It is not so easy to point to the time in history when religious belief first emerged. For all we know, human primates do not believe in any gods, and even for humans, only about 50.000 years ago we were able to develop some kind of religious beliefs, documented by burying of the dead and some other ancestry related rites. The first solid mentioning of god as a character trace back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, partly due to the development of scripture, where they believed that natural phenomena are divine forces in and of themselves, but can also take on human-like avatar forms. We all know of Anubis, the Chakal-faced god of death or Horus, the Bird-faced god of the sky. “Evolutionary origins of religion” researchers (those actually exist!) suggest that these religions formed because humans had developed the necessary tools like speech and symbolism and social hierarchies, which helped them survive in a dangerous and unpredictable, and more importantly, not comprehendible world.

Simplified, sharing religious belief advanced to be a cultural information tank from where humans could derive understanding of the world, and ultimately guidelines how to act.

For the most part of our history, while religion brought much harm when different “interpretations” collided, it was an absolutely necessary step for sentient beings to evolve as a social group or tribe, which eventually led to culture. Before religion, humans used to live in small tribes and family clans, not unlike many human-like primates like chimpanzees do nowadays. However, the shift from hunters and gatherers to settlers and farmers came with an increase in humans we had to interact with, to be social with, and to find common ground with. But how do you coordinate such effort?

The share of a common belief system, with its specific set of rules, is paramount for coordinating and thriving societies to develop.

Interestingly, social sciences and psychology found that people act very differently and conformist when confronted with an observer or in public, while their spectrum of actions taken are way more creative and non-conformist when being perceived observation free. In one way, creating an all-seeing omniscient god was a genius way to make people more conformist and create bigger social structures far exceeding the natural tribal format. However, it does not seem plausible that some ancient masterminds conceived religion, more likely it was a multiple-origin organic idea that grew and was just very successful, providing more advantages than disadvantages to tribes/societies utilizing it, thus it was selected for by outcompeting other ideologies.

One more thing we need to know about religion is how they spread; scientists have been able to reconstruct the development of younger religions like the Islam and orthodox Christianity over centuries using mathematical modeling. They allowed in their simulations for different ways of spreading, one treating religion like illuminating wisdom which enlightens people it encounters over time and led to 1 to 1 conversion, the other treating religion like a contagious disease, meaning that once a critical threshold of infected people is reached, it infects the whole population. Surprisingly, so far only the contagious disease-spreading simulation seems to accurately reproduce the development we’ve seen in the real world. Religion, one might claim, behaves like a form of social virus. It sounds rough stated like this, but I do not consider it a toxic or even negative comparison.

Consider for example how a certain idea or “meme” goes “viral” over the internet nowadays, we can understand the spread of religion as a pattern similar to the spread of the meme “give Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar finally”, which went viral all around the world shortly before this year’s Academy Awards.

No matter how we feel about religion today, it is very unlikely that humanity would have advanced to the complex social species we are now without it.

Religion brought much good, it gave us an explanatory framework for many of the unknowns in the wild world we encountered every day. It gave a beginning to the question where we came from and a goal for the question where we are heading to.

Psychologically, it was achieving the fulfillment of a basic human need, security, which is the second step on Maslow’s pyramid of basic human needs, just above physical need for food, water and sleep. Abraham Maslow’s theory on the hierarchy of human needs is often taken by social sciences and psychology to interpret human motivation and behavior. Broken down, what it states is that humans first need to have something to eat, drink and sleep and not feeling threatened by constant danger to be able to be occupied with more cognitive demanding task like abstract thinking, math, philosophy and so on. For example, we suck at solving math equations when not getting any sleep. Or to drive the point home, when you are starving after a plane crash in a deserted area, you don’t ponder on the pros and cons of being a vegan philanthropist while you are cannibalizing crash victims over fire in order to survive.

Once human societies became bigger and more organised, their fitness and survival being ensured by a functioning collective instead of individual hunting luck, the cognitive task of creating god became unavoidable; and in turn the security and conformism the belief in god fosters served as pillars of an ever-growing flock to flourish.

Somehow all the old biblical commentaries of the flock and its divine shepherd make more sense now… in any case, overall it is estimated that a shared believe system is one of the evolutionary thresholds any species has to pass to climb the ladder. Of course it’s hard to tell for sure because on our planet, we have been the only species to have gone this far, and actually quite a bit further, something that I will discuss in more detail in other articles.

In summary, the creation of god was a blessing for a sentient species, as this believe system embodied cultural information which provides security and conformism; traits necessary for bigger societies to form. Its importance and success can be witnessed everywhere all over the world.

“Religious circle” Symbols by the clockwise order: Judaism Christianity Islam Bahá’í Faith Hinduism Taoism Buddhism Sikhism Rodnoveri Celtic paganism (contemporary) Heathenism Semitic paganism (contemporary) Wicca Kemetism Hellenic paganism (contemporary) Roman paganism (contemporary) Languages by the clockwise order: Latin English German French Czech Russian Modern Greek (ancient would be πιστις) Arabic Chinese Simplified (www.wikipedia.org)

Be sure to check out part 2 and part 3!

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