User:Muntuwandi/Origin of religion

The origin of religion refers to the emergence of religious behavior during the course of human evolution. When humans first became religious remains unknown. However, there is credible evidence of religious behavior from Middle Paleolithic era (300-50kya).

Religion

Though religious behavior varies widely between the world's cultures, religion is a cultural universal found in all human populations. Common elements include:

• a notion of the transcendent, supernatural or numinous, usually involving entities like ghosts, demons or deities, and practices involving magic and divination.
• an aspect of ritual and liturgy, almost invariably involving music and dance
• societal norms of morality (ethos) and virtue (arete)
• a set of
  beliefs

Primate behavior

See also Morality and Evolution of morality

Dr. de Waal and Barbara King both view human morality as having grown out of primate sociality. Though morality is a unique human trait, many social animals such as primates, dolphins and whales have been known to exhibit premoral sentiments. According to Michael Shermer, the following characteristics are shared by humans and other social animals, particularly the great apes:

attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring ahout what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. ^[4]

De Waal contends that all social animals have had to restrain or alter their behavior for group living to be worthwhile. Premoral sentiments evolved in primate societies as a method of restraining individual selfishness and building more cooperative groups. For any social species, the benefits of being part of an altruistic group outweigh the benefits of individual selfishness. For example, lack of group cohesion could make individuals more vulnerable to attack from outsiders. Being part of group may also improve the chances of finding food. This is evident among animals that hunt in packs to take down large or dangerous prey.

All social animals have hierarchical societies in which each member knows its own place. Social order is maintained by rules of expected behavior and dominant group members enforce order through punishment. However, higher order primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. Chimpanzees remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. chimpanzees are more likely to

Chimpanzees live fission-fusion groups that average 50 individuals. It is likely that early ancestors of humans lived in groups of similar size. Based on the size of extant hunter gatherer societies, recent paleolithic hominids lived in bands of a few hundred individuals. As community size increased over the course of human evolution, greater enforcement to achieve group cohesion would have been required. Morality may evolved in these bands of 100 to 200 people as a means of social control, conflict resolution and group solidarity. Dr. de Waal argues that human morality has two extra levels of sophistication that are not found in primate societies. Humans enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. People also apply a degree of judgment and reason, not seen in the animal kingdom.

Religion is thought to have emerged after morality. Religion built upon morality by expanding the social scrutiny of individual behavior to include supernatural agents. By including ever watchful ancestors, spirits and gods in the social realm, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.^[6] The adaptive value of religion would have enhanced group survival.^{[7] [8]}

Prehistoric evidence of religion

Paleolithic burials

The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead. Most animals display only a casual interest in the dead of their own species. Humans are therefore unique in their treatment of the dead^[9]. Ritual burial thus represents a significant advancement in human behavior. Ritual burial represent an awareness of life and death and a possible belief in the afterlife. Philip Lieberman states "burials with grave goods clearly signify religious practices and concern for the dead that transcends daily life"^[10]. The earliest evidence for treatment of the dead comes from Atapuerca in spain. At this location the bones of 30 individuals believed to be Homo heidelbergensis have been found in a pit.^[11]

Burial rituals incorporating grave goods may have been invented by the anatomically modern hominids who emigrated from Africa to the Middle East 100,000 years ago.[15]

The use of symbolism

The use of

Artwork or the use of pigments is seen as evidence of a mind capable of religious thought. Steven Mithen states that the very first art is intimately associated with religious ideas. There is some evidence of ritual behavior from Middle Stone Age sites in africa such as one site in South Africa dated to 70,000 years ago. [17]. Pigments are of little practical use to hunter gatherers, thus evidence of their use is interpreted as symbolic or for ritual purposes. Several MSA sites in Africa indicate increased use of pigments, which are thought to relate to ritual activity, dating back as far as 100,000 years ago.^[18]Upper paleolithic cave art provides some of the credible evidence of religious thought. Cave paintings at Chauvet depict creatures that are half human and half animal, a phenomenon commonly associated among shamanistic practices.

The evolution of the brain

The religious mind is one consequence of a brain that is large enough to formulate religious and philosophical ideas. ^[19]. During human evolution, the hominid brain tripled in size , peaking 500,000 years ago.

Much of the brain's expansion took place in the

Lewis Wolpert argues that causal beliefs that emerged from tool use played a major role in the evolution of belief. The manufacture of complex tools requires, firstly, creating a mental image of an object that does not exist naturally before actually making artifact. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used, which requires an understanding of causality^[21] Hence the manufacture of these tools represents the capacity to imagine gods and other spiritual beings that are not naturally occurring. ^[22].

Language and religion

Religion requires a system of symbolic communication such as language to be transmitted from one individual to another. Philip Lieberman states "human religious thought and moral sense clearly rest on a cognitive-linguistic base," ^[10] From this premise science writer Nicholas Wade states:

"Like most behaviors that are found in societies throughout the world, religion must have been present in the ancestral human population before the dispersal from Africa 50,000 years ago. Although religious rituals usually involve dance and music, they are also very verbal, since the sacred truths have to be stated. If so, religion, at least in its modern form, cannot pre-date the emergence of language. It has been argued earlier that language attained its modern state shortly before the exodus from Africa. If religion had to await the evolution of modern, articulate language, then it too would have emerged shortly before 50,000 years ago. "^[23]

Neolithic religions

The neolithic revolution brought about significant changes in the role that religion played in human societies. Up until the neolithic 11000 years ago, all humans around the world lived as semi-nomadic hunter gatherers. The population density of these hunter gather societies was relatively low. As the pace of technological development intensified following the great leap forward the global human population began to increase. Begining in the Near East, populations abandoned the nomadic lifestlye and adopted sedentism 13,000 years ago. The subsequent invention of agriculture led to dramatic social changes to human societies around the world. Population densities increased and humans began living in settlements comprising thousands of individuals. The chiefdoms amd states that arose allowed for division of labor, both socially and economically.

Hunter gatherers societies normally practice animism, shamanism and ancestor worship. Religion became an institution during this period and had several roles, chiefly, maintaining social order through the justification of social hierarchies^[4]. A major technological advance that had a major impact on religion was the invention of writing 4000 years ago.Some scientists regard the Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt as the oldest know religious texts in the world dating to between 3300 to 3150 BCE.^{[24] [25]} It is these factors that led to the development of the world religions during the Axial Age.

Psychology of religion

Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just like hearts, lungs and immune systems, cognition has functional structure that has a genetic basis, and therefore evolved by natural selection. Like organs, this functional structure should be universally shared and should solve important problems of survival. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve.

Psychological processes

The cognitive psychology of religion is a new field of inquiry which attempts to account for the psychological processes that underlie religious thought and practice. In his book Religion Explained, Pascal Boyer asserts there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. Boyer is concerned with the various psychological processes involved in ideas concerning the gods. Boyer builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who first argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology, and purposeful human constructs about the world (for example, bodiless beings with thoughts and emotions) that make religious cognitions striking and memorable.

Cognitive studies

There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, believed that religion was an exaptation or a Spandrel, in other words that religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.^[26][27][28] Sch mechanisms may include: the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (

Some scholars have suggested that religion is genetically "hardwired" into the human condition. One controversial hypothesis, the

References