Renowned "Face on Mars" photographed by an early Viking mission, and later shown to be an illusion caused by local geology and the sun's angle (Wikipedia)
I’ve previously explained my contention that when it comes to evolution and human beings, what we don’t know is if anything more interesting than what we do. (Indeed, my latest book looks specifically at an array of evolutionary mysteries—including but not limited to homosexuality, female orgasm, menopause, and consciousness—laying out some of the most prominent hypotheses for each.)
Among these mysteries, of course, is religion, and among the reasonable hypotheses thus far adduced, there are several based on what I call “overshoot.” The basic idea is that natural selection can favor a given trait, which under certain circumstances ends up being maladapative or at best nonadaptive. Applied to religion, numerous possibilities emerge in addition to HADD, which I recently wrote about.
Recall that HADD is concerned with the adaptive human tendency to seek “agency” outside ourselves. When it comes to attributing such capacity to non-self entities (the weather, trees, the sun and moon, etc.) , probably the trickiest—and, paradoxically, the most important as well—are those weird entities known as other people. Psychologists have been especially interested of late in what is known as Theory of Mind (ToM). This is the highly adaptive human capacity to “read someone else’s mind,” not extrasensory perception, but rather, the far more down-to-earth process of making assumptions that other people have their own agendas, their own subjective sources of information as well as their own motivation, independent of our own. Put this all together and the result is a world that is not only populated by other things and creatures, but also by things and creatures that are bursting with intents, many of them oriented toward ourselves.
Here is Daniel Dennett on how it works once people started populating the world with objects that move and whose actions could have consequences for themselves: “We experience the world as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.” Not only that, but even inanimate objects can take on the aura or intentionality, or at least, of consequentiality for those weak-bodied (albeit strongly-imagining) creatures who are so vulnerable to attack, and who therefore must rely on their ability to imagine events in order to flourish. Think of the clutching, grasping arms of a forest at night, or the building threat of accumulating storm clouds, or—on the positive side—the cheerful promise of a sunny day, or the friendly, hopeful caress of a spring rain on parched fields. And then, consider that once the world is so densely populated with fitness-relevant agents, how tempting it must have been (and still is) to attempt to pacify, or otherwise influence them – i.e., to seek their approval.
To this, add animism, the likely universal tendency to attribute motives even to things that are “animated” by altogether non-living energies and impulses … and which, a few minutes ago, I just indulged when I muttered something about my computer not wanting to boot up. At other times, it spends time thinking, while trying to download a lengthy file, just as your car may struggle in low gear. After all, we know—sort of—that plants seek the light, that rivers try to reach the sea, and, that when the sky is partly cloudy, the sun often attempts to break through.
Along the way, it is plausible that our ancient ancestors’ ToM contributed not only to the personification of nature, but also—quite naturally—to a belief in souls, spirits and ghosts, which in one form or another is closely allied to most religious traditions. Once you attribute mind, an independent consciousness, to others, you have opened the door to the existence of something whose objective reality you accept but cannot see, touch, hear, or smell. In other words, you may well have taken a consequential step toward accepting something close to the Roman Catholic catechism, which describes the soul as “a living being without a body, having reason and free will.”
In addition, as anthropologist Pascal Boyer has emphasized, early human beings faced a particularly daunting problem when it came to death of a loved one, even beyond the practical issues of missing that person, losing his or her company, assistance, advice, and so forth: What to do with the corpse? The exigencies of microbiology make it impossible to keep a dead body around indefinitely, but once all that ToM has been generated—and not merely toward clouds and trees—how were our ancestors to turn off their assumptions and expectations about the dearly departed? After the body is buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of, what to do with the likely persistence of memory on the part of those left behind? One convenient ploy would be to argue that some part of the deceased person—moreover, a part that corresponds to the memory retained by the living—still persists. Thus, perhaps, belief in the ongoing vitality of “souls” or “spirits” of the recently dead.
It probably didn’t hurt that such belief also helped soothe anxiety among the living that some day, they too would join the dead. The prospect of literally being worshiped once dead might have been additionally reassuring, although at least some people, anticipating this outcome, have been rather cynical about it: Vae puto deus fio (“Dammit, I seem to be becoming a god”) the Roman emperor Vespasian is said to have complained on his deathbed. More important, however, than enabling the elderly to anticipate becoming a god, or at least, a venerated ancestor in the hereafter, might well have been the prospect of payoff in the here and now. If someone is getting close to becoming a powerful ghost or presiding spirit, it would seem wise to treat this person with deference and to cater to his or her needs and desires. And this, in turn, could motivate such persons to urge the reality of ghosts and spirits.
Its only a small step from mollifying one’s ancestors (living or dead) to propitiating or otherwise manipulating other underlying agents, not only ghosts and spirits but also other forces—human-shaped or inchoate—that more closely approximate most people’s conception of God. Of course, rivers and mountains, the sun and stars, not to mention rain and winter and summer don’t have an obviously godlike appearance, so it is not altogether unreasonable to assume that they are manipulated by gods, which, like the Wizard of Oz, pull the strings offstage.
And of course, human faces are especially important to human beings, starting, we now know, in early infancy and continuing into adulthood as “pareidolia,” the perception of patterns where none exists. The result is a widespread human tendency to see human faces and features in the most non-human of things: the Virgin Mary in a spilled ice-cream cone, “Pope-Tarts,” the face of Jesus in a tortilla – and we’re on our collective way, not only to “primitive” religion, but to increasingly elaborate theology, with all the fixings.
There is no question that the natural world has rewarded people who perceive it accurately, and it seems reasonable that in the process, the door has been opened to misperceptions, as well. But assuming that things don’t flow in the other direction – that sacrificial offerings, prayers, ritual observances and obeissances of various sorts don’t really influence the physical world – why should people continue to put their faith in them? Wouldn’t it be more adaptive to drop those belief systems that experience shows to be inaccurate or ineffective? It depends on the cost of persevering versus that of backing away.
Moreover, the human tendency to stick with beliefs, even those manifestly unsupported by experience or evidence, is itself supported by a deep-seated inclination; namely, an almost desperate search … not only for patterns, but for causal connections as well. Insofar as that inclination is in most cases adaptive, it could well have been selected for, even though on occasion it may lead us astray.
As with religion?