How and why did religion evolve?

Pedro_P

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Can the roots of spiritual behaviours and feelings be found in other animals? In the first of a two-part special, Brandon Ambrosino examines the evolutionary origins of religion.


▼ “This is my body.”
These words, recorded in the Gospels as being spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper, are said daily at Church services around the world before the communion meal is eaten. When Christians hear these words spoken in the present, we’re reminded of the past, which is always with us, which never goes away.
Just how much past are Christians reminded of? Certainly the last two millennia, which, in addition to devout celebrations of the Eucharist, are rife with doctrinal disputes, church splits, episodes of violence, excommunications, papal pronouncements, and various metaphysical debates, all revolving around the communion meal.
But we can rewind further back, to the development of the oral traditions that got fixed into texts that were incorporated into the canonical New Testament. We can also wonder about the historical meal on which the various Last Supper texts are based.
We can travel further back still, long before even the emergence of Christianity. After all, Jesus was a Jew, and so his act of breaking bread with the disciples reminds us of the entire history of the Jewish people, including their harrowing escape from Egyptian slavery and their receiving of the Torah at Sinai.
But we can go back even further. Any religious meal is, before it is anything else, ameal. It is an act of table-sharing, certainly an important ritual in the ancient Near East. Seder, and later communion, were “taken up” theologically and liturgically, but the positive feelings around table-sharing were already in place. They’d already been in place since the emergence of modern humans, about 200,000 years ago.
And yet –Homosapienswasn’t the only species to discover the benefits of food-sharing. Neanderthals certainly pooled their resources, as did the several otherHomospecies dating back two million years.
“Think of uber pro-social hunter-gatherers having a meal,” one of my theology professors told me when I wondered about the deep evolutionary history behind the Eucharist. “The hunters feel proud to have done well and shared with their family; those who prepared the food are recognised and appreciated; everyone’s belly is getting filled and feeling good; and so many positive social interactions are taking place. No wonder so much mythological content is built up around the meal.”
But food-sharing even predates ourHomoancestors, and is currently observed in chimpanzeesand bonobos. In fact, one recent paper even documented research of bonobos  sharing foodwith bonobosoutsideof their own social group. Barbara Fruth, one of the study’s authors, told the digital magazine Sapiensthat meal-sharing “must have its roots in our last common ancestor”. Based on the molecular clock, the last common ancestor, or LCA, of humans and Great Apes lived about 19 million years ago.
When I hear the words “This is my Body,” then, my mind immediately launches into a race to the evolutionary starting line, if you will.
Deep religion
I begin with a discussion of the Eucharist because my particular religious tradition is Christian. But the point I’m making – that religious experiences emerge from very specific, very long histories – could be made with most religious phenomena. That’s because, in the words of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, “Nothing is ever lost.” History goes all the way back, and who and how and where we are now is the result of its winding forward. Any human phenomenon that exists is a human phenomenon thatbecamewhat it is. This is no less true of religion.
If we’re going to think about the deep history of religion, then we need to be clear about what religion is. In his book The  Bonobo and the Atheist, the primatologist Frans de Waal shares a funny story about participating in a panel hosted by the American Academy of Religion. When one participant suggested they start with defining religion, someone was quick to note that last time they tried to do that, “half the audience had angrily stomped out of the room”. Quipped de Waal: “And this in an academy named after the topic!”
Still, we need to start somewhere, so de Waal suggests this definition: religion is “the shared reverence for the supernatural, sacred, or spiritual as well as the symbols, rituals, and worship that are associated with it”. De Waal’s definition echoes one given by sociologist Émile Durkheim, who also emphasised the importance ofsharedexperiences that “unite into one single moral community”.
The importance of shared experience can’t be overstated since, in the story we’re telling, the evolution of human religion is inseparable from the ever-increasing sociality of the hominin line. As Bellah points out, religion is as a way of being. We might also view it as a way offeeling, as a way of feelingtogether.
While much of the scientific study of religion is on theology-based doctrinal religions, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar thinks this is a narrow way of studying the phenomenon because it “completely ignores the fact that for most of human history religions have had a very different shamanic-like form that lacks gods and moral codes”. (By shamanic, Dunbar means religions of experience that commonly involve trance and travel in spirit worlds.) While the theology-based forms are only a few thousand years old and characteristic of post-agricultural societies, Dunbar argues that the shamanic forms date back 500,000 years. These, he claims, are characteristic of hunter-gatherers.
If we want to understand how and why religion evolved, Dunbar says we need to start out by examining religions “with the cultural accretions stripped away”. We need to focus less on questions about Big Gods and creeds, and more on questions about the capacities that emerged in our ancient ancestors that allowed them to achieve a religious way of being together.
Adaptation or by-product? (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

Ah That was a good one I enjoyed. De Waal's definition holds a lot of appeal.  But Religion is also an evolving theme and has meant different things at different points of time in history.
Initially, it must be viewed as an instrument for societal binding and progress  but Middle ages display it as an object of control and a symbol of power.  today several parts of human society stand divided in the name of rotual and religion

Rhett_Bassard

Media evangelists (and their personality) attract lambs.
Kinda like politicians.

edenv

Surely it's just mankind trying to explain the unexplainable, the impossible, the unbelievable ...
all religions have a creation myth that is uncannily similar - breath being given to a doll-like creature by the gods, the great flood stories, the early Adam and Eve characters, the early twin stories.  

chanakyakripa

In today's world of religious intolerance, the definition of religion is still something on which common people can cling on with some hope. May we all bear this definition in mind and may goodwill and good sence prevail.