Anne - I know this wasn't directed at me, but I happened to be working on an essay that relates, and thought you might find it interesting. The basic premise is that the earliest religious beliefs were originally emergent properties of the physiology of our brains.
Most complex organisms are able, at least at a fundamental level, to "learn". By this I mean through experience they are able to associate two temporally-linked significant events or stimuli. Whether there is in reality a cause-effect relationship between the two events is utterly immaterial. This ability - no doubt the end result of millions of years of natural selection - has distinct survival benefit. It doesn't matter to the tasty bunny whether the rustle in the grass is a predator or just the wind. It flees. Hence the ability to positively correlate "rustle" with "predator" confers a survival advantage.
However, a problem arises when you start dealing with organisms who have more complex brains than our poor deluded bunny. Whereas humans (and I presume our close cousins) still retain this survival-based learning (consider the instant association of a child who touches a hot stove "touch stove" = "pain"), with us the asymmetry inherent in this instant association leads to a lot of mistakes, especially when we think about events that occur together from time to time. Humans are really lousy at accurately judging the relationship between events that only sometimes co-occur. Because we are so heavily influenced by pairings of significant events, we can come to infer an association - even a causal one - between two events even if there isn't one. For example. prayers may correspond with subsequent events only every so often by chance, and yet this pairing may have a dramatic effect on belief in the efficacy of prayer. Worse still, the world around us is full of coincidental occurrences, some of which are meaningful but the vast majority of which are not. This provides a fertile ground for the growth of fallacious beliefs. We readily learn that associations exist between events, even when they do not. We are often led by co-occurring events to infer that the one that occurred first somehow caused the one that succeeded it. We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved. We are always looking for causal explanations, and we tend to infer causality even when none exists.
The second aspect that leads to mistakes is our perceptual system. Humans are incredible at detecting patterns. Unfortunately, not all the patterns we detect are meaningful ones. Our perceptual processes work in such a way as to make sense of the environment around us. Perception is not a passive gathering of information, it's an active construction of a representation of what is going on around us, built from information received by our senses. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment. Since perception is highly filtered by this "pattern recognition software", it's all too easy to infer pattern from the same mis-association of paired events that leads to mistakes in causality. The adaptive value of pattern recognition is fairly obvious - fight-or-flight responses are often sub-conscious even in humans and their ilk.
quote:
An individual is walking through the woods when she picks up information -- either auditory, such as rustling leaves, or visual, such as the sight of a slender curved object on the ground -- which triggers a fear response. This information, even before it reaches the cortex, is processed in the amygdala, which arouses the body to an alarm footing. Somewhat later, when the cortex has had enough time to decide whether or not the object really is a snake, this cognitive information processing will either augment the fear response and corresponding evasive behaviour, or will serve to bring that response to a halt. (LeDoux, R., 1994, Sci Am 270, pp. 50-57)
A third element that causes us to make mistakes, again based on the structure of our brains and central nervous system, is the way in which experience and perceptions are retained. As with preception, memory is a constructive process, not simply data storage as on a computer. Through our own experience, we come to believe in the reliability of our memories and in our ability to judge whether a given memory is reliable or not. Memories are subject to serious biases and distortions, often filtered through or compared with similar memories. It is very difficult for an individual to reject the products of his or her own memory process, for memory can seem to be so "real." Once again, the simple adaptive value of this system is obvious. From location of appropriate fruits to a hawk's shadow and kin recognition, memory serves to increase survival IF you can compare and contrast memories of past experience with current situations. Once you get beyond the "rustle = predator" stage of complexity, the ability to associate experience/memory provides a crucial advantage. However, memory will also include all of the fallacies of perception and cause-effect mis-association.
Humans (and I guess our nearest kin), also have a marvelous facility for assigning emotional content to specific memories. This emotion is, in essence, an environmental feedback mechanism based (probably) initially on the relative significance of the event or perception that triggered it. However this arose, it is apparent that the stronger the emotional content, the more intense the memory, and the more likely the individual will seek to either avoid subsequent iterations of the situation - or conversely seek out repetitions. When you start talking about humans, this emotional content can be assigned to highly abstract memories. For example, if our perceptions show an event that is highly improbable, our brains, filtering the event through the memory, pattern recognition, and learned response systems, may assign a high emotional loading to the memory. (One possible explanation is that the more important a memory in terms of survival, the higher the emotional load - but that's speculation). A really strong coincidence can produce the same result. In fact, humans are SO susceptible to loading peak experience with strong emotion, that we're even more likely than our less "developed" relatives to jump to a completely wrong conclusion inre causation. Once the emotion is assigned to a memory, then later thinking may well be dominated by the awareness that the emotional reaction was intense, leading to the conclusion that something unusual really did happen. And emotion in turn may directly influence both perception and learning - i.e., an event may be interpreted as bizarre or unusual because of the emotional responses triggered when we compare the event to previously retained experiences and this provides an additional filter to both future experience and learning.
Taking all of this into consideration, it's fairly easy to see how the very physiology of our brains and perception system can easily lead to what we now call "belief". For our "primitive", predator-haunted forebears, these systems provided a net survival advantage. In our highly complex, modern society, beliefs stilll help us function. They guide our actions and increase or reduce our anxieties. If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it "works" for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience. It didn't matter to our pre-cognitive ancestors whether a belief was rational or not.
We haven't gotten all that far from our prey ancestors. We now live in a highly complex, for all practical purposes incomprehensible, society. We are anxiety laden in ways our evolutionary ancestors never had to face. So how did we end up with religion? Remember, we aren't passive receivers of information. We actively seek out information to satisfy our needs. We may desire to find "meaning" in life. We may seek for a sense of identity. We may wish for recovery from disease or to be in touch with deceased loved ones. In general we seek to reduce anxiety and uncertainty. Beliefs, whether correct or false, can assuage anxiety. Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing anxiety. Rationality and scientific truth have little to offer for most people as remedies. However, belief in reincarnation, supernatural intervention, and everlasting life can overcome uncertainty and anxiety to a great extent. The only way to answer questions about the injustice and indifference in the natural world is to make reference to a higher level of justice in another world.
Religious thinking exists as an outgrowth of the way our brains adapted and developed. At a certain point, religious thinking arose as an expressed need to explain the mistakes in our perceptual, learning, and memory processes. The version that we call modern religion arose later when the "cheaters" (in game theory terms) realized they could obtain personal advantage from that need. Since humans were already "programmed" gregarious and hierarchical (like all our closest relatives except perhaps the bonobo - which may likely be an anomaly whose environment allowed them to take a different path than the rest of the primates), it was fairly easy to substitute the high priest for the high male. We're programmed for obedience. If the high priest can relieve our anxiety, we're programmed to seek it out. Over thousands of years, religions have evolved sophisticated methods of self-perpetuation - sin, reward/punishment, indoctrination, ritual, oaths, etc are all powerful mechanisms to insure the anxiety is both reinforced on the one hand, and relief of anxiety focused only on a single solution on the other.
The antidote to our hard-wired past is a relatively new phenomenon. Reason and science are terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. Science accepts what few people ever accept - that you can't routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality.
(Some of the basic ideas above are from James Alcock's 1991 essay "The Belief Engine". However, the interpretation and application to religion is my own.)
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