Evolutionary explanation of religion

[Apollo]

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Everything has an evolutionary basis.  The question is how to meaningfully separate out explanations that highlight salient points.  Saying it evolved can be applied to anything human.

Well, that's true. But to be clear, when we are talking about evolution, we are talking about evolution by natural selection. So even though dogs, modern forms of corn or banana, and all of the GMOs exist through process of evolution, it's not the same as evolution by natural selection since humans artificially selected them.

This is important to keep in mind when thinking about our brain's ability to conceptualize a supernatural intent-full force through evolution by natural selection vs evolution through artificial selection––because many people may believe that concept of god started around neolithic or immediate pre-neolithic era due to socio-cultural conditions and was a contrivance and hence has more to do with artificial selection than natural selection.  The research however points to our brain's ability in believing in some supernatural force through natural selection.

[The Grand Nudger]

The supernatural is not interchangeable with gods, Apollo.  People very clearly believed in the supernatural for tens of thousands of years before anyone seems to have hit on the idea of a god.

[Apollo]

The supernatural is not interchangeable with gods, Apollo.  People very clearly believed in the supernatural for tens of thousands of years before anyone seems to have hit on the idea of a god.

It’s a cognitive journey—cognitive faculties evolved over a period of time—and we see traces of this in other primates too who seem to be capable of theory of mind faculty but not there to clearly display the byproduct we seem to have.

In other words, humans didn’t wake up one day and screamed god! The concept took various forms through cognitive journey going back to cognitive revolution or may be even before. Monotheistic and polytheistic gods are more recent refined forms of that feeling of someone is watching/intent and design in nature.

[The Grand Nudger]

We've been fully modern for 50k years and there's absolutely no evidence that any evolutionary change since that time gave rise to god beliefs, which have only existed for a fraction of that time and an even smaller fraction of the time that we've been anatomically modern.

While you wave off the idea that somebody woke up one morning screaming about gods as an absurdity...that's exactly what happened. Over and over and over again, exactly that.

[Apollo]

“ there's absolutely no evidence that any evolutionary change since that time gave rise to god beliefs,”

Please explain to me how would you go about collecting evidence of such evolutionary change other than archaeological and anthropological research—after all, we can only discern so much from skull fossils—for cognitive faculty measures you’re only left with hypotheses based on archeology and anthropology along with findings based on modern evolutionary psychology and they do point to our cognitive ability to see intent and agent patterns in nature which is the precursor to later refined notion of god(s).

[The Grand Nudger]

The ability to see intent and agency is even older than full modernity, and probably older than our own anatomic modernity. For whatever reason, for all those hundreds of k's (and in all of the other animals that do the same)..it didn't produce any god beliefs or any evidence of god beliefs. Produced plenty of evidence for all sorts of other things, and right about the end of the stone age we have tons of evidence of god beliefs.

You're asking how we'd collect evidence for something that we have collected evidence for. Evolutionary biology isn't the explanation for god beliefs. Nothing appears to have changed in us so that we started believing in them - and I suppose you could call it an accident of (pre)history that we hadn't done so before. It was no new ability, and it's not a heritable trait, just a new situation.

They're a cultural phenomena, not biology.

(speaking of accidents of history, we may not believe in gods for much longer...obviously this tape hasn't rolled out yet - and on the timescale that we're considering future anthropologists might find the meteoric rise and utter collapse of these types of beliefs to be an aberration - a vanishing moment)

[Apollo]

You're asking how we'd collect evidence for something that we have collected evidence for.

Right. I asked that rhetorically to point out that the only way for us to collect evidence was through archaeology and anthropology and not some fMRI brain scans and psychological studies since you cannot perform those on fossils and skulls and other artifacts.  So the best we can do is to inference based on engravings or buildings etc to trace the existence of notion of more refined concept of god, and how that came about.

Your premise is that one day someone woke up and came up with the idea of god (crudely speaking).  My premise is that it's a cognitive journey––as works of various evolutionary psychologist combined with works of archaeology and anthropology have theorized, our mind has some useful byproduct awareness of someone watching through our brain's ability to see intent through theory of mind.  We don't wake up one day and make up something and that stick as strongly as the concept of god has.

The reason we have it and other animals don't have it because our cognitive abilities are comparatively more unique––although in recent studies other primates have been shown to display signs of theory of mind as well so evolution of this ability goes way back than just tens of thousands of years (link here). 

The concept of god won't stick if our mind was not receptive to it.  It will fall apart just like how Santa Clause falls apart as kids grow up –– the reason indoctrinated children don't give up idea of god when they grow up even in the face of increasingly available indication to the contrary is because our brains is fertile land for teleological thinking.  We are more receptive to forming concrete reality based on underlying illusory nature than not.

In any event, I think we may be talking in circles at this point as our premises don't quite line up.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd say that we're looking at an example of failing to highlight some salient detail or relationship. Sure, all along the way, and for any given human behavior - there's an underlying biology to support it. Again, though, it's not because we don't know anything and can't collect evidence about evolutionary change in human beings over the last 50k years that we can say that the belief in gods is not best explained by evolutionary biology.

If some evolutionary change were the salient detail then we would expect the god gene to still be with us, and we would also expect god beliefs and the god gene to have a discoverable hereditary pattern, and we would expect that the distribution of god artifacts would generally reflect that pattern.

This is not what we see. Not any of it. We do, in fact, see the evidence of multitudinous branches of individual creativity and inspiration filtered down through time and culture and consequence and competition - and not just here with gods, we did the same with many of our tools (and I would say, other tools).

Let's try a thought experiment. Random native animists come into contact with god believing colonials. 400 years later, the vast majority of people in the territory are god believers. Was god belief a heritable trait selected for? Is something like that the explanation for god belief in that environment today...or might it have been all the guns the believing colonials brought and employed?

[Apollo]

If some evolutionary change were the salient detail then we would expect the god gene to still be with us, and we would also expect god beliefs and the god gene to have a discoverable hereditary pattern, and we would expect that the distribution of god artifacts would generally reflect that pattern.

No one has made any claim to have discovered a "god" gene. As a matter of most recent research, mapping genes to individual traits is not the right way to look at it anyway.  It's the gene expression that matter.  Many individual may have same gene but that gene may not express itself similarly (or express itself at all) across those individuals because genes interact with environment and express themselves in myriad different ways. Epigenetic is more recent way of looking at genes.  Anyway. That's a minor digression.

The point here is that our mind thinks teleologically.  It sees purpose, design, and intent in nature.  The byproduct of it is "someone watching over us and guiding our way along". This teleological way of looking at nature has some benefits.  The concept of god itself is a cultural phenomenon born out of contrivance to manage larger social groups (societies).  It stuck because it maps to our teleological way of thinking and was a logical transition as our learning brain learned to solve more complex social problems. As humans thought more about "someone watching over us" over generations over a period of tens of thousands of years, the incrementalism in knowledge and thought led to more refined notions and associations with our observations (e.g. no rain so "the someone watching over for rain...let's call it rain god, must be angry with us") that eventually made into "god".

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd say any digression into identifying a gene or sequence of genes or pattern of heredity is a necessary one to insisting that a salient detail of god belief finds a credible explanation in evolutionary biology. As it stands, with no evidence in it's favor, evidence which we would expect to find if it were false readily apparent, and the existence of better explanations....it's just doesn't seem like a fit.

The belief that someone or something watches over us and guides our way is not interchangeable with a belief in gods. That belief is common to current and historic hunter gatherer societies and we suspect it was common to prehistoric ones as well. Largely due to surveys regarding the homology of existing and historic beliefs combined with the similarities in cultural artifact production between those beliefs and prehistoric sites, both of which can be mapped in-time. God belief is comparatively rare in that homology, and we suspect it would have been even more so before the point at which all the evidence we have of definite god beliefs show up in the archaeological record.

We're going to be as hard pressed to describe our metrics for comparative refinement of this or that idea as we are to find evidence of evolutionary biology meaningfully explaining god beliefs. Which period of tens of thousands of years do we have in mind? All of our religious beliefs map to teleological thinking, not just the very specific set of god beliefs. This doesn't set them apart or explain why we selected them over others.

The utility of a god belief to the organization and preservation of a society or culture appears, for all the world and by all the evidence we have, to be the salient set of facts. The belief in and of itself may not be the operative part of that, even. As we see god beliefs assume their underlying normative content from a range of places and make changes to it (and, ultimately, transition to secular normativity). All of this, ostensibly, that refinement™ towards some goal or another. We'd have to establish that god belief isn't a free rider, right off the bat.