Evolutionary Theories of Religion

[Clueless Morgan]

#1, Holy shit with the over-formatted text...




#2

With abstract reasoning, why did humans have to fabricate a pantheon of mythologies that are obviously completely contrived?

I don't think humans had to fabricate pantheons of gods, I think that's just what happened. If we ran the clock back and ran the simulation a second, third, fourth, fifth time, whose to say we'd invent pantheons of gods again?

I do think, though, that pantheons of gods is something of a natural course for religiosity to have taken given what I began by saying in this thread in the first place: the evolution of gods and structures of religious hierarchies suspiciously mirrors the evolution of human civilization. (Go back to my earlier posts)

I also think that there's something in the Theory of Mind that contributes to humans developing religiosity, though I fully admit that I'm no expert and don't know enough to even have an informed conversation about it. We don't know to what degree animals have a Theory of Mind (they probably have some level of it) and it may be that humans have a much more advanced Theory of Mind than animals in the same way we appear more capable of abstract thought, and those two things together combined in a unique way to contribute to the evolution of religiosity.

I don't know.

#ArgumentfromIgnorance