Why Is There Religion?

This page is part of the author’s set of pages on religion.

0. Introduction

Religion is a fascinating subject.

Now, I am not religious, I am an atheist. To most people, religion is a personal matter, and if there is any fascination in it, it’s in the fulfillment they feel during the moments they experience communication with supernatural beings. But how can religion appear fascinating to a non-believer?

Why, of course religion is fascinating even if you are not a believer, because it poses so many interesting questions that — from an atheist’s point of view — require an explanation: Why Is Religion Here? Why are people religious? Why so many people are religious — why is it the rule to be religious, and the exception to be an atheist?

Religious people would guffaw with my naïveness. “Why is there religion” — what a silly question! Only a zany atheist would think of asking a question with a self-evident answer: Because God is out there and made us so that we have a knowledge of His existence, you fool! And some of us revere Him, while some others, like you, have fallen into the devil’s trap. It’s so simple!

But wait, I don’t think it is so simple. For one thing, the three great monotheistic religions that talk about a God who created humankind (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) emerged only in the last 4,000 years (the Jewish tribes are estimated to be at most that old, see here). But do you know for how long we humans have existed on this planet as the same species, Homo sapiens? For approximately 150,000 years!^(*) How can it be that nobody was talking about God (the God) for tens, and even hundreds of thousands of years? Yes, people have always been religious, but what kind of religion did they have for almost their entire existence? For nearly 150,000 years there was no talk of God. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors believed in ghosts and ancestor spirits. If religion is here because of God, how could God allow this? What the heck was God doing during all this time that we have been around, folks? Please take a look at the following line, which shows (in blue color on the left) the approximate length of time that we have been on this planet without any notion of God as conceptualized by the monotheistic trio, compared to the length of time that the concept “God” started appearing in people’s minds (red color, on the right):

In reality, even the above drawing is flattering for monotheistic religions. The concept “God” did not appear suddenly, full-fledged in people’s minds as we know it today. The ancient Jewish God was very different from the one of the modern times: he was an anthropomorphic God. He had a thunderous voice, legs to walk with on the garden of Eden, and other bodily parts that we don’t need to mention here, lest some people might feel offended. The concept “God” evolved in the minds of believers, until we reached the God-spirit of the Christian religion in the last 2,000 years: a God who is occasionally depicted and imagined as a respectful and healthy Old Man; and the Allah of the Islamic religion in the last 1,300 years, who has no gender^(*) and cannot be depicted at all. Also, humanity as a whole did not switch to the notion “one God” suddenly, 4,000 years ago; the Jews were but a minute percent of the entire human population (they still are), and it took the Christian religion and its adoption in Europe, and a bit later the Islamic religion and its adoption in the Arabic world, for the concept “one God” to take off. Even today, people in the most populous nation, China, do not believe in a monotheistic God, creator of the universe. So, if religion is here because of God, then God has created a peculiarly fragmentary and localized (both in space and in time) image of himself in people’s minds. It’s a “God with a thousand faces” that appears in the world. Why?

But my purpose is not to argue with believers. For them, all questions are answered, all cases appear closed. Believers enjoy staying in a tranquil state of mind, in which questions of fundamental importance, such as whether God exists, or whether there is an afterlife, are not asked at all. They refuse to question the very foundations of their belief system, and this is very understandable, because such questioning would put in danger the entire edifice, which they don’t want to shake and destroy. My purpose is to write down an explanatory system for the phenomenon of religion primarily for myself, because as a cognitive scientist I am very interested in understanding how the mind works, and one important property of human minds is their religious beliefs. But why did I write this web page, if I am interested in an explanation for my own satisfaction only? Because it is not productive to be talking to oneself; I need to receive feedback, primarily from those people who do not feel threatened by putting under the microscope of reason even the most basic religious assumptions.

So, certainly, under the assumption that God exists, there is hardly any question to be asked about the origin of religion (save for the objections I presented earlier — see the figure with the colored line, above — but the believer can always cop out with a “God’s ways are mysterious” retort). The question of the origin of religion becomes important only under the assumption that God is a creation of the human mind. If you are a believer and feel offended by this assumption, there is always the Back button on your browser. If you are not offended, you might either be a non-believer, or a believer who simply is curious to see how an atheist would answer the question of the origin of religion (for example, you might want to prepare yourself and gather ammunition for the next occasion a non-believer brings up this issue in a discussion). In any case, assuming that I am not offending the reader, I proceed now to the main topics of this text.

List of Contents

1. Explanations for the Origin of Religion
1.1 Why Are People Religious?
1.1.1 Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained”
1.2 Darwinian Explanations
1.3 Religion as a Viral Meme
2. The Evolution of Religion
2.1 Biological Foundations of Morality and its Evolution
2.1.1 The Bible as Guide for Morality
2.1.2 Morality Keeps Evolving
2.2 Evolution of Rituals
3. Properties of the Religious Mind
3.1 Is Rationality Appropriate for Understanding Religion?
3.1.1 Is the Religious Mind Hostile to Reason?
3.2 The Hardwired Component of Religion
3.3 Confusing What Is Nice to Believe with What Simply Is
3.4 Why is Religion hostile to Sexuality?
4. Dangers from Religion
4.1 On the Inability to Put Oneself in Another Person’s Shoes
4.2 Having God on Our Tribe’s Side: the Justification of Genocide
4.3 Is There a Conflict Between Science and Religion?
4.3.1 Religious Dishonesty: How Creationists Misrepresent Scientific Theories
5. Dangers from Science
5.1 Is Science Another Religion?
5.2 A Thought Experiment: What if Religion Vanishes and Science Remains?

1. Explanations for the Origin of Religion

1.1 Why Are People Religious?

A religious person would have the exact opposite question: why are some people (like the author) non-religious?^(*) But is the issue symmetric? Is a religious person as much justified in asking this question, as the author is in asking why so many people are religious? I will argue in this section (§1) that the issue is not symmetric:

However, the above analogy is not very accurate because one can always opt to lose the excessive weight by going on diet; but in the case of religion, there is no recipe to follow to lose it, for two reasons: first, religious people do not think there is something wrong with their religious beliefs, or that their beliefs are causing harm to other people. And second, there is a strong genetic factor in religion (stronger than any genetic predisposition to acquiring weight), which is an idea that will be discussed later.

Religion is a cognitive phenomenon, and thus traditional evolutionary approaches fail to shed light to all of its aspects. This is not to say that biology has no useful information to give us for a deeper understanding of religion. For example, as Frans de Waal^[1] and Marc Hauser^[2] tell us in their recent publications, the core of the sense of morality that almost all humans share has a biological foundation: other primates may not have to decide on issues such as abortion and euthanasia, but they do have to deal with stealing and murder on a regular basis. (This subject will be developed further in the section on the origins of morality, see §2.1.) Indeed, a comparison of our cognitive abilities with those of other animals will help us understand the basis of the answer to the question “Whence Religion”. This is what I discuss next.

Try to put yourself in the mental position of an adult chimpanzee who has just witnessed the death of an elder family member. Do you think you would be able to entertain the following thought?

“This elder chimp just died; in fact, all chimps die, sooner or later;
I am one of them; so one day I will die, too, sooner or later.”

No, you wouldn’t. To put it simply, you wouldn’t have the mental capacity to make the above complicated thought. Some pieces of the thought would be reachable (“This elder chimp just died”, “I am one of them” — though they wouldn’t be expressible in such linguistic terms, of course), but others would be completely beyond your mental horizon (“all chimps die”, “so one day I will die, too”). Your basic mental handicap as a chimp (or as any other non-human animal for that matter), is that you cannot conceive of the notion of “remote future”. Only humans can do that.^(*) Not all future would be inaccessible to you — for example, you would be able to hide a piece of food from your peers, knowing that you would be able to retrieve it soon, maybe even in a few days. But you wouldn’t be able to think of a future that extends beyond a few days ahead. You wouldn’t understand what “in a few years” means. Thus you couldn’t possibly ever fear your own death.

The fear of death is just one psychological burden that we humans alone have to carry on our shoulders throughout our lives. Another is the fear of the contingencies of our hostile environment. Right now most of us (and especially those of us who have access to a high-tech information medium such as the Internet) feel completely secure, reading as we are the present text. I can bet all my money that you are not thinking of the wall possibly collapsing and killing you before you finish reading this paragraph. But our ancestors did not evolve in such secure environments, but in ones where any life-threatening situation could happen at any time. They felt that the contingencies of life, especially the damaging and hurtful ones, required an explanation. In reality, there is no explanation for why some person appears unfortunate.^(*) But the human mind is designed to seek an explanation, and if one is difficult to find, it will stick to something, some idea that appears as an explanation. So our ancestors, for tens of thousands of years, believed that misfortunes are caused by evil ghosts, spirits, and vengeful dead ancestors (who were assumed to be around, invisible to the living people). Recently (at most in the last 4,000 years only), the notion of “Evil” was personified and attributed to one agent, the Devil; similarly, the notion of “Good” was also personified and concentrated on a single agent, God.^(*) But this is a very recent (relatively speaking, see the introduction) development. Thus, the explanation of nature’s capricious character (floods, earthquakes, wild animals, personal disasters, etc.) was another factor in helping us to develop religious beliefs. God, or gods, was the last resort of the unfortunate person. It is widely known that during the time of personal misfortune, or of impending disaster, people implore for divine help and intervention.

Related to the explanation for misfortune and disasters, though of lesser importance, is the need for an explanation of how the world came to be. It should be mentioned that because this need is not of vital importance, we do not encounter creation myths in all of the world’s religions. They do appear in many, however.^(*) The human mind is filled with awe when observing the intricate structure of the natural world, and seeks an explanation for it: someone must have ordered this chaos. Religions (at least some of them) can play the role of “layman’s philosophy” when they include creation myths.

Religion also has an important function, which does not explain directly why we are religious, but is indirectly related to the origins of religious behavior: religion, at least in its recent institutionalized form, is a way to impose social order. Until quite recently in Western Europe (before the acceptance of secularism), non-compliance with the religious order might spell even the death of the individual. This is still (early 21st C.) the case in some Islamic nations, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the judicial system of which is regulated by the sharia (Islamic law). However, religion was not institutionalized during most of the time of its presence (see the blue part of the line of the figure at the top of this page). Still, non-compliance with religious rules was usually discouraged either mildly, or compulsively. The biologist Eugene O. Wilson suggested that the enforcement of religion, i.e., the need to “stay with the group/tribe”, is one of the forces that selected for religious minds, and in particular, for obedient minds: those individuals who could tolerate without questioning the nonsense that came out of the mouth of the religious leader (the shaman, who was usually also the tribal leader), could gain better share of the resources of the tribe (food, social care, etc.), and thus produce more offspring than the others, the mavericks, who, questioning the leader’s authority, would be ousted from the community. Thus we have a proposal for the explanation of why the religious mind is generally not bothered by contradictions,^(*) and is willing to accept the illogical ideas believed by religious peers, especially the nonsense that sometimes comes from religious authorities.^(*) It should also be noted that the anthropologist and cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer argues persuasively that the more incredible the religious belief is, the better it qualifies as a religious belief.^[3] (The introductory chapter of Boyer’s book is also examined immediately below.) In summary, the need to comply to religious rules, no matter how irrational, could be an explanation of how religion was hardwired in human brains. Of course, as in every statistical argument, this does not mean that everyone would have to be religious; only that on average, people tend to be born with a predisposition for religion, rather than an aversion to it. Given suitable societal inputs, the person born with such a proclivity will become religious, usually following the dominant denomination of his/her society.

1.1.1 Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained”

The American cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer, who teaches at the Psychology and Anthropology departments of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, essentially rejects all the above reasons as explanations for the origin of religion in his book Religion Explained,[3] in chapter one. For each one of the above explanations, Boyer finds one or more religions for which the explanation does not hold. So he concludes that this cannot be a universal explanation. For example, regarding the mortality and “fear of death” problem, Boyer says: “[W]e must [...] discard the parochial notion that religion everywhere promises salvation, for that is clearly not the case.” (p. 21) Yes, but the world’s 2.1 billion Christians, and 1.3 billion Muslims, or a combined 64% of the world’s religious population (see source of these statistics) do believe in afterlife and salvation. Many ancient religions believed in afterlife, too. The Greeks believed that souls go to the underworld, ruled by the god Hades. Romans believed essentially the same, calling the god Pluto.

Even most of the religions that Boyer thinks provide counter-examples, are actually examples of the afterlife belief: every religion that refers to ancestor spirits, for instance, explicitly points to the idea of afterlife: “When I die, I will be a dead ancestor of my living descendants, and my soul might stay around, just as my own ancestors’ souls are around now.” Salvation, which Boyer focuses on, might indeed be parochial. But what nurtures the human psyche with courage is not the particular idea of salvation, but the more general one of afterlife, the hope that death is not the end of it all.

A closer examination of the world’s religions reveals that in essentially all of them, people believe in some form of afterlife: setting aside the well-known beliefs about paradise and hell of Christians and Muslims, the 900 million Hindus believe in reincarnation; ~400 million Buddhists also believe in cycles of rebirth, and the eventual attainment of bodhi (“enlightenment”, i.e., becoming buddha); similar beliefs are held by another ~400 million of Chinese traditional religion (a blend of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism). If we add to this the ancestor worship of Japanese Shintoism and various African, Indian American, and Aboriginal Australian religions, one wonders, just what is the percent of people who can be called religious and do not believe in some form of afterlife? Such religions, if they exist, must be really parochial.

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Even the idea that religions provide explanations is a nonstarter for Boyer. He claims that each religious “explanation” results in creating more questions than the ones it originally set out to explain. For example:

Consider the explanation of thunder as the booming voice of ancestors who express their anger over some human misdemeanor. This, Boyer says, creates all sorts of questions: Where are those ancestors? Why can’t they be seen? By what means does the noise come from the distant place where they live? How do they produce the noise, do they have a special mouth? Are they gigantic? On the other hand, says Boyer, people understand the concept of explanation very well. So it can’t be that they bring up the religious idea as an explanation; it must be for some other reason, or reasons (pp. 10-18).

I beg to disagree. In Boyer’s mind (as well as in mine, by the way), perhaps it’s true that religious attempts to explain a phenomenon create more questions than the ones they originally set out to explain. But in the believer’s mind the explanations are perfectly fine, because further questions are not formed. Even if someone (a non-believer) asks such questions explicitly, the believer will perceive them as ridiculous, not worthy at all to be asked. An example, quite familiar to many people, will help illustrate this point:

Suppose I ask a believer of one of the three major monotheistic religions, “Who created the world?” Immediately, I’ll receive the explanation: “But of course, God created it.” But then suppose I try to point out that this doesn’t sound good as an explanation of the existence of the world, because it creates more questions than the one it was supposed to answer. For example, who created God? To this, the believer has a ready-made answer: “Nobody created God, because God has existed forever.” But, I would insist, how do we know this? How can we be sure that God has existed forever and was not created by another hyper-God? Then again, suppose God has existed forever; why did he create our universe at that particular moment? How can a Mind wait for an infinity before creating something? What does it mean to wait for an infinity? Does this imply that God keeps creating universes eternally? If not, why did God create only one universe? If yes, what does he do with those other universes? Does he purge them, do they die naturally? Do some of them keep existing in parallel with ours? Why did God create our universe? Does he get a kick out of this business, or does he have some ultimate purpose? The average believer will miss the notion that, in an effort to give an explanation, a large number of other questions are introduced because of the God-as-creator hypothesis.

No, the average believer does not understand the notion “explanation” the same way Boyer understands it (which, as I said, agrees with my understanding of it). What Boyer has in mind is the “axiomatic theory-like” explanation: one that questions its assumptions, and proceeds backwards answering all newly created questions with further explanations, until it hits rock-bottom, stopping at the “axioms” of the theory. If such axioms can be conventionally accepted (e.g., by direct observation, to the best of our current abilities), fine, we have a scientific theory. If the axioms are arbitrary, not amenable to scientific verification (e.g., “God exists”), then we have an arbitrary theory. But no layperson, lacking training in mathematics, logic, and proof theory, thinks of this kind of explanation when using the word “explanation”. For most people, an explanation such as “God did it” is perfectly self-sufficient. So, yes — contrary to what Boyer thinks — most religions provide explanations to most people. Here is what Boyer says (p. 14, his emphasis):

“If we say that people use religious notions to explain the world, this seems to suggest that they do not know what a proper explanation is. But that is absurd. We have ample evidence that they do know.”

He does not proceed to tell us what this “ample evidence” is, but he describes the above as “a paradox familiar to all anthropologists”. I would agree it is a paradox if by the word “explanation” the average person understood the same notion of axiomatic theory-like explanation as Boyer and I understand. But they don’t. On the contrary, people resort to bogus explanations all the time, such as that their bad luck was caused by a black cat that they happened to come across some time ago (a belief held in Greece, Turkey, and other Balkan and Middle Eastern countries); or that their going to a trip this year was caused by their running around the block carrying an empty suitcase on the 1st of January (a belief held in Colombia); or that two people are good friends because one was born in the year of the monkey and the other in the year of the dragon (Chinese and East Asian); or that some unfortunate event was associated with the number 13 in one way or another (Western); or that a person’s luck depends on the positions of the planets and stars (Western); or that a person’s health improved because some crystal (a stone) was rubbed over the person’s chest (global). We usually call all these beliefs not religious, but superstitious. However, such beliefs are characteristic of what people can accept as “explanation” and cause-and-effect relation. People can believe trash. There is ample evidence, one doesn’t need to be a cognitive scientist to see it. Unfortunately, “politically correct” anthropologists may deny it. You see, if you are a politically correct anthropologist or sociologist, you might wish to deny that people can be fools. But if you do so, then you are not a scientist. With science we learn not what we wish to find, but what our disinterested methods (our instruments, math tools, etc.) tell us that there is.

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Still in the context of explanations, Boyer attacks a 19th century anthropology movement called intellectualism. According to it, if a phenomenon is common in human experience and people do not have the conceptual means to understand it, then they will try and find some speculative explanation.^(*)

Boyer thinks a general statement such as the above is “plainly false”, and, to show why, he brings up the question of how our thoughts (an immaterial entity) manage to interact with the physical world, and cause, for example, our arms to move. This, he says, “is a difficult problem for philosophers and cognitive scientists^(*) ... but surprisingly enough, it is a problem for nobody else in the entire world.”

Exactly. This observation should tell something to good professor Boyer. Why are people not interested in coming up with an explanation — not even a bogus one — for this problem? Why only philosophers and cognitive scientists see it as a problem, but the average folk cannot care less?

Obviously, because this problem is not one that has any consequence for people’s lives. In contrast, natural phenomena that have been given bogus explanations have had immediate effects, sometimes devastating, in people’s lives. If it rained for a whole week, and the rivers flooded — as it happens every so often in some part of the world — and the whole land in which you lived in prehistoric times was covered with waters, as far as you could see and as far as anyone you know could see, and if many, or most, of your loved ones perished during the event, this would have a devastating effect in your life, and engrave a deep groove in your tribe’s collective memory. You would feel the need to understand why; you would probably ask — nay, shout loudly — WHY did this happen to us? Why were we destroyed? The bogus explanation can differ from culture to culture. The Greeks, for example, thought that Zeus decided he had failed with his original experiment at constructing the human psyche, and wanted to start all over, so he flooded the world; the Jews believed that God was angry with people’s moral behavior. Whatever the explanation, people felt the need to explain. Is this comparable in any way with the “problem” of how our immaterial thoughts manage to interact with and move material objects? Of course no normal person will perceive this as a question to be answered at all: who cares!

If we examine the nature of the problems that were given religious (bogus) explanations, we realize that they all had immediate impact on people’s lives. The rainbow appears during a time of change between inclement and calm weather; it signifies a state of flux in the weather, so naturally it’s a candidate for a bogus explanation. Not many cultures tried to explain the rainbow, actually; I am aware of only the Jews, who thought it was God’s sign of the coming peace in weather conditions. This suggests that the importance of a natural phenomenon in people’s lives might be correlated with the number of cultures that attempted to explain it. Other events, more important, were “explained” by more cultures. The thunder, lightning, and thunderbolts, had more direct effects than the rainbow — people and their livestock were getting killed — therefore, more cultures associated such events with a god’s wrath about something or someone. The mountains played a major role in ancient people’s lives, determining the extent to which they could expand their agriculture and animal husbandry, and the regions from where enemy tribes could not attack them. Therefore, mountains required an explanation, or at least a creator. Why were they there? The Jews thought God made them (for no apparent reason), but the Muslims went a step further: they thought Allah placed them like pegs holding a tent, to prevent the earth from shaking.^(*) Rivers were important for similar reasons, and the more important role they played (e.g., the Nile in Egyptian life; Euphrates and Tigris in Mesopotamia), the more likely it was that they would be explained as personified deities. Conversely, the sea didn’t play much of a role in ancient Jews’ lives, so it was just a “thing”, one of the many that God created, but for seafaring peoples such as Greeks and Romans, it was personified by a deity (Oceanos/Oceanus), and powerful gods were thought to live in it (Poseidon / Neptune, Triton, the Nereids, and more).

So, if anthropological intellectualism is expanded to include even yawn-inducing “problems”, such as how thoughts move objects, of course it is wrong. But, in my understanding, intellectualism merely says that traditionally people have sought to explain issues that appeared important to them, and they did so without regard to the plausibility of the explanation, or its agreement with observation, or the number of additional questions that it creates. Any odd explanation, be it of religious or superstitious nature, seems equally good. I don’t see how one can reject this statement. The evidence is not just ample, but overwhelming.

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Similarly, Boyer rejects other arguments explaining religion by pointing to some religion for which the explanation fails. And thus, since none of these explanations holds in 100% of the cases, he proceeds in the following chapters to vindicate the title of his book: “Religion Explained”. This is a really good book (even if a bit austere in style), and I recommend it to the interested and patient reader. But in its first chapter, Boyer, as a good American, falls into his culture’s trap: he wants total explanations, ones that work in 100% of the cases. Either something explains everything, or it explains nothing, he thinks. (Black-and-white thinking is a typical attribute that pervades the American culture.^(*)) He wants the magic solution that will explain everything. Why is this a feature of his culture? Consider this example: It is known that Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Whereas other people grow vertically because of better nutrition, Americans keep growing horizontally. This is a problem, and many Americans perceive it as such. But instead of doing what common sense suggests, namely, to consume less quantity and better quality of food (fewer fast-food products, fewer junk snacks, and drink water for Pete’s sake, instead of their famous national sugary drink), their scientists want to find the magic chemical ingredient that, when taken (in the form of a pill, for example), will allow them to hold on to their eating habits (which means eating like elephants), and still keep in perfect shape. This inanity requires a sociological and anthropological explanation, but here I only want to point out that Boyer’s attitude towards explanations is typically American: instead of admitting the totality of explanations for the existence of religion as a whole, he observes that none of them works as a magic ingredient that explains everything, so he rejects them all.

1.2 Darwinian Explanations

Every specialist tends to see the world through the spectacles of their own area of interest. The theologian will find religious implications in any given aspect of nature, the artist will marvel at and be inspired by it, and attempt to represent it in an artistic medium, and the biologist will try to outline a Darwinian (evolutionary) explanation for it. Religion, as an aspect of (human) nature, is no exception: biologists have proposed evolutionary explanations for the emergence of religion among humans. These will be briefly discussed below.

Religion, from a biological point of view, appears on the surface just as puzzling as the tail of a male bird of paradise: so cumbersome that it becomes dangerous for the survival of its holder. A male bird of paradise rises with difficulty from the ground, given the weight of its long tail feathers, thus becoming easier to capture by predators. Similarly, possessing religion can be dangerous for the individual: religious human sacrifice was practiced regularly until our recent past (well into the historical times) as a means to pacify some nonexistent entity, a god, or gods, i.e., ideas in the minds of religious people. The mythologies and legends of various cultures describe such stories of human sacrifice. In The Iliad, Iphigenia, the virgin daughter of the king-leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon, is sacrificed on the altar in order to appease the gods so that they send propitious winds that can set the Greek fleet in motion, to sail against Troy. In the story, goddess Artemis is supposed to intervene at the last moment, replacing Iphigenia with a deer. This story is repeated in two versions in the Jewish Bible: one in which the sacrificial victim, boy Isaac, is replaced at the last moment by a ram through an act of God before being slain by his father Abraham, and another one in which a virgin girl is actually sacrificed by her father, who believed that God helped him to become victor in a battle (thus he offered his daughter as a thank-you present to God; more details to follow later on). Even though these are just mythological descriptions, it is reasonable to assume that they echo actual ancient customs and practices. Evidence of real human sacrifice has been found among native American cultures of Central America (Aztecs, Mayas) and South America (Incas), always as part of religious rituals. Even non-human sacrifice, i.e., the concept of wasting resources (food) to appease gods, works against survival. The counter-argument is that the notion of sacrifice was developed only after our ancestors passed from the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence to farming, which provided surplus resources, making possible (or even necessary) the idea that some of them could be wasted. But religion can be detrimental to health not only due to sacrifice. At the time of this writing, there are daily reports of suicide bombers in Iraq: people who arm themselves with explosives, and detonate them in order not only to exterminate their enemies, but also to reach their creator and thus live blissfully and eternally after their suicide — that’s what they think. In earlier, pre-farming times, a person concerning him/herself with religion would be wasting precious resources and energy in activities that fail to fill an empty stomach. But every seemingly burdensome feature, be it the tail of the male bird of paradise or religious activities of human beings, must have some non-obvious advantages that compensate for the losses. What are the biological advantages of religion?

Since we are looking for evolutionary explanations, we must consider religion not as it mostly appears now, but as it used to be during most of our existence as a species. (This issue will be further developed here.) It has been suggested that a person who would trust the shaman’s ability to cure, would have some chances to really be cured in some cases by means of the placebo effect, i.e., the power of suggestion. But in order for the placebo effect to work, one must have blind faith to the shamanic practices and wisdom. Thus the people who could show a blind faith to the authority of the shaman stood better chances to be cured.^[6] Together with blind faith to shamanic authority also came the ability to shut down the faculty of logic (to be examined later on), because it really takes some special ability to sincerely believe that the spells, dances, and rituals of the shaman will have some beneficial effect on one’s health. Note that such obedient members of the tribe benefit by receiving resources from the group, whereas the disobedient ones lose contact with the group and hence access to the resources, thus having fewer chances to have descendants and propagate their genes, including those genes that led them to live away from the tribe (E. O. Wilson). Others have seen the benefit not only to the individual, but also to the entire group of people who share common beliefs. Thus, common beliefs would help strengthen the cohesion of the group, and help it survive better than other groups that did not show such cohesion. Among the proponents of the controversial theory of group selection are the Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew, and the American biologist David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral.^[14]

Other biologists see religion not as benefiting the individual, but as a byproduct of some other important biological or psychological property. The British biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, proposes (without insisting that this must be the definitive explanation) that religious feelings are feelings that start during childhood as obedience to the authority of the parents, and later, in adulthood, misfire and become feelings of obedience to an image of a fatherly and loving God.^[13] Undoubtedly, children have evolved to trust their parents’ advice without questions. (Those children who did not, had fewer chances to survive and have descendants.) Once the idea “Trust authority without questions” is established in a young mind, it becomes deeply ingrained, and it later misfires by trusting the authority of the tribal elders, priests, and the “ultimate parent”, God. Although this idea is interesting, one wonders, couldn’t humans evolve so as to lose the ability to blindly trust authority as adults, just as children lose their ability to learn natively languages later in life? But still, Dawkins proposes this as a possibility only: as an example of how religious feelings could be the byproduct of some other function of the human intellect.

1.3 Religion as a Viral Meme

It has been more than two decades since the idea that some of our thoughts might be copied from mind to mind in an evolutionary-like process first appeared in Dawkins’s seminal work, The Selfish Gene.^[4] Dawkins coined the term “meme” for any such self-replicating idea (by analogy with the word “gene”), and the term has stayed with us ever since (1976), as a new meme (the “meme meme”). Dawkins also suggested, at the very end of his book, that religion might be seen as a “viral” meme. This idea was developed somewhat further in Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine.^[5] To understand how a viral meme can commandeer a person’s mind, allowing the person to believe that the person is in control, it is useful to consider an analogy offered by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett at the very beginning of his recent book, Breaking the Spell.^[6] Dennett writes of an ant that exhibits a peculiar behavior:

“You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely—even suicidal—ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host.” (p. 3).

Dennett then goes on to compare the situation of a mind of a religious person “taken” by religious memes, to the situation of the brain of an ant that is similarly “taken” by the parasitic genes. Dennett’s analogy should not be construed too literally, of course. For example, the parasite Dicrocelium dendriticum has a metabolism, so if it does not find a host such as a sheep or cow to complete its life cycle, it will presumably die. Not so with the religious memes (thoughts, concepts), which lack metabolism, and can stay in the believer’s mind indefinitely. But, just like the ant with the D. dendriticum, a believer will engage in certain rituals (for example, going to church every Sunday), over, and over, and over. Again, the reader might object that the ant does the grass-blade climbing ritual unthinkingly, whereas the believer goes to church by his/her own free will (and would avoid going if something urgent happened). Certainly, a human mind with a set of religious memes is an immensely complex system. Dennett’s analogy is not meant to belittle a religious mind, reducing it to a mindless automaton, such as that of an ant’s. It does not mean that a believer has the brain of an ant! (for Pete’s sake, as someone complained to me; after all, if a believer is an ant, we are all ants — including Dennett and this author!) The analogy only points to the fact that a religious mind is a normal mind plus some set of ideas (the religious memes), which cause the believer to exhibit some behavioral patterns. One of those patterns is that the believer will try (and usually succeed) to convince his/her own children of the “truth” of those religious memes, so that the memes will be transmitted to the child; and so on, generation after generation. The believer believes that the transmission is done by the believer’s own free will. Fine. But an alternative viewpoint is that this is only a cognitive illusion. After all, how many believers ever thought, “No: I will not teach my own children anything about my religion; instead, I will let them find out about God by themselves.” Even if an occasional believer does entertain this thought, religious memes are not passed only by parents to children, but also by the social environment in which children grow up. To say “I will not teach my children anything about my religion” is like living in a house where every adult has the flu, and hoping that you won’t pass your viruses to your children if you simply do not sneeze or cough in their face.

But there are other memes in people’s minds. Why should only the religious ones be called “viral”? Why should only they be denigrated with a label such as “virus-like”, and not do the same for other memes, e.g., those that a non-believer has regarding God’s non-existence? Why, isn’t an atheist “taken” by the atheism memes?

Because there is an important difference between memes and memes. The religious ones “want”^(*) to spread. To this end, religions traditionally organize missions, sending their missionaries to places deemed “ground suitable for sowing the word of God”. (Which means, minds so weakly infected by other, feeble religious memes, that the new and superior ones will spread like the plague — and Churches are usually dead right.) Believers typically make monetary contributions to such missions, considering it as one of their religious duties. In contrast, non-religious memes do not seem to have any “wish” to spread, and so they don’t even qualify to be labeled as memes (a meme is an idea, or set of ideas, that appears as if it wants to spread; other examples are given below). Though religious missions are known since it was financially feasible to organize them, I have yet to hear of the first atheistic mission.^(*) Atheists, agnostics, and other non-believers, do not gather regularly at a place listening to the sermon of an atheist priest. There are no atheist temples, no rituals, no prayers, no priests, no bishops, no missionaries, no holy scriptures, no donations for the advancement of atheism in the world.^(*) These concepts are all attributes of religion, and that is why there is an asymmetry between believing and not believing, and why religious ideas qualify as memes, whereas their absence does not.^(*)

Boy!... Does this Cameron character look like he wants to sneeze his viral memes in your face?

Now, if a non-believer’s ideas do not even qualify as memes, but religious ones do, why are the latter labeled as “viral”? What are examples of non-viral memes?

Non-viral, or normal memes, are sets of ideas that generally spread from person to person, but without causing the mind that possesses them to engage in repetitious rituals, nor wanting to pass them on to successive generations. For example, a tune that plays in your mind and causes you to hum it, sometimes for an entire day, could be called a meme. It is transmitted by radio waves, electronically, optically (burned on CD’s), or simply by listening to another person humming it. A new trend in fashion would qualify as another meme, or complex of memes. Certainly, such memes will cause you to exhibit some behaviors (you might go to the music store to buy a CD, or to the department store to buy a fashionable pair of shoes), but they will not cause you to perform rituals, nor congregate with other people to reinforce the rote learning of those rituals, nor summon your child one day and tell him/her in a very solemn voice, “Listen, sweetie: I want to talk to you about a very important tune/fashion that there is in this universe, which I would like you to remember/follow for the rest of your life.”

Are there any other viral memes, besides the religious ones? I think so. Every ideology, every “-ism” that involves a hierarchical organization with leaders and subordinates, some text that spells the ideological principles, gatherings in which rituals or near-rituals are performed, fundraising campaigns, and propaganda for spreading the ideology of “-ism”, including perhaps some magazine or newspaper controlled by the top echelons of the organization, qualifies as “viral” in my view. Followers of such ideologies generally wish to see their children involved in the same organization (i.e., be infected by the viral memes of the ideology). The difference with religions is that the child’s environment (e.g., school) is usually not contaminated by the same ideology, so the viral infection is not as effective as in the case of a religious doctrine. (Usually, but not always: communism would be an example of an ideology with a complex of viral memes that infested even the schools of societies that employed it as the sole form of governance.)

Young students receiving Islamic education in Afghanistan. (These come from pictures taken in the summer of 2007,
but the originals are property of the Associated Press, so I did some image filtering to avoid violating property rights.)

The above analogy of religious memes with viral genes can be interesting for the non-believer, because it provides a new perspective on religion, but might appear hostile, even abominable to the believer. Objectively, the analogy misses a crucial point: whereas biological viruses are often detrimental for the health of infected individuals, religious memes must have played a crucial and beneficial role in the evolution of our species. Without them, we might not be around. This idea is further developed in the sections that follow.

2. The Evolution of Religion

When we think of “religion” today, we usually have the present state of religion in the world, in our minds. There are more than six billion people, and well-known religions (e.g., those followed by over 100 million people) account for around 80% of the entire population of Earth. (Source.) The indigenous tribes of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australia, account for only 6% of the total today. But has the situation always been like this? Could it be that we now witness a very recent and rather atypical view of religion? If we want to understand religion deeply, where it came from, and what it meant to human beings throughout our existence, instead of just how it appears now, we need to acquire a clear picture of how people and their various religions changed over the eons; in other words, how religion evolved in time. Specifically, we need to know the answers for the following questions:

• For how long have we existed on this planet?
• Where did our species first appear?
• How many individuals constituted our most ancient ancestors?
• When did our ancestors spread to different places of the world?
• How did the size of the human population change over time?
• By what time should they have started developing religious concepts, and what kinds of concepts might those be?
• How did religions start taking their present familiar form?

Note that, although — superficially — only the last two questions appear to concern religion, it is wrong to try to answer only them ignoring the rest, which are prerequisites for properly understanding the answer for the last two quesions. So let’s proceed, answering the above questions one by one.

The first three questions are the easiest ones to answer, because data in the form of fossil findings and DNA analyses have been accumulating for some time, converging on roughly the same conclusions.^(*)

The age of our species seems to be anywhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years, with the number 150,000 as the best rough estimate, if we insist to remember a single number. How do we end up with these numbers?

Turning now to where our earliest ancestors appeared, the scientific evidence has again converged to a single answer. Christians and Jews believe that the place was the garden of Eden, somewhere in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), and that our first ancestors were two individuals, Adam and Eve. Some Muslims believe Adam was sent somewhere in India after his creation (e.g., see here). No religion has guessed correctly the true location of our origin,^(*) except possibly some tribes in Eastern Africa, between Ethiopia and Kenya (assuming they have creation myths), because that is where we originated from.

The region marked with green on the map of Africa on the left encloses approximately the area where the most ancient fossils of our own kind have been unearthed. There is also independent evidence from DNA analysis that confirms the African origin hypothesis, except that in this case the conclusion is not so specific as to say “East Africa”, but simply “Africa”. Sources that present and analyze in detail the scientific evidence include Roger Lewin’s Human Evolution,[7] Richard Leakey’s The Origin of Humankind,[8] Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History,[9] and Richard Cowen’s History of Life.[10] The same sources discuss the evidence for the age of our species. Lewin’s book (in unit 7) and Cowen’s book (in chapter 2) also discuss the details of scientific dating methods for finding the age of rocks and fossils.

Isn’t this modern conclusion wonderful? Well, to some people at least (like me) it is, while to others it’s not exactly music to their ears. Groups of people that would feel disturbed by this conclusion, besides religious fundamentalists who insist to take the word of their holy book literally, include all racists, and others who insist on the purity of their origins; because, besides everything else, this conclusion implies that our earliest ancestors were all “black”. We are all “blacks”! All people on Earth: “white” Americans, Australians, and Europeans (including Adolph Hitler, let us not forget), Jews, Arabs, Indians, East Asians, American Indians, Australian aboriginals, Eskimos, and of course people of African descent anywhere on the planet, we all have only “black” ancestors, if we move sufficiently far back in our genealogy. The fictional characters Adam and Eve, if they existed they would have to have chocolate-colored skin, too. Nobody’s roots are “purely white”.

What about the size of the population of our first ancestors? Steve Olson^[9] estimates it to be anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 (p. 28). This estimate comes from DNA analysis, working backwards from the present population, and taking into account the “molecular clock” which is inferred by the mutations of the DNA structure (discussed earlier).

At this point some readers might experience a conceptual difficulty in accepting the above estimate. If our ancestors started at any number as large as the above, how could they be the first ones? How did they arrive to the world, didn’t they have parents? If not, then who created them? If yes, then wouldn’t their parents (and grandparents, and grand-grand...) also be our ancestors?

The long answer is already given on this page of mine, so I will not attempt to repeat it here. The short answer is that we are not talking about some specific instant in time, some beautiful day on which we take a snapshot of the human population, count heads, find them to be 15,824 (say), and decide that these and none else count as our “original ancestors”. Of course it doesn’t work like that. We are talking about a period of time that lasted for thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands of years, during which our ancestors were changing from what we now call Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. During this period of thousands of years, people were at a transitional stage between the two species, and they wouldn’t be placed squarely into one kind or the other. All of those were our ancestors: the Homo erectus individuals before the transition, the transitional ones, and the Homo sapiens individuals after the transition was complete. Note that this is a general process that applies to all living kinds that evolve and change from some ancestor species to some descendant one; it’s not particular to our kind. And, please, before considering writing to me, complaining that what I describe is logically impossible, make sure you have read and understood my long answer (see the page referenced above).

But how could a mere 10,000 to 20,000 individuals be spread out in a vast region like the one depicted on the map, above? Well, the region on the map shows the approximate area where our ancestors could have been roaming for thousands of years; it’s not an area that was populated by some specific 10,000–20,000 people at some particular instant in time.

When did our ancestors start spreading out of their original location, populating the rest of Africa, the Middle East, the rest of Asia, Europe, and even Australia, and (much later) the Americas? The chronology of events, as is known today from both archaeological findings and DNA analysis, is as follows:

For several tens of thousands of years, perhaps until around 100,000 years ago, our ancestors remained in the region of Africa shown earlier. Throughout this time, the only tools they were making were simple stones, chopped on one end to make them pointy (by hitting them with other stones), by which they would kill game, carve flesh out of bones, and occasionally crush the head of a member of a rival tribe. (There is no evidence for this latter idea, but I doubt anyone would seriously contest it.) Their mode of subsistence must have been the “hunter–gatherer” one, by which is meant that men “hunt” (which, more often than not, includes collecting nuts, roots, fruits, etc., rather than killing game, as Jared Diamond^[11] points out) and women collect the food at home base, store it, prepare it for consumption, and distribute it. Many tribes of Africans and American Indians continue to operate in this mode of living today, and that’s where our knowledge comes from: direct observation. (It is assumed that the mode of living of contemporary indigenous tribes has not changed in some essential way until our times.)

During a period between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, a great shift in intelligence appeared among our ancestors, a shift that has been termed “the Great Leap Forward”^[11] by paleoanthropologists. The old clumsy stone-made tools were replaced by other, more delicate ones, made mostly of bone. Interestingly, forms of art (making beads and other ornaments, painting) appeared at the “same time” (bear in mind that the time referred to here spans thousands of years). Anthropologists and cognitive scientists suspect that the improvement of competence in language made possible this “sudden” burst in creative activity. This does not mean that brains grew larger. Our present brain size had already been reached by our earliest ancestors, around 200,000 to 150,000 years ago. Greater intelligence might be the result of qualitative (better organized neuronal connections) rather than quantitative change. Whatever the causes, the Great Leap Forward coincided with a physical “leap forward”, by which our ancestors left their original location of Eastern Africa and spread, gradually, to the rest of the world.

The above map, adapted from Lewin^[7] and Olson,^[9] shows the general routes our ancestors took while moving out of their original region in Eastern Africa. Note that one route involves the crossing of the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, the narrowest point where the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula nearly touches Africa, sometime between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago. (The K stands for 1000 years on the map.) Although the Strait is so narrow that can hardly be seen on the map (see also the previous enlarged view of Africa), its 27 kilometers (17 miles) presented a formidable task of navigation to earlier species of humans.^(*) Perhaps by this time our ancestors possessed enough curiosity to attempt a risky trip over the sea, enough general intelligence to conceive of something like a raft, and enough complexity in verbal communication to coordinate the building of a raft by several peers. Whatever the cognitive skills involved, we know that H. sapiens arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago. However, this should not be imagined as a single brave expedition that was accomplished during a single lifetime. Instead, it involved the gradual spreading of tribes along encampments that remained at a reasonable distance from the seashore, over thousands of years. The spreading happens because people are pressured by crowded conditions to explore new and untapped resources. Soon after the time people reached Australia, some of Australia’s large marsupial mammals were driven to extinction. This, besides human bones, is an additional indicator of the time around which people reached Australia.

Another route involves moving northbound on land, passing over today’s Egyptian peninsula of Sinai, and from there to regions of Asia and Europe. However, their spreading should have been far from effortless and unhindered, because somewhere in today’s Israel, and then further in Turkey and southeastern Europe, they must have met with the previous inhabitants of those regions, the Neanderthals. The latter must have been an offshoot of our ancestor species, Homo erectus, which had already inhabited the Old World (Africa, Asia, and Europe) since around 1.5 million years ago, starting once again from Africa. Thus, there have been two out-of-Africa events: one of our ancestor species, H. erectus, and one of our own, H. sapiens (the event described here; note that Alan Templeton describes a third such event, between the two mentioned above, plus a more recent event of moving from Asia back to Africa — see Dawkins,^[30] pp. 57–60). The Neanderthals appeared as early as 500,000 years ago, and were completely extinct as late as 24,000 years ago. Molecular evidence tentatively suggests that our ancestors did not mix with the Neanderthals,^[9] because no parts of our DNA have been found yet that do not seem to converge to a more distant past than around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. (If we had mixed genetically with the Neanderthals we should have some DNA parts common with them that converge to ancestors older than at least 500,000 years.) However, this hypothesis is still debated.

Note that the arrows on the map, above, do not mean to depict specific routes taken, but rather indicate the general direction of spreading of our species. The Americas must have been inhabited no earlier than 13,000 years ago, by people who crossed the Bering Strait (the 92 km or 58 miles of sea that separates Siberia from Alaska), at a time when the sea level had dropped due to glaciation, exposing the land where the water is shallow and turning the Bering Strait into a land bridge. The first native Americans were blocked by glaciers and stayed in Alaska for some time (a few generations), but eventually the glaciers receded and people managed to migrate southwards into today’s Canada and the U.S.A. From there on, it took them only 1000 years to reach Patagonia, at the southern tip of South America.^[7]

It was mentioned above that the initial size of our first ancestors’ population is estimated to have been between 10,000 and 20,000. By the year 2000 it reached approximately 6,000,000,000 (six billion). How did our size change over time, and why did we become so many? It is extremely important to understand this if we want a proper understanding of how religion evolved, for the following reason: for most of the time, i.e., for around 150,000 years, our existence was characterized by the following attributes:

• hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence,
• small population size (from a few thousand to a few million), and
• primarily ancestor-worship, or what I would call “small-scale, ‘amateuristic’ (pagan) religion”.

But for around the last 10,000 years (only), our mode of existence changed drastically. Specifically, it acquired the following attributes:

• farmer mode of subsistence,
• very large population size (of the order of several billion), and
• predominantly God-worship (with capital G), or what I would call “large-scale, institutionalized religion”.

These attributes were not independent of each other. It is because of the farmer mode of subsistence that large populations — much larger than before — could be fed and maintained. Also, large populations brought about the emergence of classes among people (merchants, soldiers, slaves, scribes, aristocrats, and, last but not least, priests). It was because of farming and agriculture^(*) that human populations could now afford to feed classes of people who did not work in order to earn their living (e.g., soldiers, priests, aristocrats), something that was unthinkable in the previous, hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. One of the consequences of the division of human populations into classes was the structural “complexification” of religion: instead of a single shaman-king of the tribe, there was now an entire class of people, the priesthood, hierarchically organized with a supreme leader (e.g., a Pope, an Ecumenical Patriarch, a Grand Ayatollah, etc.), a few individuals close to the supreme leader (archbishops, ayatollahs), and more individuals farther from the leader, and closer to the base of the pyramid (bishops, priests, muftis, imams, etc.). An excellent source that explains not only the above, but also why agriculture arose in particular places in the world and not in others (resulting in the perceived “supremacy” of the “white” people, when in fact any technological advancements by “whites” were granted to them by mere strokes of geographical, botanical, and zoological luck), is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel,^[12] a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a must-read for anyone who wonders why some “races” appear more capable, and hence dominant, than others.

It should be noted that in very recent times — perhaps for the last 300–400 years, after the Renaissance — a considerable part of humanity has switched to a third mode of subsistence: the mode of services, in which the product of one’s work is not something edible, or even tangible, but it can still be of value to other people. For instance, it can be insurance, a movie, a novel, a piece of software, a lottery, a piece of legal advice, a deal, or simply a re-selling of somebody else’s work. Because many of us earn a living in this mode of subsistence, it is easy to overlook the vast effect that the farmer mode have had on human society. Yet, just as the services mode is very short compared to the farmer mode, so the farmer mode is very short compared to the hunter-gatherer mode. Another observation is that the emergence of each mode does not imply the elimination of the previous ones: there are still hunter-gatherers in many places of the world, but they tend to play a peripheral role in global world affairs.

With the above in mind, let’s examine a graph that depicts the growth of human population over time.

The population is shown on the vertical axis, whereas time is on the horizontal axis, and it corresponds almost exactly with the Western notion of “year”; that is, time zero corresponds to 1 AD (or 1 CE), or to 1 BC (or BCE), whichever you prefer; time -2,000 corresponds to the year 2000 BC (or BCE), give or take one year, an adjustment that for the purposes of the above graph has no significance at all. The blue region on the bottom-right shows approximately how the human population changed over time. The data to construct this graph were taken from this page, and this one. A version of this graph can be found here.

We see that the the growth of the curve on the above graph is such that the population remains nearly invisible for more than half of the time depicted, until it becomes visible and starts rising in historical times, shooting sharply upwards in recent times. But the most interesting part for our purposes is not the visible, but the invisible part of the curve; specifically, the length of the invisible part. Notice that the graph stops on the left at -10,000 (at which time the data suggest a population of 4 to 5 million). That’s not the beginning of our species, though; it is an arbitrary time, shortly before the emergence of agriculture. If we were to include the whole duration of existence of our species, with the conventional time -150,000 on the left (where I estimated earlier the size of our population to be around 10,000 – 20,000 individuals), we would need to extend the graph 15 times to the left, with the population curve coinciding exactly with the horizontal axis throughout this leftward extension. If you have a hard time imagining this, then picture it on the next figure:

The above figure by itself tells us nothing more interesting than that our population curve took a sharp increase shortly after the emergence of agriculture. What’s more interesting is that throughout the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, and even later until well into the historical times (i.e., for the entire part where the height of the curve is practically zero), the religious beliefs of people had nothing to do with God; they were beliefs based on ancestor souls, ghosts, good and bad spirits that inhabit the woods, the lake, the sea, or other unknown, dangerous, and scary places, and so on — just the sort of beliefs that the few remaining hunter-gatherers hold today (they will be discussed a bit more, soon). If we want to plot the rise of the monotheistic religions that sprang from Judaism in the above graph (i.e., Christianity and Islam), then we get the following:

Monotheistic religions in which the notion “God” is dominant are marked in red, above. The appearance of Judaism is marked as starting shortly before time zero, keeping the curve practically at zero for a while due to the insignificant number of Jews compared to the world population, and from time zero and beyond it is largely due to Christianity, and then in addition to Islam, that the red portion of the graph shoots upwards. Before rushing to accuse me of “painting God into a corner” (rather literally), consider that the above graphs were constructed out of hard facts; they hopefully give us a clearer perspective of the magnitude and duration of the idea “God” (the God meme) in humanity than we tend to attribute to it today — at least for those of us who live in cultures imbued with the notion of “God”.

Now, having a rough idea of the timeline of the spreading of our ancestors throughout the world, let’s focus on their religious concepts and customs: approximately when did they originate, what form did they have when they began, and how did they evolve over time?

It is hard to answer the first question with any degree of certainty, but there are indications that beliefs that today we would categorize as “concerning the supernatural” emerged around 100,000 to 90,000 years ago. How do we infer this? Because that’s the approximate time that we encounter the most ancient graves with anything like objects that accompany the deceased person (e.g., source). Burials might have happened even earlier (though not much earlier), but a plain burial is not evidence for belief in an afterlife. For example, the relatives of the deceased person might loathe to see their previously living relative being consumed by scavengers.^(*) But if there are objects in the grave, together with the dead body, what purpose could these objects serve other than to accompany the person in his or her afterlife? Of course, it is always possible to object to this idea, countering that the living relatives might not want to be seeing the deceased person’s belongings anymore, because such objects would cause them psychological pain. It is always possible to speculate with counter-arguments against something that is a mere interpretation of a fact (the fact is that objects were found in graves), but one should keep the various interpretations under a rational perspective. For instance, if you want to get rid of objects, you can dump them somewhere else, not necessarily in the grave (as if the latter is a trash bin); also, we don’t find just any random collection of belongings, but ones of particular types, of rather symbolic value; finally, even if some exceptional culture used to dump belongings to graves to get rid of them, there should be others that practiced the more common tradition of placing only objects of symbolic value together with the deceased. If we can’t find this practice before 100,000 years ago, most probably it is because people did not have the cognitive capacity to entertain the idea of afterlife prior to that time.

But the precise time at which belief in the afterlife emerged is not very important. What is more important is to understand what kinds of religious beliefs our ancestors used to have during most of our existence as a species. Given that their mode of subsistence was that of the hunter-gatherer until fairly recently (i.e., until around 10,000 years ago), we can draw conclusions about their religious beliefs by observing the few remaining modern hunter-gatherers. Anthropologists have been doing precisely that for a long time, and a lot of data has been accumulated. The overall picture that emerges is that hunter-gatherer religious (or better described as supernatural) beliefs revolve around souls of deceased ancestors, witches, fairies, other spirits, etc.. When something bad and unexpected happens, such as the roof of a hut collapsing, the explanation offered can be that some imaginary but well-known bad witch caused this intentionally, to hurt some people (in Boyer^[3], ch.1). The members of the tribe might gather and discuss, trying to figure out why the witch wanted to cause harm, and how to appease her. Bad weather might be caused by the displeased souls of ancestors, and thunders might be their angry voices. If one walks alone, away from the tribe, spirits good and bad accompany this person, who is then at their mercy. This is a mere medley of typical hunter-gatherer supernatural beliefs. Since they do not possess any more specific beliefs about gods or God, we might call these beliefs religious, instead of superstitious.

However, today not only most people do not live in a hunter-gatherer world, but also most people do not have religious beliefs of the hunter-gatherer kind, such as those described in the previous paragraph. Today the overwhelming majority of people are believers of a handful of religions, the dominant ones among which are descendants of Judaism. This change in “style” of religious beliefs is not a coincidence. The hunter-gatherer “style” of beliefs was unsuitable for the later, agricultural world, who developed beliefs in specific gods, who were often also creators of the world, or of parts of the world.

• The Egyptians believed in Amun (or Ammon, the creator), Ra (sun-god), Osiris (god of the dead), Isis (goddess of magic, wife of Osiris), Nut (sky-goddess, wife of Ra), Geb (earth-god, lover of Nut), Thoth (god of wisdom), Seth (desert-god), Horus (son of Isis and Osiris), etc. There were quarrels among gods (Seth killed his brother Osiris, who thus became king of the dead), illicit love affairs (Nut flirting with Geb), wars (Horus against Seth), as well as stories about how and why the Nile floods and fertilizes the land once a year, how the sun cruises the sky and shines on the earth once every day, and so on. Such stories and characters constituted the Egyptian mythology.
• The Greeks believed in Zeus (king of the Olympian gods), Poseidon (sea-god), Hera (wife of Zeus), Athena (goddess of wisdom), Apollon (god of music), Ares (war-god), Artemis (goddess of hunting), Demeter (goddess of crops), Aphrodite (goddess of love), Hades (god of the dead), and more. There were again quarrels and wars among gods (Zeus became king by overthrowing his father Cronos, together with the rest of the Titans, after a fierce battle), illicit love affairs (Zeus must be the record holder, hiding his love affairs with mortal women from his wife Hera, usually transforming them into some animal). Again, there were numerous stories constituting the Greek mythology; stories about how the world came to be, how people learned to use fire (the good Titan Prometheus gave it to people after stealing it from Zeus, who then gave him a harsh punishment), how Zeus decided to purge the world and all people in a Great Deluge, save for a single couple (Deucalion and his wife, Pyrrha), who built an ark, and after nine days of floating on water, their ark touched ground on the peak of mount Parnassos.^(*) Greek mythology is known to us in great detail, largely due to the focus of the Western world on its ancient Greek heritage.
• The Romans later inherited the Greek gods and their stories wholesale, in the grandest act of plagiarism the world has ever known. They only romanized the names of the gods: Zeus became Jupiter, Poseidon – Neptune, Hera – Juno, Athena – Minerva, Apollon – Apollo, Ares – Mars, Artemis – Diana, Demeter – Ceres, Aphrodite – Venus, Hades – Pluto, Cronos – Saturn, and so on.
• The Jews believed in a single God, who was later adopted by Christianity and Islam. The Jewish mythology included its own versions of creation, Great Flood, wars (except that since there were no other gods to fight with, in this case it was God’s chosen people, the Jews, who were waging wars against neighboring tribes), and so on. But there are great differences among the Jewish beliefs and those of all others. Specifically, whereas most other peoples (or at least the educated individuals among them) were more-or-less aware of the myth-o-logical (i.e., story-telling) nature of their beliefs, the Jews took their stories seriously. Whereas among their contemporary cultures (e.g., Greeks, Romans) there were thinkers who believed that mythology was a bunch of fairy tales for the masses, and openly expressed this view in their writings, among the Jews there is not a single person known to have expressed an opinion opposing the official dogma; and this is not a great mystery, because opposing Jewish religion was punishable by death. Not only did the Jews believe in the literal truth of their mythology, but this attitude was inherited by their descendant religions: even today, there are plenty of Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Jewish Bible (the Old Testament, in Christian terms), although a rather larger number of Christians believe that the Old Testament account is figurative (an “allegory”); in the Muslim world, the situation is not very different from the ancient Jewish one: the Koran is believed to be the word of God (Allah), and in most Muslim nations^(*) disbelief in the literal truth of the Koran is punishable by death.

The Jewish beliefs are the progenitors of religious memes that later spread like wildfire in the world, so the Jewish religion is a special one in the context of the evolution of religion. It reveals how religious concepts changed. As a case in point, the God of the Old Testament (O.T., or Jewish Bible) is theoretically the same God as the one of contemporary Christianity; but in practice, the O.T. God was very different. He had very different attributes from the Christian God. The latter is a more “evolved” version of the former. For one thing, the O.T. God was a physical entity. He had a voice, and legs to walk with. According to Gen 3:8, Adam and Eve heard God’s voice who was walking on the garden of Eden, and they scurried somewhere to hide themselves, feeling guilty because they had just eaten from the forbidden fruit. Then God has a dialogue with Adam and Eve (“Where art thou?”, etc.). We should note that the story is not meant to be read as a mere metaphor, because the garden of Eden (into which God was doing his walking) was a very real, physical garden on Earth, situated among four rivers known to the ancient Hebrews, one of which was the well-known river Euphrates (Gen 2:10-14), so Eden was some place here on Earth, somewhere in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), where Euphrates flows. The idea that the story of Adam and Eve should be read as an allegory dawned only later to some people who saw the absurdity of believing it literally (although not all other believers perceive it as absurd).

Now, if God had physical legs to walk with on a physical garden, and presumably a mouth as well, one wonders, what other organs did that God have? He couldn’t be an assembly of just two legs and a mouth, could he? There should be a head with a brain (that did the thinking before the talking), a body to hold the head and legs together, and who knows what else. But this is not the only narrative in the O.T. that describes an anthropomorphic God. In Exd 33:9-23, for example, God talks to Moses “face to face” (Exd 33:11) shortly before giving him the ten commandments. Moses pleads to God to allow him to see his face, God refuses (because anyone who sees his face must die, Exd 33:20), but allows Moses to see his back parts (Exd 33:23). Well, if the Jewish God had a head and legs to walk with, it is little wonder that he also possessed a back side (along with its appurtenances, presumably), but what is important is that the excerpts from Exodus show a consistent view of God in the O.T. This anthropomorphic view contrasts sharply with the Christian God, who is supposed to be a pure spirit, devoid of human-like features such as legs, mouth, head, sex, etc. (though not of thought — read this page of mine to see the problems that arise with a God who thinks). By the time Islam was established, the Christian God had already acquired his present-day attributes, so Islam inherited the idea of an abstract God — a “pure spirit”.

The O.T. God’s physicality and human-like figure, as opposed to the later Christian/Islamic spiritual God, is only one indicator of the evolution that religion went through. Another indicator is the evolution of God’s morality. This is the subject of the following section.

2.1 Biological Foundations of Morality and its Evolution

The O.T. God is a God whose acts would be objectively judged as morally despicable by any person of today who is not blinded by the viral memes of Judaism and Christianity. To corroborate the previous statement with some evidence, recall that God obliterates two cities by burning all their inhabitants — apparently including the babies — because they were immoral,^(*) but saving one couple: Lot and his wife, who however made the error to turn and look back over her shoulder, and was instantly turned to a pillar of salt (Gen 19:24-25); earlier, the same man, Lot, had proposed to some thugs who were pestering him (trying to break the door of his house), to give them his two virgin daughters, to do as they pleased with them (Gen 19:8), provided the men would leave Lot and his male guests in peace! In an earlier episode, God exterminates the entire population of Earth in a Great Flood (except Noah and his family; again, favoritism does not seem to be an accusation that would make God — or rather, the authors of the Bible — blush). Even earlier, God asks an old man, Abraham, to sacrifice his only son, and the moment Abraham is ready to deliver the deadly blow with a knife to the child on the altar, God replaces the child with a ram.^(*) But at a later instance, a virgin girl is roasted on the altar by her father, Jephthah, a general of the Jews, who vowed to God that he would sacrifice the first person he would see upon returning home, should God help him achieve a great military victory (Jdg 11:30-40); this time God did not deem it necessary to replace the poor victim with some ovine, so the girl was turned to the first documented human barbeque. This is only a brief anthology of the bloodthirsty violence and — by today’s standards — moral corruption that is presented as virtuous and commendable (or merely worth-mentioning) throughout the Old Testament. A much more complete one can be found in Dawkins’s The God Delusion,^[13] pp. 237-250.

What happened to God later? Why did God change so drastically, and from a genocidal, misogynist, diabolically jealous bigot^(*) — in comparison to whom, Satan appears like a true angel — turned into the fatherly benign spirit of the A.D. times? We must believe either the incredible, namely, that God himself improved, or a much more economical explanation: that people’s ideas about their own selves (how they should behave, etc.), improved, and this improvement was reflected in how people imagined their God. We have a different set of moral principles now, according to which it is immoral for a higher authority to inflict damage on the weak and helpless.^(*) This was not so only a few decades ago, and it keeps appearing worse and worse as we move back in time (^[13], pp. 262-272). How did we acquire our modern concepts about morality? Where did our morality come from? Could it ever have come from religions that brandish holy books which extol the making of shish kebab out of the flesh of virgin girls? Highly unlikely. Could there be a more natural origin of our morality? This is examined in what follows.

Once, a few years ago, I received an email message from a psychologist writing from Fort Belvoir, Virginia. She had just read an earlier version of this page of mine, where I discuss what I consider to be the two main contradictions in religious ideas about God, and wanted to give me a lesson in matters of faith, belief, the universe, where we come from, how I “do not understand God’s attributes as revealed by scripture”, and so on. The next day I received a message from her husband, “a physicist for 23 years and now a seminarian”, who, after presenting his religious point of view, cautioned me about his wife. He said, “I will argue for [God’s existence], she will attempt to prove.” Indeed, the next day his wife, filled to the brim with religious certitude and her culture’s arrogance,^(*) set out to prove to me that God exists, by drawing what she thought was an ace from her sleeve; specifically, posing what she thought is a real conundrum for any atheist: where did our morality come from?

After exchanging a few more messages, I soon realized there was exactly zero possibility to establish any line of communication with that person. She seemed to me as mind-deaf as a rock (a rock of faith, perhaps?), and after a few days I dropped out of the discussion, figuring that if we continued, we would be talking like signal-exchanging ships cruising along opposite directions at night. What remained in my mind as an interesting idea after this exchange was the psychologist’s conviction that the question “Where did our morality come from?” is answered like this: “It came from God! We are moral because God is moral, and He wants us to be moral, too!”

Amazing. Why would people who are expected to be rational thinkers, like the psychologist and her ex-physicist husband, consider this circular reasoning^(*) to be an answer at all? How can rational people fail to see the sorely missing explanation in this “explanation” of human morality when they attribute it to the morality of a higher being? Why don’t they ask themselves, why is that morality the way it is and not otherwise? Conceivably, we could be living in an evil God’s universe, couldn’t we? It could be a malicious God who has an army of scourge-inflicting angels to serve him, and who has banished the only benevolent angel, the Satan, to hell: the only place where good things happen 24/7. That God would want us to be bad like him, and so, crime would be rampant in our world, and the few good-doers would be incarcerated, serving long sentences in jail. Why is reality not like that?

Religious people usually balk at the idea of questioning the origin of their God’s attributes. Typically, their answer is “God’s ways are mysterious”, not realizing that this is another way of saying “I don’t know, but I don’t want to admit that I don’t know.” The issue of the shutting down of the faculty of logic by religion will be examined later on, but now we can try to answer this question: Would it ever be possible for us to live in a malicious God’s world, as described above?

Anyone who believes that the origin of our morality is God and can think rationally would have to admit that the fact that “good” is laudable and “evil” is punishable in our world is a matter of mere chance. There is a 50% chance that our God could be evil,^(*) and wanted us to be evil, too. It so happened that our God is good.

But my view is different. No, our world could not be one in which evil prevails and good is the exception. It is not a coincidence at all that we live in a world in which teachers and spiritual leaders urge us to be good, and in which the minority of people who commit crimes are isolated from the majority. Our morality is explicable by recourse to biological principles, according to which there is no 50-50% chance to be moral or immoral; our world could not be different from the way it is. This is what is shown immediately below.

Let’s start with a thought experiment, which I will then implement as a program and turn into an actual experiment, so we’ll verify that the thought experiment really works that way.

Suppose there are two kinds of animals in an environment that includes a limited amount of food for those animals: some plants, for instance, which the animals eat. Call the two kinds of animals the W’s and the T’s — my choice of letters will become evident in a minute. So, say we start with several individuals of kind W, and an equal number of kind T animals. Both kinds of animals have the custom to take food and cache it for later consumption. But — and here is the difference between the two kinds — the W-animals are all “workers”, which means they simply pick up food when they find it in their vicinity; whereas the T-animals are occasionally “thieves”, which means the following: sometimes they pick up food when they find it on their way, but some other times they steal food from their conspecifics. How much they manage to steal is a parameter of the experiment. Also, what percent of the T-animals comprises thieves, and how often such an individual will actually commit a theft (when meeting a conspecific) are different parameters of this imagined world. The T-animals never attack the W-animals, nor vice-versa. (Why? see the readers’ reactions, below, for the explanation.)

Otherwise, each animal lives approximately for at most a given time, and when it dies, it is “returned to the environment”, i.e., there is a chance that a plant might grow somewhere after the death of the animal. While living, once the animal possesses enough “energy” (which means, once its cache of stored food items exceeds a threshold), it can give birth to another animal of the same kind, which starts roaming in the environment, looking for food, and so on. Suppose all animals of each kind are identical in their structure, i.e., there are no mutations, hence no biological evolution within the time-frame that our experiment lasts.

In short, what is going on is an abstraction of what one would expect in an environment where two species compete for the same resources, within a time short enough to regard biological evolution as negligible. However, one species comprises honest workers who never steal from each other, whereas the other species includes thieves who sometimes steal from each other. What would happen to these two species as time goes by? Would they continue to exist forever, competing for resources? Would the thieves disappear over time, or would they thrive at the expense of the honest workers?

My guess, when I thought of this situation, was that the T-animals would gradually disappear. How slowly, or how fast? Depends on how many of them practice theft, and how effective the thieves are at stealing: the more stealing that occurs, the faster the T-species should disappear. The thieves themselves, individually, might thrive and spawn more descendants than those who do not steal. (Recall that since these are animals, there are no prisons to incarcerate or punish in other ways the thieves; so there is no reason why the thieves should not thrive.) But the species of T-animals as a whole would disappear as time goes by.

Why? Because, regardless of the habits and fates of individuals, if we take a bird’s-eye view and look at the two species as two wholes, we’ll see that the W-species is a more efficient consumer of food, i.e., a more efficient transducer of food into energy (motion), than the T-species. The former converts all the food it encounters into energy and descendants, whereas the latter occasionally “eats its own flesh”: that’s what an act of stealing is. If food items are found both in the environment and in the possession of T-animals, then each time a T-animal steals food items from others, no food accrues to the T-species as a whole; instead, some food items are exchanged among its members. This might benefit some members, but it would be detrimental for the species as a whole. As an analogy, suppose your body corresponds to the T-species, and the cells of your body are the individual T-animals. Some of your lung cells are responsible for taking oxygen from the air and direct it into your bloodstream. If all cells do this job as expected, fine. But if some of them, instead of taking oxygen from the outside, attack neighboring cells and strip them of their oxygen molecules, your respiration will suffer. If all of your lung cells are into this stealing business, you’ll soon die of asphyxiation.

Is this thought correct? Theory and thought experiments like the above are the province of philosophers. I am not a philosopher, I like to build systems, usually by programming them. When I have a question and a theory such as the above, I immediately think of writing a computer application that simulates the system exactly as I imagined it, so that I let the program run and see what happens. If I were a mathematician, I would like to put down the “axioms” of my system (“there are two kinds of animals”, “each animal lives for time x”, and so on), and then try to prove that either the proposition “species T as a whole disappears”, or the proposition “species T thrives indefinitely”, follows as a theorem. But, not only am I not a mathematician, but I suspect that real mathematicians would have trouble proving such propositions. What I described above is called a “chaotic system” in computational theory, and often the only way to deal with such systems is to let them run and observe what happens.^(*) So, let’s do it: let’s build such a system and see what the outcome is. Here is the program:

What you see above is the space (black rectangle) where our animals live their lives. The space is littered with food items (“plants”, green circles). It contains also some W-animals (yellow), and an equal number of T-animals (red). As it stands initially, the space has 1500 food items, 50 W’s, and 50 T’s, but these numbers are parameters that you can change (by clicking on the settings button , see below).

Now click on the button that shows a running figure . You’ll see that the yellow and red (W and T) animals are set in motion. While they move randomly, they encounter food items, grab them, and grow fatter. After collecting enough food (if they do), they might spawn more of their kind (one child per birth event). After some time, they die. A “time unit” is called an “epoch” in such simulations, and each animal makes one random step in space per epoch. You can see the number of elapsed epochs on the bottom-right corner, on the status bar. The same status bar shows the numbers of W-animals (“workers”, on the left), and T-animals (“thieves”, center). Watching how these numbers change is the whole point of running this simulation.

There is a control for the speed of the simulation, on the tool bar (top). After you familiarize yourself with what is going on, increase the speed a bit, and then even further, until what happens on the main area (the “space”) is too fast to keep track of, so then concentrate on how the numbers of W’s and T’s change. With the given parameters, the T-species will vanish at any time between epochs 1000 and 8000 (these are not hard limits, but an approximate range), whereas species W will stabilize its size somewhere around 100 individuals. No matter how many times I repeated this simulation, I always observed the same result: species T invariably vanished. You can repeat the simulation by pausing it first (clicking on button , which is how the -button appears while the program is running), then initializing it by clicking on the “new space” button (), and setting it again into motion (, once more).

I would like to list now precisely the parameters of this simulation, because they correspond to the axioms (initial assumptions) of an axiomatic theory. The exact values will also help the reader judge the reasonableness of the system.

• The space has a width of 100 locations, and a height of 64 locations, or a total of 6400 locations.
• There are 1500 food items (green).
• Each food item remains eternally fixed on one location, until picked up by an animal.
• Animals move randomly by one location up, down, left, right, or diagonally at every epoch.
• Animals live for at least 150 epochs (provided they find food to support themselves with energy during this time, see below), after which they have a probability of 0.10 to die at every subsequent epoch. (This probability is set only to avoid the visual effect of seeing all animals of a certain generation die and disappear in unison; it plays no essential role, hence it could be set to 1.)
• After collecting 6 food items, an animal can give birth to another one, identical to itself, with a probability of 0.75. The child is placed on a random location in space. The parent loses energy in the amount of one food item at every birth event.
• Animals can make up to 50 steps with the energy supplied by one food item. After completing 50 steps, they have a probability of 0.95 to lose one food item at every subsequent epoch. (This probability is set only to avoid the visual effect of seeing food items appearing in space in unison; it plays no essential role, hence it could be set to 1.)
• Animals can die not only of old age, but also of exhaustion: because they made at least 50 steps and lost the last food item remaining in their possession.
• Each animal starts its life with an energy equivalent to one food item. (Therefore, if an animal does not find a single food item within the first 50 steps of its life, it dies.)
• When an animal dies of exhaustion it returns to the environment a single food item (which is placed somewhere randomly in space) with a probability of 0.95. If it dies of old age, whatever food items it had in its possession at the time of its death are returned to the environment (placed randomly in space).
• There are two kinds of animals: the W type (yellow) and the T type (red). Initially there are 50 W’s and 50 T’s.
• W’s never interact with T’s, or with each other; they only interact with food items, as already described.
• T’s have a probability of 0.10 to have the “psychology of a thief”, as described below. This “psychology” is given to them at birth according to the mentioned probability, and they retain it throughout their lives. (Thus, out of the original 50 T’s, only around 5 will actually behave like a thief; the rest will behave identically to the workers.)
• When a T has the “psychology of a thief”, it behaves as follows: upon encountering another T, it has a 0.80 chance that it will steal 90% of the food items of the other T; but upon encountering a food item, it has only 0.20 chance to pick it up. Thus, T’s with the psychology of a thief usually acquire their energy by stealing, not by “working honestly to earn their living”.

The reader will notice that there are plenty of parameters used in the above description (i.e., all those numbers mentioned explicitly). Several of these parameters are essential for the viability of the populations, and the reader can find out what their effect is by changing them, clicking on the settings button (). Thus, for example, if the probability of 0.95 for an animal (worker or thief) to turn into a food item after dying is lowered somewhat, then there are not enough food items returned to the environment during animal deaths, and the populations die gradually (regardless of their type), due to starvation; whereas if this probability is increased somewhat, then too many food items are generated over ti