Theory of Indivisibility: Evolutionary Origins of Religion
This transcription corresponds with Episode 7 of my podcast, Theory of Indivisibility. The show is now available on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, and Castbox. If you’d like to support my work, please visit my Patreon page.
In my last transcription, we explored patriarchy; today we explore the evolutionary origins of religion. First, I want to share how much I grappled with what I’ve learned…Here are some things about me to give you some context:
- I grew up in the Baptist church & Southern Baptist church tradition. I grew up with a mother and two grandmothers who were deeply committed to Jesus Christ, Christianity, and their churches.
- When I was growing up, there was never any talk about scientific evidence. I was taught that all we needed was the bible and faith. The bible was our first history book and our first science book. It provided all of the answers for how the world began and evolved and we weren’t to question it. If there were any unanswered questions we were told to rely on faith to fill in the blanks.
Choosing a different, non-biblical, science-based path to gain understanding and clarity about our world makes me somewhat of an outsider in my family culture because I have ultimately rejected the religion in which I was raised.
Now that you know a little more about my personal relationship to religion, let’s explore how, when, and why religion started…
The following information includes what I’ve gathered from Wikipedia articles entitled “Evolutionary Origins of Religion” and “Evolutionary Psychology of Religion”:
The evolutionary origin of religions and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language, mythology, and the cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion.
Linguists, psychologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists primarily contribute to these fields of study on this topic.
There is general agreement among scientists that a propensity to engage in religious behavior evolved early in human history (before homo-sapiens evolved approx 300k years ago). However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation, in which case religion provided some sort of evolutionary advantage. The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors may have emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits.
Many of the adaptive values of religion are social solidarity theories, which view religion as having evolved to increase cooperation and cohesion within groups. Group membership, in turn, provides benefits which can enhance an individuals chances of survival and reproduction.
Stephen Jay Gould, now deceased, was an influential paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and Harvard professor who described religion as an example of an exaptation…a term used to describe a shift in the function of a trait during evolution. He brings up Freud’s suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal with the concept of personal mortality for the first time. Religion may have been one solution to this problem.
Other researchers have proposed specific psychological processes which may have been co-opted for religion. Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of something that might do harm, the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events, and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine the reasons behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, the complexity of life, etc.
“Our homo sapien ancestors did not practice religion as we now know it for the first 289,000 years of our existence as a species.”
There is so much more detail than I could ever provide here, however, I’ve included links to these articles at the end of this transcription. The best thing about Wikipedia is the hyperlinks that lead to other articles that provide even more context, details, and understanding about the various topics. Wikipedia models the interconnectivity and interdependence that exists in our Universe. Wikipedia is a great example of Systems Thinking in practice.
Scientific research of modern-day hunter-gatherers, people who have never been touched by colonization and who live in remote parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands… provides evidence that humans began practicing spiritual rituals, ceremonies, and beliefs hundreds of thousands of years before religious institutions evolved.
A 2016 study on the evolution of religion found in The Journal of Human Nature examined 33 hunter-gatherer societies around the world. The researchers found that the oldest trait of religion, shared by the most recent common ancestor of present-day hunter-gatherers, was animism. Animism is the belief that all things…plants, land, animals, inanimate objects, and natural phenomenon…have a distinct spiritual essence.
The results of this study also suggest that belief in an afterlife, shamanism, and ancestor worship evolved as integrated systems of beliefs and practices. The study also notes that belief in either ancestral spirits or creator deities who remain active in human affairs was not present in ancestral hunter-gatherer societies. This is reflective of deeply rooted egalitarianism amongst hunter-gatherer societies, because high gods as rulers would not occur to them.
This same study indicates that societies which developed a belief in an omniscient and morally punishing male creator did so as a reflection of their already ruler-oriented social and political structures.
Next, let’s refer back to the timeline of human pre-history found in the transcription of Episode 2 to gain chronological perspective.
This timeline covers the period after the first appearance of homo-sapiens in Africa 300,000 years ago (known as the Middle Paleolithic period) to the invention of writing in Sumer & Egypt 4,600 years ago (during the Bronze age of the Holocene period).
It is during the Holocene period (AKA the Agricultural Revolution) that the oldest evidence of organized religion is found in the near east, approximately 11,000 years ago or the year 9,000 BCE.
What does that tell us? For one thing, our homo sapien ancestors did not practice religion as we now know it for the first 289,000 years of our existence as a species.
So what changed? If you’ve been keeping up with this series so far, you know that climate change during that period led to the Agricultural Revolution…which led to the conditions for power-over & patriarchal social norms to evolve, which I cover in detail in previous transcriptions of the Theory of Indivisibility podcast.
Power-over & patriarchy evolved to create social norms and language patterns that centered men as the default or norm and that carried over to religion. This scripture from the New International Version of the Christian Bible provides an example:
“Then a voice came from the throne, saying: ‘Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, both small and great!’” — Revelations 19:5
As we see in this scripture, God is referred to as “he” and “him”. The Power-over language found in this scripture includes “all you his servants” and “you who fear him”.
In his Pulitzer-Prize winning book entitled, Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, a geographer, historian, and author, provides detailed context for the evolution of religion. In Chapter 14, “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy”, Diamond explains how early human societies evolved after the Agricultural Revolution created the conditions for people to live in sedentary ways for the first time. The ability to settle & farm the land instead of living as hunter-gatherer nomads, contributed to population growth and the subsequent need for new social systems to manage that growth. Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, all humans lived in nomadic bands of a few dozen people. Over time, bands evolved into tribes with hundreds of people, tribes evolved into chiefdoms with thousands of people, and chiefdoms evolved into states with 50,000+ people.
The book explains how various social systems evolved to meet the demands of growth during each of these stages and provides a chart which includes…
- Government & decision making
- Monopoly of force and information
- Conflict resolution
- Economy exchanges
- Division of Labor
- Slavery
- Religion Justifies Kleptocracy
In Theory of Indivisibility: The Evolution of Power-Over Systems, I provided details about what a Kleptocracy is and how chiefs & rulers created religions out of the spiritual beliefs and practices that evolved from bands and tribes in an effort to justify central authority, facilitate the transfer of wealth, and/or maintain peace among unrelated individuals.
There are many religions around the world…I want to highlight a few of the prominent ones in order of their evolution.
Hinduism evolved around 1700 BCE
Judaism evolved around 500–600 BCE
Buddism evolved around 300 BCE
Christianity evolved around 30 CE — 62 CE
Islam evolved around 610 CE
I took the time to read about the creation stories of these religions. Each one is different from one another and differs from the scientific evidence that I presented in my piece about the origins of the universe.
Do any of these belief systems contain truths about human origins? We’ll dive deeper into that question and more in my next transcription, where I will explore the current complexities of Religion.
Thanks for reading…
Until next time,
I love y’all, Peace!
Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta
2022. Podcast brought into written form by Ray Lightheart
