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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.

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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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