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Is religion inevitable for any conscious evolving species?

carlosy

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Is religion (the belief into some concepts of supernatural forces or entities) an inevitable step or byproduct or even necessary in the evolution of any conscious species during the process of learning and becoming a more advanced society?

I tend to think it is almost inevitable.

I've put this topic into the science section, because it is not about the contents of any religion.
 
A sample size of one is insufficient. We haven't met any non-terrestrial races.

I recall reading in anthropology that most, but not all, human tribes had some notion of spirituality. Many of these wouldn't be recognized by non-anthropologists as religion qua religion.

On the other hand, my dog is clearly conscious and self-aware, and may meet the criteria for sapience (damned dodgy concept, that). I have no way to know if my dog experiences any form of religious experience, but available evidence suggests religion is a purely human thing.

I can't think of an argument that would require religion as a basic tenant of being human. English is a slippery language: It allows us to have names for things that don't exist. Everyone knows what a unicorn is, but that doesn't imply that unicorns exist. By the same token, pretty much everyone has some idea of what "supernatural" means, but that doesn't mean anything supernatural exists.

The single biggest predictor of your religious views is your place of birth. The second best predictor is your parents' religious views. This suggests that religion is a cultural phenomenon, but says nothing about inevitability.
 
The problem is that even those tribes aren't really independent samples. We know that Neanderthals already had ceremonial burial, and due to the presence of grave goods we can take a pretty good guess that they expected SOME kind of afterlife.

In fact, while the slam dunk evidence only appears with the Neanderthals, we have very probable evidence of ceremonial burial as early as Homo naledi, which is actually a very primitive hominid with a rather small brain. We're talking 450 to 600 cubic cm worth of brain in Homo naledi, vs 1450 cubic cm in modern humans or about 1500 cubic cm in Neanderthals. We're talking about chimp sized brains, and they figured out ceremonial burial.

More importantly, it's WAY before Homo Sapiens evolved.

So basically all those tribes are descendants of some people who had religion all along. They may have refined it into their own version over enough tens of thousands of years, but they didn't discover religion independently.

So essentially the TL;DR version is: we're back to having a sample size of one.
 
carlosy said:
I tend to think it is almost inevitable.
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I agree with you, because the nature of evolution means sentience will come before science, so questions will be asked, that in the lack of scientific data, are likely to include supernatural answers.

sphenisc said:
Might be relevant if you regard superstition as a stepping stone to religion.
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Religion is a superstition, so I'd say it's very relevant.
 
DallasDad said:
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On the other hand, my dog is clearly conscious and self-aware, and may meet the criteria for sapience (damned dodgy concept, that). I have no way to know if my dog experiences any form of religious experience, but available evidence suggests religion is a purely human thing.

---snipped---
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While I'm not fluent in the language, there are indications that my cat has religious notions.

He seems to believe I'm some sort of weather god. When it's too hot, rainy, or particularly when it snows, he will loudly complain to me and appears to expect me to fix it.
 
Purely from a logical standpoint, it seems likely that a species with a dawning awareness of self and environment would develop some kind of rudimentary spiritual belief system to try to explain the things around them that they cannot otherwise explain. Where does the sun go between sunset and sunrise? What are those points of light in the sky and why do they change position with the seasons.. and why do the seasons occur anyway? And what about those wandering points of light that don't seem to follow the rules?
 
smartcooky said:
Purely from a logical standpoint, it seems likely that a species with a dawning awareness of self and environment would develop some kind of rudimentary spiritual belief system to try to explain the things around them that they cannot otherwise explain. Where does the sun go between sunset and sunrise? What are those points of light in the sky and why do they change position with the seasons.. and why do the seasons occur anyway? And what about those wandering points of light that don't seem to follow the rules?
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Precisely and I think Richard Dawkins called it god of the gaps.
 
Agent detection bias is relevant here, I think. Conscious agents whose predators and prey are also, to some extent at least, conscious agents are almost bound to attribute much they don't understand to more powerful conscious agents, and other cognitive biases will tend to confirm that attribution.

"The gods are angry" is an obvious, and perfectly adequate, explanation for thunder and lightning. It just doesn't happen to be the correct one.
 
How exactly do we define "religion" for purposes of this question? Some sort of organized system of belief in a deity?

Religion seems to fall under the more general category of "ideology", which seems to be essential for social organization. But the ideology need not necessarily be based on deity worship.
 
Lately I've encountered arguments that political belief systems or conspiracy theories are essentially religions, but that seems to be too broad of a definition. I prefer a more traditional definition (i.e. narrow definition) of the term "religion".
 
Puppycow said:
How exactly do we define "religion" for purposes of this question? Some sort of organized system of belief in a deity?

Religion seems to fall under the more general category of "ideology", which seems to be essential for social organization. But the ideology need not necessarily be based on deity worship.
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IMO, the right term isn't really "religion" as that implies a system, organisation, religious leaders, praying/worshipping, and temples or churches. The term we should probably be using is "spirituality".

Cultures in the collective history of humanity all seem to have had gods that are directly derived from nature, be they actual objects such as the Sun, the Moon and the Sky, physical phenomena such as fire, rain and thunder, and non-physical phenomena such as love, reason and wisdom. They anthropomorphize those imagined to be responsible for the unexplainable, creating accounts that are handed down through the generations to become mytho-historical stories the origins of which are untraceable.

It wouldn't take very many generations for those observations of something with no explanation to lead to attributing that to not just a living being, but to a deity; a divine being that lives beyond the sky, or in the sea or underground, and eventually, over a long period of time, becoming what we would now recognize as the beginnings of a religion.
 
Not sure why. We already have a term for organized religion, so I'm pretty sure disorganized is also an option. Plus, the more you basically demand that it has to be exactly like whatever you grew up with, the more you exclude actual world religions from being a religion.

E.g., Shintoism is pretty much the national religion of Japan, and it was very much the official religion in WW2. And it's a much more disorganized religion than any flavour of Xianity ever was.

For a start, you don't need any special qualification to have your own shrine, other than having enough people take it seriously, and it can be yours to minister just because you inherited it from your mum and dad. There is no shinto pope or bishop to tell you that you're doing it wrong, or that you need to get any approval from. If people still think that your fortunes (as in strips of horoscope-like predictions) are worth getting, congrats, it's as much of a shrine as anyone else's. And it can have started over as little as that some farmer thought some fox helped his family, and made a couple of fox statues, and other people came to pray to the fox messengers of the gods, and that was it.

And you need absolutely no qualifications whatsoever other than being unmarried and female to be a Miko, sometimes translated as shrine maiden, but basically more like an auxiliary priestess. In fact, historically it used to mean more like shamaness. (And technically is written as a female medium.) In the meantime, it's just whoever wants to play that role for ceremonies and such. If you're a priest by sole virtue of having inherited the shrine, you can have anyone be the auxiliary priestess just because she's willing to put on a traditional miko outfit and play along. You can dress your daughter up during ceremonies, and congrats, she's a priestess.

Quoth Lucky Star, "Hey, you too cosplay priestesses at your family's shrine." :p

It's played for laughs, but basically literally that is all the qualification needed. If you're willing to cosplay one at the shrine, and the shrine owner is ok with it, congrats, you're a miko. No different than putting on a maid outfit at a maid cafe.

And you don't even have to do that permanently at one shrine, mind you. They actually have thousands of years of the tradition of traveling mikos. So basically some priestess from out of town could just show up at your shrine, and if she's famous enough or you're otherwise ok with it, congrats, she can cosplay a miko at your shrine over the weekend.

Hell, in the meantime some major temples have started offering foreigner tourists the chance to work as a miko for a few days, if they're willing to pay for the experience.

Temples are also very much not important, other than as historical buildings. The important part for religion is the shrine within, which may literally be nothing more than a donation box and a bell with a rope. If some big noble wanted to build a big golden temple around his favourite shrine in his capital (which actually happened, btw), he's free to, but it doesn't make the actual shrine any better or worse than the one in someone's back yard, two blocks down from your house. I mean, the big one will get tourists bussed there, but that's not a religious difference.

They also pretty much just have a loose collection of legends, but not much in the way of actual doctrine/ideology or standardized prayers or anything. A "prayer" can be and usually IS no more than "please help me pass the exam." Then you chuck a 100 yen (about 1$) coin in the donation box, or however much you feel you need to offer, clap your hands and/or ring the bell, and you're on your merry way.

But generally, they have SOME religious customs (such as you stick a pair of chopsticks into the bowl of rice at a funeral, but it's a horribly insensitive faux pas to do that at the dinner table) but none of them really is some standardized religious doctrine.

So would you say that Shinto is NOT a religion? Surely something with tens of millions of followers, and which was the official religion of a country (in fact, a world superpower) at one point, might be reasonably argued to qualify as a religion.
 
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Hans, great description of Shinto. I've been trying to wrap my head around whether or not it qualifies as a religion for years. Thanks!
 
#Hans M.

My extensive excavations at Grotte de Wikiped conclude that attributing religious agency to Homo naledi is premature, and still contentious among the bone wranglers. Ditto any absolute certainty about Neanderthal funerary practices. In the case of the latter, we should for caution's sake stick to the idea that "they probably had the hardware, but not the software."

Of course, over long epochs of association with H. sapiens they might have picked up some superstitious practices -- and not have been wise enough to put them down again. I don't say we'll never know, because there's still a helluva lotta information yet to come out of the dirt.
 
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@DallasDad
Judging by anime ;) the Japanese have just as much trouble figuring out how Xianity works. Like, exactly what kind of magic do our mikos... err... nuns study, that it has to be a lifetime career instead of something you cosplay on weekends :p
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
Soooo... Money? Capitalism? Nation States?
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Okay, how about belief in entities that aren't made of anything.

Of course, I go along with good old Carl Gustav Bats in His Privy Jung in defining religion as any belief in the supernatural. He was no anthropologist, and I suppose he didn't have time for finely split hairs. Nor do I.

Betcha we can arrive at an economical definition of religion, although probably too inclusive to do much good.
 
Religion is the belief that unseen powers have more control over our environment and lives than we do, and that we can somehow communicate with these powers and hopefully influence them..

Entrepreneurship is responsible for individuals who came up with the idea that these unseen powers require donations of good and services, which these individuals would make sure got passed on to the proper custodians.
Somewhere along the way, this also evolved into the idea that one group of entrepreneur followers should kill other groups and take their stuff.
 
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smartcooky said:
Purely from a logical standpoint, it seems likely that a species with a dawning awareness of self and environment would develop some kind of rudimentary spiritual belief system to try to explain the things around them that they cannot otherwise explain. Where does the sun go between sunset and sunrise? What are those points of light in the sky and why do they change position with the seasons.. and why do the seasons occur anyway? And what about those wandering points of light that don't seem to follow the rules?
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A wrong explanation of something is not a religion, which is the reason why heliocentrism and genetics didn't eradicate religion. It takes more than good explanations to do so.
One thing is that cavemen came up with weird explanations for rain, thunder and draughts. Another thing is that they came up with the idea of punishing and rewarding gods who could be appeased.

The gods fulfilled a psychological need that nothing else could provide them with: They were scared ******** by an environment that they could neither understand nor control, an environment that would now and then kill them for no apparent reason. An angry god that could be appeased by sacrifices gave them (imaginary) control of things. They themselves could not control things, but their sacrifices at least allowed them an (imaginary) influence on the guys who were (believed to be) in control.

Religions are killed, i.e. rendered unnecessary, by things like irrigation, lightning rods, dams, electric light, vaccines, etc. All the things that enable us to control nature.
However, the mere existence of those things is not enough. People need to have access to them. It doesn't help you that there is a medical doctor next door if you can't pay him. The invention of modern medicine alone does not make witchdoctors (and the gods and spirits they appeal to) go away if witchdoctors are all you can afford.

I have a hard time imagining a conscious evolving species without the need for religion unless that evolving species is somehow born with full control of its environment, which I also can't imagine, so I tend to think that religion is an inevitable evolutionary step for any intelligent species.

As long as conditions make people need the 'opium of the people', religion is there to fulfill that need. If it isn't, it is invented more or less spontaneously.*


*ETA: See my link to the story about the children of Beslan and the invention of the Harry Potter religion: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9447804#post9447804
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
Soooo... Money? Capitalism? Nation States?
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Money, capitalism and nation states are real phenomena. The power of the nation that guarantees the value of the coin or note is very real. National states are based on the actual power of rulers. Even nationalism, the ideology of national states, is a real phenomenon. That you can't find an ounce of physical substance in an ideology doesn't make it supernatural.
 
The Pirahã people appear to have no concept of religion, and seem to be content with no explanation for things they cannot explain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people They have a concept of spirits but not as supreme beings or leaders. Although they now have considerable contact with modern society, they haven't developed religion.
 
Agatha said:
The Pirahã people appear to have no concept of religion, and seem to be content with no explanation for things they cannot explain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people They have a concept of spirits but not as supreme beings or leaders. Although they now have considerable contact with modern society, they haven't developed religion.
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If they believe in spirits, at least one of them named (according to the cited article*), then that's religion. Supreme beings or leading gods aren't necessary; I daresay the Egyptian priesthoods would take a hearty exception to those concepts. "Muh, mebbe YER god's da big cheese where you're set up, but not in OUR parta town! So **** off, big shots!"



* I wonder about that little story. Did the indigenes maybe have their own reasons for not venturing into those particular woods that day? Suddenly these stubborn materialists can see an invisible being? And hear him threatening them? With what, his invisible bow and arrows? His invisible superpowers?
 
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Well, I suppose you could make a case about Egyptian gods, but I think Shinto, since I mentioned it already, makes an even better case. Shinto is animism. Everything has a spirit or is a spirit. The Sun is a spirit (Amaterasu: the most powerful one and a direct ancestress of the Emperor), your late great grandma is a spirit, and so is the late Showa emperor (best known over here as Hirohito), but a tree or a grove or a river or even a sword also have a spirit. And while the Sun is a VASTLY more powerful spirit than your great-grandma, and conversely some spirits are far weaker than your late great grandma, it's still a part of a continuum. There is no abrupt qualitative difference that makes them something else, like, say, the difference between God and angels in Xianity. In fact, technically it's impossible to even fit them into fixed categories.

(Also as a side note, a kami, i.e., spirit, is not the same as a soul. A kami in fact usually has two souls.)

That said, they do have an idea of duty, both towards the kami and by the kami to fulfil their role. (It's Japan, really. Did you expect anything else than it revolving around duty?:p) Also, some kami do have various degrees of authority, though not really in the same way as God.

It's really less of a case of obey the spirits because they're your boss (they're not), but rather kinda here's what the kami can do for you, including spiritual stuff like purifying your own spirit, it's in your best interest to play nice. Well, with the good kami, anyway.
 
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HansMustermann said:
So would you say that Shinto is NOT a religion? Surely something with tens of millions of followers, and which was the official religion of a country (in fact, a world superpower) at one point, might be reasonably argued to qualify as a religion.
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I would certainly include Shinto in my narrow definition of religion. What I would not include is things like QAnon, the Democratic Party, Critical Race Theory, or Socialism.
 
sackett said:
Belief in something that isn't made of anything.
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dann said:
Money, capitalism and nation states are real phenomena. The power of the nation that guarantees the value of the coin or note is very real. National states are based on the actual power of rulers. Even nationalism, the ideology of national states, is a real phenomenon. That you can't find an ounce of physical substance in an ideology doesn't make it supernatural.
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Religions are a real phenomena for exactly the same reason nation States are: people believe they exist.
And plenty of Americans attribute supernatural powers to the US as a country with Divine Right.
 
Superstition or magical thinking is a component and probably stepping stone of religion. The harder something is to accept, it must be true regardless is a completely absent concept in other primates, let alone the rest of the animal kingdom. Brilliantly stupid. I think it is a cost of being an intelligent species who have become wise about the world.

We only have our own history to examine though. Religion has served as a powerful tool for maintaining social cohesion. Are all sufficiently intelligent beings also highly social beings? If so I think eventually these beings will share their opinions, rumors, and fantasies as fact.
 
dann said:
One thing is that cavemen came up with weird explanations for rain, thunder and draughts. Another thing is that they came up with the idea of punishing and rewarding gods who could be appeased.
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It's a short step from postulating gods cause rain to claiming gods must be appeased or there will be a drought or famine.

If you can accept one irrational, made-up explanation, others will follow.
 
Sherman Bay said:
It's a short step from postulating gods cause rain to claiming gods must be appeased or there will be a drought or famine.
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I think you miss the point of the dilemma: A creature with enough intelligence to try to make sense of the world while at the same time unable to control that world beyond making primitive tools. I think we all know that nothing is more scary than being utterly helpless, unable to do anything about the things that control our iives. The idea of omnipotent gods gives the mostly impotent creatures the consolation of being at least somewhat in control: We can appeal to them, appease them. You yourself are no match for Chechen rebels, but Jesus Christ or Harry Potter is:
... the children in Beslan who were held hostage at a school by Chechen rebels:
Carat, 11: "I was hoping that Harry Potter would come. I remembered that he had a cloak that made him invisible and he would come and wrap me in it, and we'd be invisible and we'd escape."
Nine-year-old Laima draws pictures of what she saw when she was held hostage:
"I found a little cross on the gym's floor. I kept it on me for all of the three days. It helped me to survive."
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A correct explanation of droughts doesn't do much unless we have the technology to do something about it: irrigation. An explanation alone doesn't make us safe from lightning. The lightning rod does.
Evidence-based explanations of diseases don't help us unless they have been applied and turned into evidence-based medicine - and we have access to that medicine.

If you can accept one irrational, made-up explanation, others will follow.
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No, that's not how it goes. There are too many examples of very bright individuals who are also religious: Bob Bakker, Martin Gardner. They can't (or don't want to) let go of that one consoling idea, but they don't fall for any others. Religion isn't simply an "irrational, made-up explanation". There are an awful lot of them that have nothing at all to do with religion. That face masks are dangerous, for instance, or that Covid-19 is a hoax meant to enslave are not religious ideas. Some of the people who believe in them are atheists.
 
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Venom said:
Are all sufficiently intelligent beings also highly social beings?
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Primates, parrots, crows and dolphins are. Octopuses aren't. There is no way of knowing about the rest of the universe until we can ask them.
 
dann said:
Primates, parrots, crows and dolphins are. Octopuses aren't. There is no way of knowing about the rest of the universe until we can ask them.
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Point is there is quite a gap between humans the rest of the primates, let alone parrots, crows, and dolphins. The rest don't appear to be able to do much with things they have not directly observed or cannot logically infer. I wonder how long hominids have been thinking this way.
 
Agreed. They are not "sufficiently intelligent beings," but they are the closest we've got. And most of them are "highly social beings."
 
No. I think even for humans religion is something of an anomaly.

Basically a small handful of monotheistic religions managed to parasite themselves onto major social/political/government advances.

Honestly had the Christian/Muslim/Jewish religions not managed to follow the spice routes around the world I think the odds are good, not certain but good, that religion would have died off. The vague, less organized Earthy and ancestor worship religions would have faded quicker had they not had the Monotheism to really keep "religion" going.
 
JoeMorgue said:
No. I think even for humans religion is something of an anomaly.
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The perennial philosophy is at the esoteric core of the world's major religions.

The concept comes up everywhere and in every epoch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy

Honestly had the Christian/Muslim/Jewish religions not managed to follow the spice routes around the world I think the odds are good, not certain but good, that religion would have died off. The vague, less organized Earthy and ancestor worship religions would have faded quicker had they not had the Monotheism to really keep "religion" going.
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There is more religion in the world than those Abrahamic ones.

The earlier religions grew into the monotheistic religions in the Axial age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age

Belief in the universe is a form of monotheism.

The universe is the omnipresent basis of all real things.

We think the universe is special compared to the omnipresent basis of all real things in other religions. But, like Catholics think there idea of God is special compared to Protestants. Ultimately, it's all more or less the same thing.

The "universe" isn't mentioned once in the Bible. Were Hebrews completely unaware of its existence?
 
HansMustermann said:
@DallasDad
Judging by anime ;) the Japanese have just as much trouble figuring out how Xianity works. Like, exactly what kind of magic do our mikos... err... nuns study, that it has to be a lifetime career instead of something you cosplay on weekends :p
Click to expand...
Nuns Are Mikos

Fair warning: This is a TVTropes link. Click at your own risk.
 
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