More about relgion, the brain, and culture

The other day I posted briefly about the efforts of scientists to understand how and why people are religious. I want to post a little more on that subject.

Scientists start from the assumption that there are physiological processes, based on our physiology and therefore on our genes and experiences, that explain how we think, believe and feel. Indeed, science has been remarkably successful in showing that there are causal relationships. Without certain brain structures and physiological processes, normal thinking and feeling fail to take place.

I defer to social scientists to define the range an nature of religious experiences. There are some obvious aspects One can not accept a body of religious beliefs without the ability to understand what is included in those beliefs. There are mystical experiences that must be explained. Our social instincts as a species must be related to our social participation in religious rituals. Our capacity for abstract thought must be involved in our ability to believe in insubstantial entities, be they gods, angels, demons, ghosts, or faries. So too, the functioning of our brains somehow allows moral concerns to be included as well as practical ones in our decision making, even when we are not able to fully articulate the nature of those moral concerns.

A question for evolutionary theorists and experiment is whether aspects of human religious behavior provide advantages in the natural selection process that result in people expressing those behaviors being more successful in reproducing their genes than people who do not so behave.

We know that there have been important changes in religious beliefs in the last couple of thousand years, and we believe that human evolutionary changes (in large populations) do not occur in so short a time. Thus we infer that there are cultural changes that explain these religious changes, although they must also be consistent with human genetic potential. We would not sing psalms in registers available to other species, nor create icons outside of our visual range even if they would be within the ranges of other species.

Clearly there is an opportunity for historians and social scientists to try to explain the processes by which cultures change religious beliefs. Some are obvious. Imperial powers have often imposed their religious beliefs on the peoples that they have conquered. Evangelical religions tend to expand their membership faster than do non-evangelical religions. The Shakers by prohibiting marriage and child bearing contributed to their own demise (although the celibate religious orders of the Catholic Church have remained alive for hundreds of years by recruiting new members.)

Perhaps a more interesting question is whether there has been a coevolution of cultural aspects of religion and the genetic factors that enable people to be religious over the past several tens of thousands of years. There have been many finds of cave paintings, burial practices, and carvings as well as personal ornaments which suggest religious or religious like practices tens of thousands of years ago -- long before any modern religions were developed. Did proto-religions co-evolve with the human capacities to be religious over the last few thousand years?

The question may not be a scientific one, in that I don't see any way to obtain data to illuminate its answer. (One might do something with computer simulation, perhaps to lend or subtract credibility from the possibility.)