The Biological Roots of Religion

Why Does Religion Exist

I’m an atheist in the strict sense of the word. I do not believe in an omnipotent being, nor do I put my faith in any sort of salvation or afterlife. 

But I’ve found recently that I am not nearly as anti-religious as many others who similarly describe themselves as atheists. In fact, recent and brief social media interactions with other self-described atheists have shown me that many of these people attack religion with the same vitriol they often accuse religious people of attacking homosexuality or other taboo beliefs and behaviors. 

This frustrating and disturbing trend caused me to reflect on my lack of belief in a divine being, and to contrast that belief with the much more common acceptance of some deity or deities. In considering why it is that I don’t believe in god while others do, and furthermore, why others believe in all varieties of god, I stumbled upon the obvious: all human beings are capable of conceiving of a being greater than and outside of ourselves. This is a biological gift.

This is one easy explanation for why religion is and always has been a fixture in human society. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have documented proof of organized religion, and even prehistorical archaeological sites have evidence of pre-religious or pseudo-religious practices — human burial, for example.

Via evolution, we have been gifted the ability to conceive of something bigger and better than ourselves. Accepting Natural Selection, there must be some value to this gift, and the history of religion and the evidence of pre-historical religious practices show us that for tens of thousands of years, our ancestors have held beliefs similar to the ones many cherish today. I would even venture a guess that our gorilla and chimp cousins, cowering under an intense thunder storm, may ask themselves who lives in the sky that gets so angry. 

Survival and Unity

From the perspective of survival, the case for “religion” is easy to make. Early humans had to cooperate to survive. We are smaller and far less physically endowed than many of our would-be predators, and the small prey we can catch individually cannot sustain large groups. Naturally, early “religion” centered on the spirits of the ancestors. As Jared Diamond points out in The Third Chimpanzee, in preliterate societies, the knowledge of ancestors could be the difference between life and death. 

That the first recognizable religion is ancestor worship among small bands and tribes of early humans is thus unsurprising. A group of humans no bigger than an extended family would have been very reliant on the wisdom of its elder members, and the familial bond made the transition from living sage to spiritual deity quite easy. Grandparents shared their wisdom, died, and became deified because of how important their knowledge had been to the well-being of the living.

This formula worked well as long as our tribes were not substantially larger than the extended family. There was never a question as to whose ancestors would occupy the pedestal of worship so long as there is only one set of ancestors. But as the combined power of human brains outpaced the ability of predators to kill us and prey to escape us, our ancestral groups began growing, and coming into competitive contact with each other. Groups that had once been no larger than families now began to consist of many clans, each with grandmothers as distinct as yours and mine. 

From Grandpas to Gods

Political and cultural necessities were thus grafted to the human mind’s ability to conceive beyond itself. In order to form larger bands, the essential question of “whose ancestors” had to be answered. Early human beings would have had little in common, with bands far smaller than today’s nation-states waging frequent — if small — raids and wars against one another. 

As our societies evolved, the manifestation of our biological gift evolved along with them. Ancestor worship in myriad bands coalesced into polytheism with the ancestors of different clans taking on the roles and personalities of different deities within a pantheon. This cultural evolution solved two problems for our early ancestors: it allowed them to form much larger groups by acknowledging importance and primacy of place of many ancestors, and it laid the foundation for permanent large settlements by implementing a system that, once established, would not need to reinvent deities frequently. In just a generation or two, the connection to the original ancestors would have disappeared, replaced entirely by the new pantheon. Our new societies would be less likely to fracture along sectarian lines as new members would be born into groups that accepted an entire pantheon, not just the original member that had represented its unique ancestry. 

This shift, from ancestor worship to polytheism, may seem significant to people familiar with recent history’s more intense fanaticism, but our forebears wouldn’t have struggled with the mental acrobatics of such a transition. They were acting on needs of survival and the inherent pull of the gift of natural selection which they undoubtedly felt though they could not articulate it as such. It is precisely because early human groups knew the importance of their own ancestors for their survival that they recognized ancestor veneration among others, and it is precisely because they saw the wisdom in benefiting from the brains and collective knowledge of many ancestors rather than simply their own that they abandoned this early form of religion for one that expanded the size of their group and with it, their chances of surviving and expanding. 

This trend is reflected in polytheistic cultures, which tended to be far more open and tolerant than the monotheistic societies that followed them. In his book God Against the Gods, author Jonathon Kirsch discusses how polytheistic societies were more likely to see the validity of other pantheons; they were aware that their own deities represented local knowledge and customs and were far less likely to dismiss the importance of deities unfamiliar to them. 

There is no better example of this than the world’s largest ancient empire, the Romans. At its apex, the Roman empire ran horizontally from the Atlantic shores of Western Europe across the Mediterranean and into the modern Middle East, and stretched vertically from North Africa into the wilderness reaches of Germany and East/Central Europe. In each of the regions, they conquered and subsequently governed, the Romans encountered people with different and diverse religious beliefs. And yet, Rome struggled little with religious rebellions. While the boundaries of the empire faced outside “barbarians,” and heavy-handed Roman governance at time caused domestic strife, very few of Rome’s internal governing crises had to do with religion. 

Wherever they went, the Romans brought the imperial pantheon with them, and established it as a foundation of state in their new territory. But they were also careful not to ban or oppress the religious pantheons they found in place. First and foremost, Rome was concerned with peaceful and prosperous governance, not religious turmoil. In fact, it was not until Rome established itself in Judea that it found religious confrontation in the form of monotheistic Judaism. 

The Roman experience is insightful because it highlights two important trends: the fallibility of polytheism as a governing structure and the arrival of monotheism as the political-religious force of the past 1500 years. 

The Post-Polytheistic World

While polytheism did represent a step forward in the how we manifest our ability to conceive beyond ourselves, and how we use this gift for the betterment of our species, it ultimately became too unwieldy as a governing tool. Even before the Romans encountered the obstinate monotheism of the Jews, they learned the difficulties of governing an empire as vast and diverse as theirs. Embracing other pantheons worked as a trick to peacefully co-opt other groups into the empire, but it did little to ease the jobs of bureaucrats tasked with governing the myriad cultures under the imperial umbrella. Although religious pressures, even that of the Jews, didn’t cause Rome to fall, those religious discrepancies were an aspect of the instability that weakened Rome and precipitated her collapse. Governing an empire as large and diverse as Rome’s using a hodgepodge of local customs and beliefs was simply untenable.

But Rome’s interaction with Judaism was a portent of religion’s future. Although Judaism is not an evangelical form of monotheism, the benefit of a monotheistic society were very evident: monotheists rallied zealously to their cause. Whereas tribes opposed to Rome may have united in opposition against the empire, once conquered, many groups fell in line with Roman governance and customs. This trend made governance easier at first but had the dual flaws of being unsustainable over a territory the size of the empire, and of being less than inspirational when it was necessary to rallly denizens of the empire for her betterment. 

Monotheism was an antidote to both of these problems. By replacing pantheons with a singular deity, the emperor Constantine tied Rome to God, and therefore made the empire’s umbrella much broader, if simultaneously less tolerant. Rome was no longer the seat of imperial power alone, it became the home of God’s agent on Earth as well. Allegiance to Rome no longer ensured merely temporal well-being, but also eternal salvation. 

Rome collapsed before Christianity spread across Europe, and of course isms other than religion contributed to the fracturing of the world’s people into the distinct groups that we see today, but religion as it looks today obviously played a key role in how humans define and shape ourselves, and as it manifests it must have a biological function for our species. 

What Comes Next for God

I have tried to make the case that religion as we see it today is a product of human biological functions, and more importantly, there is value to our species in the underlying biological function: the ability to conceive of something larger than ourselves and organize ourselves around that concept. This is not to suggest some grand cabal to manipulate the masses; in fact, the case for the evolution of religion as a political tool for organizing society is only possible if the beliefs are held strongly enough. All of us, even an atheist like me, are capable of conceiving of a greater being, and before very recent times, people lacked the science and the knowledge to explain this phenomenon as such, hence the manifestation and longevity of religious worldviews that were more or less infallible. 

From the first bands of proto-humans gathering around a fire for protection against predators to the fledgling civilizations competing against one another to the global empires spreading their influence to civilizations unknown to them, religion has been and continues to be one of the strongest identifying bonds for human societies. That we evolved to have, and indeed to need, this ability is no accident; that it has appeared as the religion we know is, for better and for worse, the historical record. 

The bigger question now becomes how we proceed armed with this knowledge. As aforementioned, I found my initial forays into the online atheist community to be profoundly disappointing. I feel as though, in trying to highlight the sins of religion, real as those sins are, the atheists I encountered failed to realize the positive biological foundations of religion. By failing to make this important connection, they are not pushing humanity forward in a positive manner as they hope to, but rather they are undermining one of the key biological pillars of our species’ existence. But do not mistake that as a defense of religion, — for in fact, monotheistic religion as the traditional manifestation of our biological gift has, like earlier forms of the same mental ability, outlived its usefulness. It is time for us to move beyond an identifying concept of a deity and invest our collective cognitive gift in another intellectual vehicle that will satisfy our biological urge. 

The next iteration of our collective imagination will likely be even bigger and more expansive than the current variety. As much as atheists like to disavow it, what they’re pushing for isn’t the abolition of religion but rather our human decision to invest in a vision of what is greater than us that is even more inclusive.