the observance of rules and rituals. The subjective element to religion is in part due to the tradition initiated by Augustine in his Confessions, and mediated by the "radical" arm of the Protestant revolution and the Catholic mystical tradition of such writers as Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and others. In the 19th century, a revival of mystical experientialism resulted in Theosophy and other eastern-influenced novel religions, and so it was held to be that religion was at base mystical.

Second, religion is often held to be about the "divine", as James mentioned. So religion is about gods. In particular about the unitary gods of monotheism. That this is not true universally can be seen from observing Hinduism, which has millions of deities even if a few are regarded as the main ones, and Theravada Buddhism, which has none. The role of deities in various religions is crucial to understanding them individually, of course, but it doesn't follow that the "essence" of religion is about there being gods. In fact, it seems to me that the gods are explained by the religion, rather than the reverse.

Third, religion is held to be a matter of social cohesion. The Hindu caste system Varna, for example, freezes a particular social structure for all time, based on the roles each caste or class plays in the social fabric. Only Brahmins can be priests, and only Kshatryias can be warriors. There is genetic evidence that castes were either ethnic invaders who established their dominance, and in turn were dominated by later invaders, or were clans that took control of society in various sequences. The role religion plays here is to legitimate this status quo and force conformity to it. This is not new - the polytheisms of the Mesopotamian and other fertile crescent societies tended to have myths of the gods of one ethnic group being defeated or subjugating themselves to the gods of other ethnic groups. The replacement of local religions by the religious mythos of immigrants is an age-old tale. Most recently, we see it in the spread of both Christianity and Islam, and to a lesser extent of Marxist communism.

But for all this, we need to explain why it is that humans have religions at all. And this is the focus of the recent spate of literature I mentioned in my previous post. The answers given seem to be of the following kinds.

1. Religion is adaptive. That is to say, religion has a fitness enhancing role. Some, such as David Sloan Wilson, following Darwin's lead in the Descent of Man, think that religion raises the fitness of groups. Others think that religion makes individuals fitter by enabling them to deal with their environment, social or natural, better.

2. Religion is a spandrel. The term spandrel was invented in biology by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, taking a term from architecture, to mean anything that is there simply because it is a byproduct of adaptive traits. In this case, religion is held to be a byproduct of our cognitive, social and linguistic/symbolic evolution. For instance, mysticism may be the side-effect of our ability to conceptualise the world in terms of agency, and of our brain structure.

3. Religion is an outcome of social evolution (that is to say, religious ideas are social adaptations, not biological ones). Just as the QWERTY keyboard is ubiquitous because it was the first one invented, and changing it would mean retraining and changing large number of keyboards, so a religious idea can be widespread because it was developed in a society first, and subsequent ones face the problems of competitive exclusion.

4. Religion is a "local attractor" that is set up as a basin into which social trajectories will move over time, because of the structure of society.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but in my view they do not adequately explain religion as a phenomenon. The idea that religious ideas are socially evolved is almost certainly true, but evolution by selection requires an adaptive landscape that makes some ideas or practices fitter than others. What is this adaptive landscape? In part it is the social milieu, yes, the ways in which the society is structured. But it also relies on our evolved capacities.

One of these that I think has received insufficient attention, in part because it was tied in with sociobiology of the 1970s in Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's The Imperial Animal, is the role of social dominance. We are apes. Apes are socially dominant animals that live in troops, like all primates. Apes form social dominance hierarchies based on, among other things, inherited status, strength, resource acquisition, and health. In a small troop, or tribe, the dominant individuals are the heads of the troop, and they are courted by lower-rank individuals in allegiances designed to both benefit the alpha members and the lower ranked individuals, by increasing the resources or mating opportunities and sharing in them. Franz de Waal, in his Chimpanzee Politics, has documented this in our nearest relatives.

But humans live in larger groups than chimps do, partly because we have more mobility, and partly because our technology, such as agriculture, permits us to have a higher density of population. What happens in this case? Well, for much of human history, not much. We traded between disparate groups, over rather long distances, but our territorial ranges were larger than many other species of comparable structure. However, when we developed agriculture, population densities soared, and this set up a practical problem of how to control territories and the resources they provided.

Social dominance got very complex, very quickly. The head of the local tribe or village was no longer necessarily the alpha male/female of the whole societal complex. Now, the head of your village might owe allegiance to an absent leader, a monarch. The monarch might be under threat by competing alliances. So to prevent subversion of the hierarchy, some ways of enforcing allegiance needed to be developed, and these ways evolved using prior propensities of the human apes that we are.

In ancient Egypt, at the beginning of the period of the unification of the upper and lower Egypts, the king ("pharoah" means "court") became a figure of devotion, and when kings died, they were deified, along with their already deified ancestors, as a way to ensure that everyone knew that the monarch was always watching for defection. Other methods, such as military control, were also used, but the religion of the king was a kind of loyalty marker, or tribal inclusion marker, that identified those who did not challenge the hierarchy and the consequent control over resources. Gods are often absent kings, or their "superiors".

In short, I think that ape social dynamics in large social groups are a precondition for religious systems to evolve. But this is not enough. You need also to be able to transfer information about allegiances over long distances, and for that you need culture, and language.

One of the things about this approach is that it doesn't require group selection the way Wilson's version does. Fitnesses are those of individuals interacting with others. Religion falls out of these as an effect that both contributes to the fitness of the individuals who mark themselves in as members of the group, and of the larger groups that have an average fitness as a result of their cohesion. Moreover, this is at the same time an economic as well as sociological explanation, based on the biology.

But once we assume this is the default biology of humans in large groups, we still need to explain the somewhat different topic of the reason why one religion out-competes another. For that, we need to investigate the fitness, not of the individuals that have the ideas, but the fitness of the ideas themselves, and that involves integration into existing social institutions, economic benefits, and compatibility with ordinary cognitive capacities and propensities.

Mysticism is most likely the outcome of neurological processes involving neurotransmitters, stimuli or the lack of them, and neural substrates that evolved to identify and recognise familiar objects and places. This will require more of the sort of neuropsychological investigations that are being done to work out in general. Quite apart from anything else, the susceptibility, one almost wants to say vulnerability, of individuals to these mystical experiences will vary in a population like any other biological trait. It is highly unlikely given what we know of development and genetics that everyone will have a standard mysticism "module". This is wholly an empirical subject.

What does the naturalising of religion mean for secularists? Should we bow to the inevitable and just accept that religion is a way of life among humans, with all its attendant conflicts and superstitions? It may just mean that very thing. Secularism is not the view that religion ought to be eliminated, although many secularists wish it were. Instead, it is the view that no religion ought to have dominance over those who are not members of it in a secular society. Personally, I think anyone is entitled to any view they think right. A secular society cannot prohibit religion of any kind, so long as it does not cause harm to others or its members. But if we are to manage a secular society, we had better understand the nature of the phenomenon of religion, and the only way to do that is understand what it really is, not what it seems to be on the basis of anecdotal experience or based on whatever happens to be the dominant kind of religion around us now.

The Christian-hegemony of understanding of religion is based on people thinking that Christianity, of one form or another, is the prototypical religion. I think it is, along with Islam, very atypical of religion, and the modern, fundamentalist, versions of it that Harris and Dawkins attack so vociferously, are atypical even of Christianity. A proper understanding of religion involves inclusion of Hinduism, shamanism, animism, and all the non-"Abrahamic" religions of the past 4000 years. Any view of religion that deals only with the modern forms is basically incomplete, and therefore flawed. The work of William James, Thomas Huxley, William Woodward Reade, and other critics of religion from the 19th century were necessarily dealing with the Christian, and the recently "discovered" Eastern religions. But the world of religion has more things in it than that understanding compasses, and so by taking it as the default view of religion, critics buy into the way those religions frame themselves, even if they are atheists or rationalists. And worse, for a historian, they make it impossible to properly understand Roman or Greek or Azanti religions in their own terms.

The very term "religion" developed over time to come to mean something institutional, to which adherents are "bound" (religare = "to bind" in Latin) by doctrinal assent and ritual conformity, but this is at best only part of the picture. Perhaps we need a new taxonomy of the subject matter of the study of religions. And of course we need to naturalise them in evolutionary terms, but whether this is biological or social evolution is a question that depends a lot on the things being explained or investigated.

Late note: Larry Arnhart has a post on this too.