Gods and Politics

So why do we have religious impulses anyhow? John Derbyshire succinctly answers this question from a naturalistic standpoint. It's all about politics:

WFB’s piece illustrates rather clearly two things that lurk in the interstices of a great many of the creation-evolution arguments. Both those things, I am going to claim, are core features of human nature, present to some degree — though greater or lesser in individual cases, of course — in all but a pathological few of us. Those things are:

The need to spot intelligent agency at work in the world outside our own precious selves, and

The need to be constantly evaluating and reevaluating our status in the various groups we belong to, and ditto with the statuses of other group members.

Both these core features of the individual human organism give rise to large-scale social phenomena: the first to religion, and the second to politics. (Two of the three topics, I note in passing, that you are traditionally forbidden to talk about in a British army or navy officers’ mess.) Over to WFB:

“Fifteen minutes after Charles Darwin explained his theory of evolution, his disciples — apostles — ruled out any heresy on the subject of the naturalistic explanation for human life.”

That one 27-word sentence contains three religious terms: “disciples,” “apostles,” “heresy,” and two political ones: “ruled out,” “heresy.” (Politics is about power. You can “rule out” something only if you have the power to do so. The word “heresy” is in both lists because its connotations are both religious — “You believe the wrong things!” — and political — “We have the power to punish you for believing those things!” Just how Darwin’s “disciples” managed to acquire so much power in just fifteen minutes, WFB does not tell us.)

Here you see the natural disposition of the normal human mind. We have a mighty need to believe that all ideas about the non-human world are at root religious ideas, ideas centrally concerned with human-like agency or its absence, promulgated by charismatic teachers and their followers; and we have just as mighty a need to assign social events, including public reactions to new scientific theories, to plays of status and power.

Why? Because the first, last, and only great truth about human beings is that we are social animals. To function as such, we need two particular abilities.

First, we need the ability to calculate what other people are likely to do, based on our assumption (our “theory of mind” or “ToM,” in the current cognitive-science terminology) that their beliefs, desires and intentions (“BDIs” — more cog-sci jargon) are much like our own. We could not function as social animals without this ability to impute agency to the humans around us. And to impute it elsewhere, too: Survival prospects in the wild are much improved if we can impute some kind of agency to higher animals. That this ability slops over into imputing agency to the sky (weather), the earth’s crust (earthquakes), and so on, is not very surprising. In extremely complex systems like human mentation, boundaries are rarely inviolable.

Second, we need the ability to compare ourselves with others, assess hierarchies, know whose orders can be safely ignored and whose had better be obeyed, with whom it would be reasonable to compete and with whom dire folly to do so… and so on.

The human inclinations to religion and politics follow very naturally.

Derbyshire leaves out one important connection, and that is that religion is, because it imputes the motives of a personal actor on the external world, necessarily political, since politics is the effort to order the relationships among personal actors. Once God is recognized as the actor behind the fate of the planet and all its inhabitants he becomes part of the political equation. All orderings of human society need to include God. Ignoring God from the political equation would be like ignoring the most powerful landowner in the kingdom.

From an evolutionary standpoint it is puzzling how this capacity for agency detection came to dominate other ways for predicting the what the external world would act. Storms are not personal actors, yet early man universally imputed the actions of the weather to gods. You would think that agency detection would best benefit people when it is restricted to the realm of true personal agency, which is people, and to a lesser extent intelligent animals. Why this "bleed over" to all phenomenon?

My own theory is that the social problems of early humans became so dominant that most of the higher brain capacity that evolved was put to use in bettering the person's social status. Agency detection and manipulation became the one overarching template for viewing the world. A mind that is based on one organizing principle for interpreting the world is simpler than one that has to switch between two modes, one for personal actors and one for impersonal phenomenon. There may have been little to gain for making more perfect distinctions between the two. Better to be excellent at the critical task and suboptimal at the lesser tasks than try to excel at both and do worse than the specialist in the one task that is most important for survival.

So we created imaginary beings and organized our societies around the worship of them. There's no cost to be paid for that, is there?