RELIGION'S EVOLUTIONARY BASIS

The evolution of consciousness as a means to survival required the ability to give meaning or importance to objects and events, of distinguishing between foreground and background, dangerous and safe. It is this subset of consciousness, the mechanism that created ‘important’ and ‘meaningful’, that resulted in religious sentiment. Because humans depend to such a large degree on consciousness, the part of the brain that creates the experience of ‘meaningful’ works overtime.

Since early humans lived very closely with Nature it began with shamanic practices. We are curious and with our higher creativity we need to categorize things, study things, know things, and affect our surroundings, from creating clothing to adapting caves for habitation, to the creation and use of fire.

Religion, most broadly defined, is the belief in supernatural agents. These supernatural agents inevitably possess counter intuitive properties, (e.g. a tree that can understand human language, a person who is dead yet still alive, a being who is simultaneously one entity and three entities, a woman who can become pregnant while remaining a virgin). Irrespective of their other qualities, all supernatural agents are said to possess minds. This tells us that religious ideas are rooted in our innate social inference systems. Our incredible talent for discerning the moods, motives and psychological states of others – our ‘mind reading’ ability. We tend to see minds when none are actually there. The disposition towards religion is the price that we pay for our specific mental architecture.

As our form of civilization developed and we moved away from that intimate relationship with Nature, we began to personify the Spirits and energies around us. Hence early gods tended to be glorified animals, transitional beings between pure shamanic beliefs and today's human shaped monotheistic deities. With the moving away from nature we still had a need to know things, we still had a need to feel nurtured, protected, as we had in the wilds by the Nature Spirits. It would be natural, perhaps, for those Nature Spirits to evolve humanistic qualities, since human beings were now living in larger and larger communities, and interacting with different peoples from lands far removed from their own.

Along with a vivid imagination that includes mild hallucinations, visions of a loved one deceased, alive and well, or hearing her voice in the rustling of leaves ... we came to the idea that the dead live on somehow, and become one with the powers beyond. Or all the dead together have the power to rule over the living, favoring good people, haunting bad ones, and so they must be offered sacrifices, which make them go on supporting the humans, caring for us, averting draughts and famines. Death was the origin of religion.

Religions are pre-scientific theories that provide believers with explanations for the many puzzling features of the world around them. Religion is a spin-off from the hard-wired, modular cognitive inference systems characteristic of our species. In other words, religious tendencies are more a by-product than a product of our cognitive evolution.

It can be argued that religion itself has been an evolutionary benefit because it's helped to keep groups organized. But it can also be argued that religion has had a detrimental effect on evolutionary development because it's caused ignorance, war, and stagnation of intellectual and technological development. However the case for consciousness as an evolutionary advantage is very clear (at that point in history). Consciousness clearly helped humans survive and thrive. That said, now that we are of an advanced state of consciousness and have scientific explanations for the wonders around us, religion and its detrimental effects are no longer required and should be treated as an odd curiosity from our past and not taken seriously.