The Evolution of Religion

If you buy the notion that religion is a set of beliefs, then you have to wonder how and why religion came to be, especially given the variety of religions that don't share the same beliefs. But getting at a theory of religion is no easy task.

One idea is that religion is related to evolution, in that belief confers some survival advantage. Another idea is that as with other supernatural beliefs, religion is appealing because it offers answers to things that otherwise seem inexplicable (and before modern science, a lot of things were inexplicable, from the stars in the sky to stormy weather to human illness and death). But throughout history, just feeling better by having an explanation for things would not necessarily confer much of a survival advantage.

As James Dow at Oakland University in Michigan sees things: "Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection."

A new simulation program by Dow tries to answer the question by delving into how a system rooted in passing along false or unverifiable information (that is, beliefs rather than plain-as-day facts) can spread and stick.

Dow's simulation looks at whether religion exists because it is good for the individual.

In early runs of the simulations, religion doesn't survive most scenarios, explains Massimo Pigliucci in his blog. To spread virtual religion in the simulation, non-believers have to help. The complex reasoning for why this might be so — which Pigliucci explains more fully — is that religious people inspire trust, and so the community tends to help them.

Dow says his simulation, which he calls evogod, "shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved alongside of verifiable knowledge. ... The evogod simulation shows how a capacity to create religious ideas can evolve by social selection. It reveals a selection process that can increase genetically inherited capacities to communicate unreal, unverifiable information."