Polynomial

Having gone into quite a bit of detail about how the human mind is prone to delusions – delusions that are either based on perceptual limitations of the “body” (as seen by Beau Lotto in “Optical Illusions Show How We See“) OR whether they are simply centered around a narrow world view of human understanding (as noted in Chimamanda Adichie’s perceptively acurate understanding about “The Danger Of A Single Story) – I want to begin addressing the origins of Religion. In the next few blogs I would like to ask several questions… How did Religions come about? Why did they come about? And lastly… Where/are they ever really useful?

Here I’d like to relinquish the reigns once again to a lady who seems to be exploring these ever important questions in a healthy and scientific way… Elizabeth Culotta.

Every human society has had its gods, whether worshiped from Gothic cathedrals or Mayan pyramids. In all cultures, humans pour resources into elaborate religious buildings and rituals. But religion offers no obvious boost to survival and reproduction. So how and why did it arise? In my Origins essay this month, I follow two very different disciplines—archaeology and cognitive psychology—as they attempt to understand this puzzle.

To Charles Darwin himself, the origin of belief in gods was no mystery. “As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would … have vaguely speculated on his own existence,” he wrote in The Descent of Man. In the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin’s lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought. “There are functional properties of our cognitive systems that lean toward a belief in supernatural agents, to something like a god,” says experimental psychologist Justin Barrett of Oxford University.

Barrett and others see the roots of religion in our sophisticated social cognition. Humans, they say, have a tendency to see signs of “agents”—minds like our own—at work in the world. “We have a tremendous capacity to imbue even inanimate things with beliefs, desires, emotions, and consciousness, … and this is at the core of many religious beliefs,” says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.

Meanwhile, archaeologists seeking signs of ancient religion focus on its inextricable link to another cognitive ability, symbolic behavior. They too stress religion’s social component. “Religion is a particular form of a larger, social symbolic behavior,” says archaeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge, U.K. So archaeologists explore early religion by excavating sites that reveal the beginnings of symbolic behavior and of complex society.

These fields are developing chiefly in parallel, and there remains a yawning gap between the material evidence of the archaeological record and the theoretical models of psychologists. Yet there have been some stirrings of interdisciplinary activity, and all agree that the field is experiencing a surge of interest and new evidence, with perhaps the best yet to come.

To find out where I sourced this article from, please click here.

Or to hear an interview with Science contributing editor Elizabeth Culotta on her essay on the origin of religion, please click here.

About Elizabeth Culotta:

Elizabeth Culotta is a contributing news editor at Science magazine, where she has edited and written stories on human evolution and biology for 15 years. Her recent projects have explored ancient DNA, the first cities, the evolution of language, and the nature of social intelligence.

Elizabeth earned geology degrees at Yale and the University of Michigan but then moved into journalism. Before writing for Science, she was the science reporter at The Milwaukee Journal newspaper and wrote for the children’s magazine ScienceWorld. She has been a commentator for her local NPR station and taught feature and magazine writing at Kent State University. Stories she has written or edited have won national awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award and media awards from the American Psychological Association and the Education Writers Association. She lives with her husband and son in Kent, Ohio.

You can follow her here on Twitter.