The evolutionary psychology of religion

Odin · Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 3:22 pm Post subject:

This is something that just came to my mind while posting in another thread this morning. It seems to me that religion is ultimately the result of the importance social intelligence had in our evolution. People tend to anthropomorphize things, that is thinking as if an inanimate object or physical process is, or is the result of, a conscious agent. We do this all the time, like when we curse at something (like the Blue Screen of Death) that is malfunctioning, as if the object chose to malfunction. This is the basis of Animism and it's somewhat more abstract cousin polytheism, the most ancient human belief systems. Animism is probably the "default" belief system, people will tend to see the world as filled with conscious agents controlling objects unless taught otherwise.

The emergence from animism and polytheism was triggered at least 3 times independently (in Greece, the Middle East, and India) by the "discovery" of causality, the idea that not all events are the result of the actions of conscious beings but instead are the result of cause-and-effect relationships governed by impersonal forces ("Natural Law," "Karma," Babylonian astrology, etc.) that are the expression of a transcendent being or "first cause". Thus came into existance Monotheism and Pantheism, as well as the idea that perhaps there was no transcendent being and it was just the impersonal forces, and thus Atheism originated independently in Greece and India.
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