IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
NY Times (thanks, KirstyJ)
I don’t buy it. Religion adapted to our psychology, not vice versa. It’s not a “God-shaped hole”, it’s a hole-shaped God.
so that means we’ll never get rid of it, right? or is somebody proposing to breed religion out of us?
Okay, that either supports ideas like the divine programming of evolution or our spiritual nature being a fluke. Although that still wouldn\’t answer that question, why? Unless, somehow, there is no why…
I’m dumb, but the idea of religion as a process of evolution has always made sense to me. It seems in my own small and tiny opinion that eventually some biped is going to look up in the sky and see lightning and is going to need someway to answer the question why. Then years and years later go back and re-analyze that question finding a new ansr. Rinse and repeat every question ever asked.
Leaves me thinking we’ve rather thrown the baby out with the admittedly turgid bath water by signing up with “bright” numptees like Dawkins and Dennet. If the religion doesn’t fit the universe, why assume it’s entirely invalid rather than simply misdrawn…
Alexander Technique or Buddhism for me, atheism for Paul (who I completely fail to understand anyway… “hole shaped God”?? Sounds good but what does he mean? That humanity invented a god to fill a hole? Could be clearer).
I wonder how they know that that was a dance floor .. ehehehe …
Origin of religion remains open to debate, no matter with what things scientists will come up with. Interpretation of discoveries is never really objective.
Why weather gods and such once were more normal is not that hard to imagine. We now believe what scientists have told us in many ways/areas. And can not even imagine another way of seeing upon things most of the time.
Depressed selfes will feel quite fast as if someone/something is on top him/her .. experiences it as a force from the outside with a personality .. human but way more powerfull … bla bla bla bla …
I challenged the gods of thunder once .. man, did it strike back hard … it likes positive vibes downthere … I was under control by them immediately again … (well, bot my sane brain back)
At an earlier point of our “social” evolution as the species we are today I can see the idea that Religion was a necessary stage. But that is just what it is, a period, a phase, an amount of time that has a beginning and an end. Now I think while some of us are still attempting to hold on to religion, there are those who are looking to push it off. I don’t think that makes those who are not religious better than those who are, there are just some with ‘sentimental genes’
Will probably turn out to be aliens landed in the early stages of humanity and the humans saw them as a strange ‘god’ like being and hence religion, or as my other theory goes religion was invented to teach children to behave, eg if you don’t behave god will strike down upon thee with great vengence.
The evolution of religion is not an evolution in human DNA space (we still have the same DNA we did before). It’s an evolution in meme space. Religions evolve and in so doing influence their (human) environment and so gain the ability to evolve into ever more complex forms. All it has in common with DNA evolution is the nature of the evolution, not the nature of the DNA.
Maybe ‘Religion’ is possibly a collective term for evolved, ritualistic behaviour; due to the ‘superstitious’-behaviour humans and some other species display when trying foresee or encourage/discourage events. Maybe it’s not genetic in the sense that the topic suggests – but because we could not really suggest any other alternative until scientific/mass knowledge ‘evolved’……but what do i know!
Rex your incorrect when you say
– “Leaves me thinking we’ve rather thrown the baby …..”
Dawkins in the God Delusion book actually puts forward the theory that religion is there as a direct result of natural selection.
Some quotes from the god delusions
– “Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we
should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection
originally favoured the impulse to religion.”
-The religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an
unfortunate by-product of an underlying psychological propensity
which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. On this view,
the propensity that was naturally selected in our ancestors was not
religion per se; it had some other benefit, and it only incidentally
manifests itself as religious behaviour.”
(chapter 5) well worth a read
In my opinion, religion is a phenomenon of how the human brain works: Our intelligence arises from the fact that we constantly make “virtual” objects in our mind and play around with these objects, projecting possible outcomes. It is what makes technology, planning, organizations possible.
So it is no wonder that religion arose when we made the transition from hunter-gatherers towards more organized social structures.
The problem of “magic” and religion is to think that only a thought is sufficient to make reality (“faith can move mountains”). Nothing is further from the truth. I can imagine the mountain to be moved, but it still is there. Equally I can imagine a “heavenly father”; but to imagine him doesn’t make him real in any sense, regardless of an overwhelming feeling of his existence.
It irks me a bit when someone talks about religion, but is really meaning Christianity.
Being part of, or believing in, a religion means being in an accepted group, or majority, or just feeling part of the human race, not being alone and sharing certain views with other people. This must have been happening since time immemorial.
Declaring oneself to be an atheist can shock and disturb people, a lot more people than you realise.
Devout religious beliefs have caused so much pain, hatred and bloodshed that in a way, to me, it should be more shocking to declare oneself devout.
Not very eloquently put, but you get my drift.
Should you be able to choose your religion? Or is it only acceptable to belong to the faith you were brought up and ‘educated’ in?
I agree with what others have said, religion seems to be an embodiment of how humans think and react to things. I dont think that stops it from being something thats real though, any faith could still be real in a way since its an interpretation of the world around us, although I guess it also depends on how you treat/act on your beliefs. One thing I dont get is how religion could ‘natural selection’, as if we never had it before 7,000 BC. Maybe we had a sort of religion before we were evolved into what we are now, maybe animals have a religion, something that keeps them going or an interpretation of the world, but ours has just evolved with us. I guess really that depends on what you define as religion.
Sorry if that made no sense, very sleepy but wanted to contribute, only just started reading this blog!
I think religion originated when homo-sapiens started asking the question ‘why?’ (lightning, natural disasters, death etc). The idea of gods made sense to them.
Then, a few clever men discovered the power of religion and used it to control the masses, especially if they could convince the people that they themselves were gods (pharoahs, kings and emporers). And as we know from studying history, a group of people who stick together seem to outlast those who don’t. Hence due to a kind of natural selection, those cultures with strong religious traditions seem to survive. I think Dawkins mentioned this to an extent in the god delusion.
Steffen, you have a good point. Perhaps religion emerges from two coincident inherited capacities: In a pack animal we have the capacity to look up to senior figures in the pack, feel afraid of them, feel guilty when we feel we have let them down, and so on (ask any dog). In the human mind we have the ability to imagine things that are not there, as is vital for planning. So we, perhaps uniquely, have the inevitable capacity to imagine things that are not there but which we should be afraid of offending.
Then when the crops failed for the first time some 40 thousand years ago, someone made the inevitable leap of concluding that we had offended such a being, and the whole thing kicked off.
I know I AM (the cause of all that existed, is, and shall ever be), Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, the uncreated Creator who is infinitely above everything. I AM is not this, not that. I AM is formless, omniscient, omnipresence omnipotence, omnibenevolence, incomprehensible, yet, near at hand.
I’ve always known God is watching over us all.
If there was no God, there would be no religion, church, mosque, shrine, temple, christians, Taoism, Hare Krishna, Hinduism, Islam, Zen, Buddhism, 7th day Adventist, Protestantism, Catholicism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarian, Mormon, Judaism, Pentacostalism, Atheism, New Age, Rastafarianism, this planet, Armaggedon, love, death, saints, sinners, everybody.
If God does not exist, it would have by now been necessary for us to invent Him.
God Was, Is, and will ever Be.
I’d agree with the comment about the “hole shaped God”, because if we had a God shaped hole, then why does the God change to fit the changes to the hole over time?
Just using the term God as a reference to any supernaturally powerful beings, we have in the past needed God to hold the sky up, to move the sun and the moon, to throw lightning, to make the plants grow, to save us from diseases, to help us find our keys, when you look at the tasks asked of and effects attributed to Gods, there’s no way that any of these things are any more timeless or eternal than the societies that dreamt them up to fill whatever hole they had at the time.