The Evolution of Religion

I've often wondered how we evolved the capacity for religion. This morning, on the way to work, I was listening to something on KPBS about voodoo, and it got me thinking about this again.

During the radio report, they played back part of an interview with a woman who was supposedly the bride of the demon of smallpox, or something like that ("demon" might not be the right word here, but I can't remember his name or exactly what they called him). She said that the demon protected her and her family. She said that when she had to start selling rice in the market, she prayed to the demon and he gave her good luck.

It occurred to me that believing that this demon could help her probably allowed her to go to the market with more confidence, especially the first time she went, and that this may have enabled her to do better than if she had to go there without his protection. In terms of evolution, the capacity to believe in a deity that could help her improved her chance of survival, and the chance of passing on this characteristic to later generations.

The radio show went on to say that a major component of a lot of African religions is that of ancestor worship. They described how someone might invoke the spirit of a dead grandparent to get advice on a certain issue. How could something like this give someone a selective advantage?

I remember once in college, when I was doing homework in the library, struggling with a particular problem. I was considering going and asking the professor for help. As I sat there thinking about it, I pictured myself asking him a question about the problem, and then I pictured him answering the question. The answer he gave made sense, but it didn't completely answer the problem, so I pictured myself asking another question, and getting another answer. In this way I was able to solve the math problem. The point is that the ability to answer the question was in me all along, but that picturing how the professor would answer my questions provided a mental pathway for me to find the answer.

In tribal life, you often go to the elders for advice when faced with a problem. But what happens when those elders die. Suddenly your faced with problems that you need to solve yourself. Maybe you can, but for particularly hard problems, it may benefit you to picture asking the elder for advice, and then picture the response. One way to do this would be to invoke the spirit of the dead elder and ask it. The belief that the spirit is real and that you are really asking the elder for advice will help enhance the experience and make it easier for you to picture a response. This will be an aid to your survival and, again, natural selection would select for those individuals who posess this belief.

An another benefit of ancestor worship is that, since you're picturing getting advice from a respected elder, the advice that you 'get' is likely to be in the similar to what the elder really would have given. In a tribe, this helps the continuity of the leadership of the tribe, keeping it going in the same direction that it was going before. Since you're only going to ask advice of the spirits of elders whose advice had been respected in life, this is kind of a way of training new leaders to lead in a way that has been proven successful in the past. This makes the tribe stronger, improving the survival chances of its members.