I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional stance". That is, we ascribe intentions to non-agent processes. In earlier terminology, this was called "anthropomorphism", or the treating of non-human things as if they were human.
One will often read explanations of religion as the anthropomorphisation of natural processes like spring, rain, thunder, flood, storms, and so on. When the rain washes away your village, it makes more "sense" to say that the rain god was angry with the village, because that is an explanatory schema that we have imprinted in our native cognition. Hence, natural processes became personified (or not personified but abstracted, as in the early Roman rural deities, the numina, which were forces rather than agents).
2 The ancestor worship explanation
All rural and village based religions place high value on ancestors. Forebears were reverenced after their death, and eventually ended up as figures who in some manner still had a place in social behaviours. Ideas of "honour" relied in large part on this (one had to honour one's ancestors by behaving in ways they would approve of).
This ancestor based explanation depends on the role of cultural transmission, both of knowledge (heroic figures like Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, and Tubal-Cain in Genesis 4, who is the ancestor of those who made bronze and iron tools), and of social groupings (again, Genesis 4, 5, 10 and 11 mention these figures). Founders of cities and peoples are especially mythical (Romulus and Remus, Dido of Carthage, Nimrod, founder of the Mesopotamian civilisation).
These individuals may or may not have lived or done what they are remembered and worshipped for, but they act as social glue for subsequent cultures, as social myths that serve to cohere the state or culture. Often they justify, in virtue of their prowess as warriors or strategists, the dominance of the society over others.
In time, these mythical heroes become deities or children of deities, in an attempt to further explain their achievements and position of importance.
3. The existential explanation
A common explanation is the "fear of death" or "fear of lack of control" over the powers of the world. Here, the idea is that a deity promises release from death, or control over events, that one cannot achieve individually or as a social group, particularly when the group is less powerful than rival nations.
In many cases, religions actually do not offer either release from death or control over the course of events, so much as they validate those who die or suffer. If you are doing the dying or the suffering of fates slings and arrows at the plan of a benign and powerful deity, then the suffering is less tragic and brings honour. In particular religions that lack an afterlife or have it as a shadowy existence like the Roman Elysian Fields offer that one's family and name will be granted honour, if, for example, you die in war. As Horace said, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is fit and proper to die for one's homeland). While this makes sense from the view of the state, it doesn't from the view of the warrior and his (usually his) family; so a religious justification will serve to both enforce submission and sacrifice for the homeland, and to ensure that those left behind gain in social standing from it.
4. The memetic explanation
This is also from Daniel Dennett: religion is a "mind virus" that "infects" human brains and makes use of their capacities and resources to propagate itself. Such viral infestations of our mental contents are called "memes". It follows that the "evolutionary interests" of these memes and those of the human individuals that act as their "host organism" are divergent in many cases. This view is, in effect, a side effect of our ability to pass on cultural information, but the religious memes are cheaters; they take advantage of our cultural skills to get themselves replicated, evolving more and more tricky ways to deceive and cheat our genetic interests.
A point of interest with this view is what it is that memes are adapting to. At the least they are adapting to our cognitive and sociocultural properties and propensities. They may also need to adapt to the cultures in which they are passed on (see next item).
5. Social cohesion
This is very like the ancestor worship explanation. It posits that anything that permits greater social cohesion will tend to improve the fitness of the group overall, and so improve the individual fitness of those who are part of the group, on average. Hence, religion, which serves both to mark those who are inside the group and can expect to be treated with reciprocal altruism and to mark those who are outside the group and are competitors to whom no loyalty is owed, is beneficial in an evolutionary sense.
In this case, the evolution of societies is roughly equivalent to the evolution of religions. The meme account has memes of religion adapting to the cultures in which they are passed on (so that first century, third century and 21st century religions are very different even when there is direct continuity between them). The social cohesion account has religion adapting to the competition between social groups.
6. The psychopathology explanation
Religious experience is also adduced as a source of religion. Ranging from "feelings of the numinous" and "awe" to explanations of epilepsy and schizophrenia for shamanism, these explanations go back to the nineteenth century. I'll add more when I can.
So, have I missed any? Please add them below and if they strike me as crucial, I'll move them from the comments to this item.
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Douglas Adams (greatly missed) once suggested what I suppose you'd call the "artisan explanation". To put it in the terms he used, primitive non-gender-deterministic man got up, pulled on the clothes he made, walked out of the tent he made, kicked the fire he made, looked at the rocks and the trees and the sky and thought "so who made those"? In other words, human culture reached a point where we found it easy to think of things being made and owned by somebody.
I read about it in his speech to Digital Biota
By the way, was it Dennet or Dawkins who came up the the concept of the self-replicating meme?
What about some kind of representation of internal drama, or representation of internal factors? I suppose this amounts to a theory of projection.
For example, the role of Zeus, and of the troublesome Aphrodite and Aires (It is not hard to see what they represent). I seem to remember something from the Iliad when Achilles is overcome with anger, and is ready to slay Agamemnon, but Pallas Athena "appears" to him, and stays his hand (this is very like coming to one's senses).
Also, any scenario that involves a judgement could perhaps be interpreted as an internal drama.
It seems to me that the five you have listed are not of a kind. 1, 3 and 5 seem like root causes for the existence of religion. 4 describes how the continued existence and propagation of religion is an example of survival of the fittest, where 1, 3 and 5 can be seen as descriptions of fitness metrics. And 2 seems like a description of how religion changes over time to become more fit for its changing environment rather than why it exists in the first place.
Polonius makes a good point, but I think ancestor worship could arguably be causal. In non-literate societies there's great emphasis on lineage. Early barrows are interpreted as ancestral markers in the landscape, saying I belong here because my ancestors are here. The concept of present ancestor spirits within the world would give strength to that connection with the world.
I like Pascal Boyer's (Religion Explained) argument that religion rides on the back of a few causes rather than being a cause in itself. It could be argued that social cohesion creates the conditions that allows a religion to develop, rather religion itself giving the evolutionary advantage. At the same time it also relies on certain ways of thinking about cosmology, so it wouldn't be monocausal. I'd say more but I haven't finished the book and I'm a slow reader.
A problem I've been struggling with for a while is what is religious thought and what is merely supernatural? It might be obvious in a Christian society, but many religions have a continuity between Gods and Ghosts. The best I've come up with is that a God is Ghost with a civil service. It works for ancient Greece, which is the area I'm familiar with, but I'm not sure about elsewhere. Are there religions without a political dimension? Even avowedly non-hierarchical beliefs like Paganism seem to spawn people with titles like Archdruid.
OK, not meaning to be obnoxious, but how about the "batshit insane" explanation?
From the development of language, I think we can posit the existence of internal monologue, or voices in head. I'm sure most of us have experienced the inner voice which says "whoah, hang on, don't do that".
Now, imagine that voice in your head being disconnected from self, in effect seeming to be someone else's voice. Well documented phenonenon, psychologically speaking.
These voices in head, or visitations, often seem to have some significance for religious people, who look on them as 'revelations'. Likewise, visual phenomena exist with similar disconnects, and often intersect with voices.
Ghosts, phantoms, spirit visitations, imaginary friends, UFO abduction stories, all have bases in genuine mental health phenomena, often pathological.
So what if appearances of such visions and auditory hallucinations early on in societal development had some kind of significance, possibly linked to the other posited causes? So an alpha male, maybe, goes a little mad, hears voices, decides the voices are from a higher power, galvanises his little tribe into the classic religious "they're evil, we're good" mindset, next thing you know his tribe has subsumed the other, and anyone in this larger group who hears voices is treated as a prophet. Let's face it, religious groups do have advantages in terms of single-purpose, tight-knit groups with fixed goals - see Douglas Adams' Ford Prefect just giving up because you just can't compete with zealots unless you're a zealot yourself
(*grateful for the relevant quotes from "life, the universe and everything" if someone could find them)
It's a ropey scenario in need of some work, but, hey, it's something to think about... pick holes as you wish...
Posted earlier elsewhere:
We keep hearing that religion arose as people innocently tried to understand the world around them.
If this has any truth to it, then why don't we see religious behavior in other mammals?
I suspect religion arose from the discovery that children, once they've begun to use language, are easy to fool.
People with kids are often amazed (and amused) at the crazy things a child can be made to believe.
Want to make your kids go to bed early? Tell them there are monsters under the bed who will eat them if their feet touch the floor. Or tell them about the monsters in the closet who will eat them if they get out of bed. Want to keep your kids from straying too far from the house? Tell them the woods are haunted by dead people. Or tell them about the boogeyman who eats children.
Kids are easy to control by lies. We can scare them away from doing what we don't want or con them into doing what we do want, all the while sparing us from ever having to reward the kid for doing our bidding. As cheap dirty tricks go, it can't get any cheaper.
We have Santa Claus who will bring you gifts for being a good child all year long, or Your Loving God who will burn you in hell with fire and brimstone, searing your skin and eyes and lungs, torturing you with unimaginable pain (which we will happily describe for you in lurid detail) for all eternity if you don't do what we want.
My theory is that the world's religions are the results of lying to children that got out of hand. As the lies accumulated, the contradictions exploded exponentially, requiring 'transcendence' -- illogical logic, sense that really makes no sense -- to explain the flaws away as they got discovered, and that's what we today call theology.
Polonius is right - these have different explicanda. This is part of the reason why I'm trying to sort all these differing explanations through. It seems to me that some accounts, such as Dennett's explain different things to Boyer's, and I'm working up to my own account.
I think that animism is not exactly a religion, so much as an outgrowth in a limited way of the causes of more developed religions.
And yes, the idea of memes is Dawkins, although there have been many precursors. But the use of memes to explain "religion" (however that is defined in this context) is Dennett's and Boyer's.
I assume David Sloane Wilson's view (Darwin's Cathedral and Evolution for Everyone) would come under category 5?
Yes. I'll reference these later, when I have a better handle on the terrain.
From what I've seen in Christianity, the most popular reason seems to be #3. But I would view it in the context of "security". When we were very young, our parents took care of us - in a sense, we "worshiped" them. When we're older, they're not around to take care of us, creating a psychological void. Belief in a God fills that void. And also gives new meaning to the phrase, "God the Father".
Jason is right - I left religious experiential accounts off the list, so I added a placeholder. I'll update later.
Well one appears to be missing :o)
God communicated with his partially intelligent creations (men & women) and being limited and non too bright people garbled and mis-interpreted what God was trying to communicate.
The various religions are the result of different mis-interpretations (some deliberate some not) of God's communications.
Perhaps religion simply arose as primitive attempts to explain the apparent chaos of events surrounding early man before he invented(discovered) logic and the scientific method. Religion
may be then, an early and spectacularly unccessful attempt at defining a 'science'. Magic, religions 'technology counterpart' could then be viewed as nothing more that very obsolete technology.
Either all of you are too nice or I'm too cynical. What about social control? It was a short hop from "Zeus sent down lighting because he wasn't pleased" to "Zeus told me that he will send down MORE lightening if you don't do what I told you." I find it very hard to believe that there weren't very early people out there creating religious beliefs and systems in order to control people and gain power for themselves.
I tend towards the "intentional stance", that initially, among those earliest humans to approach modernity in psychology, the earliest religions represented a way of explaining the world around them. I also think that ancestor worship and animism tie into this, that via ancestors or totemic symbols early "believers" not explained the world around them, but hoped to be able to control it.
I think aspects such as tribal identification and social control probably initially were not major parts of the most ancient religions, and it's only with the advent of shamanism at some later time, when the need for a "professional" who could remember, handle and pass on rituals, that we begin to see a more centralized role.
Dr. Wilkins wrote:
Is there any ape behavior that isn't ultimately political?
I'm not terribly familiar with a lot of the more animistic religions (and I don't think, despite what the Victorians felt, that they were more primitive), but it seems to me in most cases that I know of, there is some sort of at least part-time religious authority, someone, who as I mentioned in my last post, represents a "professional" ritualist. Obviously if you have an individual who has contact with spirits/ancestors/animals (and they may all be rolled into one), that person is going to take a position of importance within the tribe.
I simply don't think there's a way you could separate religion from politics. Where there is a religious society, whether it's some primitive hunter-gatherer tribe carrying its totems with it, or some Pharaonic god-king civilization where the Archdruid and hereditary chieftain are married into one, the role of religion and those responsible for maintaining and propagating it are inherently political.
As to the difference between religious thought and supernaturalism, it's a continuum. One only need to look at Christianity to see how, despite the supposed overarching nature of Christian theology, older traditions (like ghosts) still are present in virtually every Christian society. Religious thinkers, at least in the Christian tradition (and, I'm sure in the Muslim and Jewish traditions as well) have tried to downplay, if not reject, a lot of the supernaturalism of the societies in which the religion exists, to try to enforce an orthodox view of God and His powers and involvement. Christianity has safety valves to allow supernaturalism (like images of Mary, healing fountains and so on and so forth), but usually tries to avoid and discourage overt mysticism.
Rebecca wrote:
As you can see, a topic I love :-)
I think the problem with your example is that you are using a fairly well developed religion, which already had all the features that we would consider "complete".
I'm not sure the earliest beliefs were created in the sense that someone sat down and decided that the reason it rained was because of spirits that caused water to fall. I suspect a far more organic process, where early "guesswork" (ie. "perhaps this rainfall is caused by some being that lives in the sky and causes clouds") which, over a period of retelling, becomes fixed (ie. "this rainfall *is* caused by a being that lives in the sky and causes clouds"). Once its fixed, more guesswork enlarges the story and fills the holes, and before too long you have some sort of an accounting for natural events and have established a cultural tool for explanation that relies upon supernatural entities. From there, the evolution of a professional priesthood, where beliefs and rituals are formalized, occurs, and where social control and tribal identification can become powerful outgrowths of religion.
You need look no further than the ten commandments for evidence of it, specifically the first commandment: "thou shallt have no other gods before me." If you were a tribal elder (moses?) associated with yahweh, the introduction of a new god would divide the people and could seriously erode your power base to the point where you might even find yourself in physical danger. It could not be tolerated. Hence, this commandment was the first and most important of them all - much more important than thou shallt not kill, or thou shallt not steal.
Aaron, it was Alun (#4) who said that, not me.
The social control explanation is a subset of the social cohesion explanation, and one I happen to think does a lot of work.
The "prescience explanation" is, I think, part of the intentionality explanation, but perhaps I should widen that category to include all cognitive causes (and call it the cognitive byproduct explanation).
I miss a possible explanation: Dealing with continous danger of pain and death with absolutely no personal influence on the outcome.
I think most of the people, especially those who think religious people are nutcases, haven't thought about the situation of our ancestors. Drought, foes, death of children, sickness etc. etc. meant a continous struggle for life, day for day. So people must find a way to deal with this permanent stress and one way is trying to influence the outcome of things out of personal reach -> religion.
I don't think it is a coincidence that widespread enlightenment only occured after the people were autonomous enough to have an influence on their life. Now it is possible to believe in personal responsibility and nothing else: I am the master of my own life. But it is an dangerous illusion because it struggles with the possibility that you can still be tossed in the abyss even if you tried everything to avoid it.
Uh, must have skipped #3 with the mousewheel. Mea culpa.
I vote for none of the above.
I actually believe the reason religion exists is evolutionary. Religions are institutions of set values that help move a culture from a less humane environment towards a more humane environment. Pagan cultures evolve into Christian cultures because Christianity brings greater humanitarian benefits. This is not a black/white process, but there is a lot of validity to the idea.
PZ Myers' explanation is that Religion is not necessarily useful in and of itself, but that it is a spandrel.
Actually, it's not original to PZ, but the alternatives 1, 3, and 5 are spandrel explanations. The question therefore remains - spandrel of what?
Michael (#22): if true, that falls under the social cohesion model.
Whatever the explanations, each must account for heresy, unbelief and atheism. It can't be just "logic and science", since virtually every religion has had its doubters well before there was science and logic. Heretics have always been punished, often with death, for their apostasy.
I think that a synthesis of the explanations is a candidate for "the" explanation of religion.
Before reading the categories you give, I first jotted down my own list (which came to 7). Three were not on your list:
1) Social control, or tool for power; already mentioned in the comments.
2) Influencing nature. Some years are good for game and crops, others are bad. Early people were looking for a way of increasing the number of good years. Thanks to the well-known behaviour of remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, they got the impression it was succeeding. You could perhaps view it as a next stage after anthropomorphism.
3) Desire for justice. People caught stealing/murdering would be punished within a community, but sometimes people would get away with it and remain unpunished. The hope arose that they would in due course be punished by a more powerful being.
On re-reading your list, you perhaps intended your #3 to cover both fear of death and influencing nature, but to me they seem quite distinct, the former being an instinctive emotional response, and the latter a calculated response.
Before you try to explain religion, shouldn't you define what it is? (I don't see it on your basic concepts list.) The definition might very well influence any explanations.
In my view, it is difficult to call something "religious" unless there are two or more people involved, and some kind of organization or ritual. If a shaman hikes up into the mountains and dreams up personal or "spiritual" non-scientific ideas about the nature of reality, would you call that a religion? Ditto for many armchair philosophers today. I'm not sure I would, unless they attract followers and set up an organization.
That is simple, and pretty much independent of the original triggers for religion. Heresy is just the other guy's religion; in particular the religion of whoever lost the religious war (hot or cold war as the case may be). As for unbelief/atheism (I don't know what you think the difference is) if people were making up stories about gods/demons/angels, it's not very surprising that some other people saw through that and realised that said beings didn't actually exist.
what about the genesis-intelligent aliens explanation?
the living electromagnetic fields explanation?
the many-worlds quantum explanation?
you guys are lame[eer]s.
I have been compiling a list that has over 30 contributing factors--so far. Listing them like this, some may appear to be repeats, but they reflect different motivations (i.e. personal vs. social or evolutionary) that reinforce the same factor:
Social Cohesion and Control
Tribalism (Identity, Belonging)
Conformity
Sense of Community
Means of Social Control by Establishing Authority
Reward and Punishment (Primitive moral system)
Moral Base (ethical conformity)
Transformational Power (Conversion/Abreaction response)
Ancestor Worship
Evolutionary Spandrels
Conservatism ("Tried and True" Beliefs persist based on survival of those who held them)
Misapplied Intentional Stance
Misapplied Perspective of Tool Making ("Purpose" of Human Beings implies a tool maker)
False Pattern Recognition
Narrative (Humans are natural storytellers)
Primitive application of Causality
Tribal Boundaries (Expensive behaviour used to screen out defectors)
Cognitive Errors
Confirmation Bias
Ignorance (God in the Gaps)
Superstition
Wishful or Magical Thinking
Lack of Curiosity
Force of Habit
Illusion of Certainty
Emotional Motivations
Privileged Position in the Universe
Conservatism (Tradition)
Fear of the Unknown
Pride (Sense of Superiority)
Comfort (Fear of Death)
Spiritual (Magical) Base
Overcompensation
Gratitude
The Perfect Parent
Companionship
Meaning (Purpose for supreme Other, assurance that everything makes sense for Someone)
Timidity and reliance on Authority
Mark, is this in public form anywhere, with citations? I need to have explanations that have actually been published.