Muslim women praying
Istiqlal mosque, Jakarta, Indonesia
The NPR Hidden Brain program, Creating God, focuses on the biological and social origins and utility of the concept of God. Social psychology professor Azim Shariff at the Center for Applied Moral Psychology at the University of British Columbia has studied this question in detail. He argues that about 12,000 years ago, as humans invented agriculture, settled down and began to live in groups of more than about 150 people, an urgent need to protect people from cheaters and liars arose. Humans are not adept at knowing more than about 150 people well. Cooperation required knowing people well.
As groups living in villages of hundreds or thousands of people arose, there had to be a way to insure good, cooperative behavior for civilization to progress. In small groups where everyone knew everyone else, you would get punished if you told a lie, stole someone's dinner, failed to defend the group against enemies or otherwise acted in an immoral way. Cheats and liars could not get away with cheating and lying very well. There was no way to disappear into a crowd.
To deal with cheats and liars God was invented and the God was envisioned to be a supernatural punisher of bad deeds. People unknown to each other who held a common religion had a basis to trust and cooperate. They knew their God would punish the one who lies or cheats. In essence, a punitive God was invented to deter immoral behavior.
Empirical evidence
Shariff tested the hypothesis that belief in a punisher God would be at least correlated with less cheating behavior and maybe even caused by the religious belief. He wrote this in a 2011 research paper:
“Fear of supernatural punishment may serve as a deterrent to counternormative behavior, even in anonymous situations free from human social monitoring. The authors conducted two studies to test this hypothesis, examining the relationship between cheating behavior in an anonymous setting and views of God as loving and compassionate, or as an angry and punishing agent. Overall levels of religious devotion or belief in God did not directly predict cheating. However, viewing God as a more punishing, less loving figure was reliably associated with lower levels of cheating. This relationship remained after controlling for relevant personality dimensions, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and gender.”
The historical record indicates that the punishing God concept arose when societies were struggling with increasing social size, complexity or resource scarcity. Under conditions of such stress, Shariff argues that the need for moral cooperation was more urgent. Other research suggests that belief in a punishing God at least correlates with less bad behavior.
Modern applications
People hostile to religion for various reasons tend to be hostile to the concept that belief in a punisher God could be beneficial to a society or individuals. The hostility is postulated to stem from discomfort with the idea that religion can have any beneficial effects. Unfortunately for those folks, there is a large body of empirical evidence showing that various beneficial effects attach to religious belief regardless of whether the God(s) is a punisher or loving and forgiving.
On the other hand, some devout religious people resent this kind of cultural evolutionary research because in essence, it provides a competing narrative for the origin of God that is entirely secular and human. That thought is discomforting to at least some devoutly religious people, probably most.
Social scientists see progress of human civilization as necessarily a dual inheritance phenomenon. It is both a cultural evolutionary inheritance phenomenon and a Darwinian inheritance phenomenon. Modern religions are cultural structures that arose from millennia of trial and error about what beliefs and rituals served society reasonably well and what did not. The big modern religions arose from cultural evolutionary inheritance. When seen this way, religion served practical functions to help civilization advance.
Some questions that arise from this line of research center on whether modern religions still mostly serve or mostly hinder complex, technological societies with tens of millions of people in them. Have religions adapted to new circumstances? If they have not, are they now more damaging than helpful in the US or any other country? What are the impacts of religious beliefs in a punisher God that hold people should have as many children as they can, while refraining from using birth control?
Reconsidering religion
This research and the cultural evolution concept casts modern religion in a very different light than I had previously was aware even existed in the science literature. The endless contest between people who want their religion to stay frozen in time and those who want to modernize it is an important source of modern cultural conflict. In that lies a deep reservoir of potential conflict that propagandists and social dividers can tap into for their own ends. In this regard, it seems clear to me that this is a rich vein of mental resource to mine for demagogues, tyrants, kleptocrats and other immoral people who use dark free speech (epistemic terrorism) to deceive, divide, distract, irrationally emotionally manipulate (foment fear, anger, bigotry, distrust, etc.) and bamboozle with self-serving bogus reasoning (motivated reasoning).
For me, this is another of those significant mind-opening experiences that will take some time to consider in my thinking about people doing politics.
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