5.4.1 Why Humans Have Religion 

This book makes many claims the critics will judge as extravagant. Faced with complex human behaviors, it has boasted the "first", "only", or "correct" explanation. Yet, for the most complex human social attribute of all, religion, claims of the correct explanation need only meet a lesser criterion of perfection. The Theory of Options here claims it offers the least silly explanation of religion, with a cynical admonition that this is not a difficult criterion to meet.

There is a reason for this.

When people are required to explain religion it is usually from one of two positions. Either the person believes in God, in which case religion holds a special, overriding significance. Or the person does not believe in God, in which case the entire religious experience appears absurd, so it must exist for an absurd reason. But to be correct theories of behavior must not dismiss complex social phenomenon indelible in human culture with silly explanations. Instead, human religious need requires a proper explanation of why it occurs. Especially, we must understand the role religion filled in human life in ages past, or still fills in countries where religious belief is strong. We also must explain social and individual effects on people when religious belief systems collapse, without secular moral or educational systems to take their place.

Why, then, do humans have religion?

In one sense the answer is straightforward. As earlier explained moral behavior places constraints on humans, forcing them to explore fresh behavioral paths outside of those available from biological imperatives alone. This increases human options because although behavior is still constrained (it needs constraints to "force" an advantage) the behavior can be adapted for circumstances rather than be fixed by inheritance. The fitness advantage of this is that once individuals "force" themselves to use learned constraints they optimize behavior. Biologically, they shift more behaviors, and complex ones, to the more bountiful learning circuits leaving genetic instructions of neural design free to optimize crucial functions of sense and reflex. This process of encephalization in turn requires other mechanisms, which will eventually be ascribed to moral feelings. Only in history, ascribing mechanisms assisting encephalization to moral feelings was done without any theory or knowledge of why it was this way, and this ignorance persisted even after the Theory of Evolution was discovered. If anything, Darwin's theory only added confusion to an already complex issue, because evolution first explained an effect that was the opposite of moral behavior among wild animals. Darwin's theory explained not leaned moral constraints as an adjunct of the encephalization process, but only moral-appearing constraints which were not leaned at all, but were a direct product of reflex. So after thousands of years of civilization, even after the Theory of Evolution humans knew they were morally constrained by behavior, but still did not know why.

This is why we end up with 'silly' explanations of religion. People require a moral explanation of the emotions they feel, ahead of them requiring a rational explanation of the things they believe. So, it does not matter if Darwin's Theory can explain moral-appearing behaviors in animals as reflex. Humans instinctively feel that they remain morally constrained in behaviors that do not make sense in animal terms. So when people feel this, and for this reason fail to be rationally convinced by so-called Darwinian explanations of morality, the disjunction is "blamed" on religion, or lingering religious doubts. It is as though religion had arisen "extra-potentate" to human affairs to interfere in the modern enactment among humans in what should have been a raw Darwinian motive of behavior.

Another problem is that there does not exist anywhere a product "religion" in the imputed sense, by which we attempt to explain it. Someone is upset that the Catholic Church condemns birth control or is perplexed at how people can still believe in God even after Darwinism has explained for the umpteenth time that morality is only an effect of reflex. So again this is blamed on "religion", which it is claimed only arises because of the body's biochemistry, and so on. Yet it is true that the mood, euphoria, just like the mood, "guilt", and other deeply human moods are commonly exploited for propagation of religious beliefs. And these moods do have a natural physical basis in the neurochemistry of the brain, regardless of which thoughts provoke them. And why human neurology is optimized to produce this complex range of biochemical induced moods is a phenomenon more sensibly explained by evolutionary genetics than any explanation the Church can offer. But details of why religion subscribes to the theological or sociological dogmas it does can no more be explained practicality, by genetics or biochemistry, than reciprocal altruism can be explained by quantum mechanics. Even though here too the mechanisms of one can ultimately account for the other.

In this sense this book too does not explain religion in details of why a particular facet of religious practice arose to meet a particular social purpose, such as arranging marriages. Rather, human behavior becomes optimized when a set of social inhibitions we describe as 'morality' become constraints on behavior. These constraints override biological imperatives, forcing humans to enact certain behaviors but forego others. Only we must explain how such a restraint arose historically, before its mechanisms were understood. (Outside of the Theory of Options it is still not understood!) The answer is that constraints arose by a number of social mechanisms, of which an important one was religion. So there are three questions to be answered;

1. What was the fitness advantage in human evolution to individuals acquiring a large range of biochemically induced moods?
2. How have humans come understand the significance of the moods to behavior in ordinary language terms?
3. Historically, what line of reasoning led humans to make ordinary language interpretations of the significance of mood which they did?

The first question concerns the origin of moral feelings, which is an issue of evolutionary biology and behavior. The second question concerns ethics, and the relationship of internal feelings of biochemically induced mood to socially influenced behavior. But the third question is an investigation into the historically derived nature of belief systems, and how these came to shape people's behavioral, social, and ethical views. Yet because answers to the third question are derived historically, and each culture has its unique history, it is difficult to generalize each case. We do not like theologians telling us how to run courses on evolution. But it does not help either when evolutionists produce "theories" of particular religious beliefs or practice based on so-called evolutionary genetics. If anything, religion as opposed to simple tribal belief bid not arise until the age of agriculture, long after humans ceased significant evolution.

Yet among the myriad of religious myths there is a set of beliefs among others, which enjoyed disproportionate influence, perhaps because of all the explanations this one made the most sense. This is belief in a single all-powerful Creator-Deity, who sits in judgment of whether individuals are morally good or bad and who punishes them in an after-life accordingly. But also significant, human ethical needs first arise during a change from tribal and nomadic life, to settled agriculture and nation building. Yet in books such as the Bible, and especially that book, we have perhaps humanity's best written record of how sociological change took place as the new belief systems developed. The other great influence, at least in the West is Greek writings. Although we associate Greece with a multiple Gods, in Greek history too later trends were towards a singular deity, Zeus. Just as in Indian culture, also with many Gods, later trends were towards the single deity Krishna, and so on. Buddhism began almost as a secular religion, but it too transformed simple reverence for the teacher into another creator-deity myth, at least among some sects. So among the major modern religions today, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the near universal theme is essentially one all-powerful God, though each religion differs in myriad details. While even in Confucianism, where they is not any particular god, there is still often punishment and reward in an afterlife, and moral judgment in this life, so the moral message is similar.

So if we need to know why human behavior is strongly influenced by biochemically induced moods, which is an effect of the human physiology, we can learn that from evolution. But if we want to know why at a later stage in history among a dispersed and barely evolving population humans developed organized religions from simpler belief systems, we need to study that also in the true context in which the events actually occurred. And it occurred historically as tribes transformed into settled life, and the transformation, generally, was from simple tribal beliefs into belief in a single all-powerful creator-deity. We need to know why religion arose at that stage, long after significant human biological evolution had ceased. And we need to know why, once religion arose, it took on the belief systems that it did.

The previous chapter gave a brief outline of the how the mechanics of ethical explanation arose, and for what purpose. Through their biology humans inherit an ethical problem. Humans are gregarious, group oriented, social animals, relying on each other for protection and support. And all groups have their rules. But humans not only have "group" rules. The human brain has very a high 'learning ratio' of eight to one. This allows the species to evolve a very large brain, without paying the evolutionary price of designing each neural circuit by trial-and-error reflex. But to be effective the learning capable brain must be controlled by other evolutionary means. This is most likely by "transfer" circuits. These do not control actions directly but biochemically 'punish' or 'reward' the individual with good or bad feelings, for fitness or options moves wisely or stupidly enacted. Only without understanding in evolutionary terms what they are these mood swings impute to the individual an intimate morality. This is a sense that somebody, or something, is in control, guiding the individual about which actions to take. In a psychological sense this happens. Also from evolution the human infant takes half a lifetime, roughly 20 years of a natural reproductive human life of 40 years, to grow to full adult size. Payback from learning is also important so the long years of nurturing are not wasted. Because of this long learning precepts which the human individual is taught in childhood tend to stick throughout later life. This gives a further psychological impression that somebody is in control. As a result of these impressions the human individual must not only grapple with group rules but intimate ones as well, also telling the individual how to behave.

Only in tribal life, especially of small, integrated family members, the group and individual rules are probably not much in conflict, though this needs researching. But as civilization grows tribal life is subsumed into larger social organizations. As wealth, family, and status divisions differentiate individual roles from each other and from the group, the conflict between group rules and intimate morality in each individual intensifies so it needs an explanation. For each increase in social complexity there will be a corresponding increasing in complexity of the individual ethical conflict, which too will require a deeper explanation of why this conflict erupts. Especially, as was explained in the previous chapter humans by their evolutionary propensity will seek an ethics that maximizes options. And we can trace such propensity to the beginning of consciousness. Consciousness is a way to group harmful or beneficial stimuli as 'pleasure' or 'pain' feelings, which enables a generalized response to thousands of varied stimuli. Millions of years later, ethics is a social way for intelligent, language capable beings to also group responses to situations. In ethics, humans discovered that the most generalized response, one which can best handle all possible situations, even unforeseen ones, is to advise individuals to always act in a manner morally 'good' and eschew behavior which is morally 'bad'. Teaching that actions can be generalized as "good" or "bad" is a higher level optimization, like we use in arithmetic where 1 + 2 = 3 can be generalized as a + b = c and so on. However, while the principle of 'good' and 'bad' as moral behavior is universal in human society, how it arose was not. Before good and bad were defined in absolute terms the notion had to progress from needs of tribe, group, and nation, till its present redefinition in terms of what is universally moral and good for all humanity.

Still, all this has to be explained. But most surprising, it is only fully explained in secular terms the first time here, in the Theory of Options, at the end of the Second Millennium. Prior to this there was secular explanation about reciprocal altruism in animals, and conflict in the Freudian subconscious. But there was no explanation of why humans felt that each person was being intimately monitored, or each individual felt that he or she was being tested over whether the individual was behaving in a morally good or bad manner. Outside of the Theory of Options we do not have anywhere in science an explanation of why individuals should choose morally good over bad actions, for inherent reasons. Nobody has said until now that choosing good over bad was a human evolutionary program, that it maximized options. Nobody has said that moral 'good' was an historically determined generalized response to situations which could not be foreseen, and this was evolutionary fit because it maximized encephalization of the learning capable brain.

If anything, science made a muddle of this. Instead of teaching that moral restraint was necessary, part of the human program, because it reinforced encephalization, science taught the contrary. It has taught that the restraints are artificial; that there is no evolutionary basis for moral restraint, that humans are not in any way morally tested, that this concept only arose because of "religion", which itself arose for absurd reasons. Moreover, despite that religion and religious explanation of morality arose universally in human society science has not attempted to explain why this occurred. It has supposed only that religion was required for sociological reasons, which is true, but that the explanation was a trick dreamt up by the priesthood with no natural basis in real human needs or feelings.

But the religious explanation of moral need has a very strong basis. If anything, it took an enormous intellectual effort to work it out. It was an effort moreover, that would reward those societies that produced refined theories of moral responsibility, but especially the moral responsibility of the individual. The religious explanation was undoubtedly purloined by the priesthood and was mostly exploited, not to advance society but hold its social progress in check. But in history the founding idea of individual moral responsibility came first from religion. It has not until now been explained as convincingly to ordinary people in ordinary language terms, as has been done using religious metaphor.

What then is the religious message?

Well, religions as culture vary to meet different needs. Primitive belief systems probably began with art and language, and human ritual such as burial and marriage. As tribes coalesced into kingdoms obviously the social functions of religions too became more complex, but so do the explanations. Most tribes have animistic beliefs in which animals, plants, rivers and mountains are imbued with spirits. But as humans begin agriculture and husbandry they notice distinctions between animals, objects and humans themselves. Whatever created all things it created people differently from animals, or animals from objects, and this has to be explained. Also, as society becomes more complex gradations in social levels appear among people too. Some are born slaves, but others are born as kings. But as humans differentiate in social status they notice something else that is very strange. People enjoy different material freedoms but all people universally suffer torments of the inner psyche. The force that made people different from animals and gave people different social and material status somehow retained control over the feelings that people experienced, which also had to be explained. And it all had to be explained before the Theory of Evolution, or philosophy or science, in the simple pre-scientific terms that people of those ages could understand.

Gradually, over millennia, the wise men worked it out. The "creation" was not as simple as the earlier myths and legends allowed. Instead of multiple creations by multiple gods or events, there was one creation, by a single all-powerful Creator-Deity called God. God alone created the heavens and earth, and all living creatures on it. But having created all these things, God set a special challenge. He wanted to conduct a Divine Experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if He granted to certain living creatures God-like attributes of will and reason. Would creatures so divinely endowed pursue a God-like goodness, or would they degenerate into evil ways? To conduct His experiment, God created humans, giving them will and reason, and freedom to choose between good and evil.

Generally, results of the test were disappointing. The new creatures almost universally pursued evil ways, bringing upon themselves strife, misery, and torment. So to salvage at least part of His experiment, God sent among the humans various prophets, in one story, His own son, to explain God's intent. Although humans as a whole failed God's test, by hearing God's purpose explained individuals who choose could still pass the test through individual moral salvation, by always choosing good actions over evil ones.  For people who believe this, the solution to the ethical problem becomes one of making the internal moral feelings reflect the great Moral Code of God. Once this is achieved, the seeming disharmony between feelings and codes will be resolved, and inner peace and happiness will result.

While the religious hypothesis might appear far-fetched, it offers an elegant solution to the ethical problem. In fact, it solves several conundrums related to ethics which secular theories overlook. Religion, say, accounts for the universal quality of ethical feelings by relating them to an absolute inspiration. The religious solution correctly notes the gradation in levels of consciousness between animals and people, such that only creatures with will and reason practice ethics. This is a crucial observation of ethics that so-called Darwinist ethics has totally botched. Most importantly, religion provides a definitive solution to the intimate problem of ethics, by teaching people practical precepts that they must follow, such as always do good, to solve burning ethical torments. This provides humans with a purpose to life, such that regardless of which codes larger society practices, the individual always possesses an intimate guide to behavior. This in turn increases options, because it allows humans to respond to novel situations for which there are no prior guides. The religious explanation is also appealing because the nature of ethical torment is precisely that we feel that life is a moral test, that we are constantly being judged by our actions, and that all our actions will have future consequences for our happiness.

So, the religious idea touches the essential moral dilemma of humans. To this author the reasoning of the religious argument is very elegant, far more than any philosophical attempts so far to explain inner feelings. Only the religious explanation is not a scientific explanation in terms of human origins. It might be argued, perplexingly, that the religious explanation is more scientific than certain "science" when the only facts considered are intimate human feelings, because the religious idea focuses on moods and torments humans truly experience. But there must be another, truly scientific explanation of these moods and torments compatible with other scientific facts such as evolution, free from the mythology, corruption, and other distorted features of religious practice.

5.4.3 Human Options 

Only the current scientific explanations are not comprehensive either. Darwinian forces shape human physiology, but these forces direct psychological development in modes not abiding to Darwinian terms. During the Ice Ages changes in human habitat occurred too fast to be tracked by Darwinian mechanisms alone. Changes of inherited behavior, or instinct, could not be adjusted rapidly enough for changing climatic conditions, whereas changes of acquired behavior, or habit, could be adjusted easily. This resulted in rapid adaptation being not dependent on one biological adaptation, but on ability of the group to pass on learned behaviors. The advantage being that the more behaviors that can be passed on the less those behaviors will be genetically programmed as instincts, so the more rapidly they can be changed.

This need for flexible behavior is why morals and ethics arise. The first step for humans towards increasing options is to "transfer" the bulk of their behaviors from heritable ones, controlled by instinct, to acquired behaviors, programmable within the softwired part of the brain, but controlled to a degree by the group. Yet humans are not completely free to adjust their behaviors at whim. During evolution humans undergo a process of transferring instinctual 'hard' behaviors into acquired behaviors. But no sooner is the transfer effected than powerful new regulators of behavior arise, both in the individual psyche and within the group. No sooner do humans overcome one set of controls, which are instinctual, than they supplement them with another set, which are psychological. So, humans never become free from controls. They substitute 'hard' genetic constraints for newer, 'soft' moralistic constraints.

Even then, primitive morality mechanisms only take humans to tribal levels of morality. Soft constraints on individual members of a tribe are still Darwinian mechanisms, because tribal groups are still constrained by Darwinian laws of food supply and natural survival. It is only in the Age of Agriculture that the remaining Darwinian constraints are burst. Humans progress from adapting to varied sets of Darwinian conditions, to adapting to any conditions at all. Except one strange condition of civilized life is suffering no natural constraints on behavior at all! Yet humans reaching such a condition, like ancient King Solomon, soon find themselves confronting troubling emotions. It is as though Nature or 'Something' does not want humans to be completely free from constraint. We know that human civilization cannot survive if ethics do not constrain behavior but this is wisdom of hindsight. So there must have been a mechanism resident in primitive human psychology which warned humans not step outside natural constraints, unless they supplemented them with moral ones. Perhaps the warning came from the same Pleistocene Age mechanism that aided primitive humans long ago. If it were good in evolutionary terms for sentiment to rule over instinct long ago, by an adumbration of that process it will also be good for a refined sentiment to rule over primitive sentiment in a new age. Allowing primitive sentiments to overrule instinct adapted humans for changing natural environments. Allowing refined sentiments to overrule primitive sentiments adapts humans to the unique conditions that they created -changing cultural environments.

But why is having moral constraints good viewed even with hindsight? When humans practice ethical or religious restraint, when they invoke "refined sentiment" to overrule primitive impulses what are they doing, in naturalistic terms?

They are pursuing the path which humans pursued throughout emergence -increasing options! If we are compelled to act from instinct or impulse our behavior is constrained. We are still animals. We are back where we were when first expelled from our ancestral forest home. We do not have options. But humans do not want this. We, humans, want all our options open. Eons ago, humans took the first step towards creating options. This was interposing an internal delay between stimulus and response. We learned, within our own behavior, to substitute 'hard' for 'soft' constraints. Yet eons later humans learned to do something more amazing. No matter how well tribal peoples control their behavior, they are still ruled by the laws of nature's scarcity. Yet during the Age of Agriculture humans learned how to change not just behavioral options, but environmental ones as well. Just as the earlier change had great impact on the human group, so did this. The group mechanism created by the first change, adoption of tribal life and custom, was shattered by the second one. Instead of tribal laws, individuals became members of a larger grouping -society. Within this grouping humans increased options, because each individual became socially mobile in ways not before possible.

But something else changed too. Both tribes and society have laws, and because one evolved from the other, we imagine them as qualitatively the same. But they are opposite. Strange as it seems the distinction is that tribal laws are real. Tribal laws are 'hard' constraints on behavior, because they reflect true conditions of an evolutionary struggle for survival, only framed in group terms. In tribal life one either obeys the tribal laws, or not only the individual, but the whole tribe perishes. But in society laws do not constrain individuals this way. One only has to be rich, powerful, rebellious, cunning, dishonest, or a host of things humans are also good at to avoid obeying society's laws. As the Sophists explained long ago society's laws are mere fictions, for no other reason than that one does not have to obey them!

Then what 'laws' do humans have to obey?

If a human child were raised by wolves it must obey the laws of wolves. If it is raised in tribe 'A' it has to obey 'A's laws, and if by tribe 'B', it must obey 'B's laws. But laws of wolves and tribes are all 'hard' constraints on behavior -less flexible, less adaptable, and outside the true human purpose, which is to maximize options. Yet the 'soft' laws of society, giving maximum options, are not laws at all -they are legal fictions! So if 'hard' laws of behavior are not sufficiently adaptable, and 'soft' laws are fictions, what laws of behavior must humans obey, to fulfill their evolutionary purpose of providing themselves the maximum number of options?

They must obey the laws of the "inner" human psychology, of human culture and the human purpose. Thousands of years ago wise men of religion discovered these laws. In an age before science, philosophy, psychology, and universal human culture, the leap of abstraction was too great to go from primitive tribal laws to modern secular ethics, so an intermediate explanation was used. This was the religious hypothesis, which despite its variations, we can see today in its true terms of reference. This is that apart from laws of men and nature, there exists for humans a 'Greater' Law, which we must all be subservient too. The 'Greater Law' exists as a test of an individual's basic choices, to see if each of us, individuals with will and reason, will choose good over evil.

Yet this moral test each individual faces did not, naturalistically, come from a Creator-Deity. It came from the opposite. It came from a primitive struggle, eons ago, in which good and bad were measured not in moralistic terms, but in modes of survival. Evolution works many ways. Organisms that once breathed sulfur now breath oxygen. Creatures that once swam now run. Creatures that once crawled now fly. Science revealed these incredible transformations, but has balked at the final one. Science struggled so bitterly to explain that the processes of evolution were devoid of morality, that it blocked itself from discovering processes whereby evolutionary forces could produce moral ones. Breaking the block comes from realizing that the evolutionary purpose of humans is not mere physical survival and procreation of individuals, but evolving the maximum numbers of options the exercise of behaviors can create.

This is why humans need a basic ethic of choosing moral good over evil, because it reflects the most adaptable form of behavior. In 'survival' situations morals inhibit options, but this point, because it offers maximum flexibility. In survival situations morals can be abandoned, and frequently are! Yet if all humans are trying to achieve is to 'survive' then our evolutionary efforts for the past millions of years have been in vain. Let us hope, millions of years later, we are not still trying to survive in crude terms. Instead, if our evolutionary path has been successful, far from just seeking survival, we are on the contrary facing situations in which all our options are open. If our evolution in both cultural and physiological terms has been truly successful we should now face situations in which the only remaining constraints on our behavior are moral ones. Contrary to modern views it is moral behavior that gives humans the maximum number of options. This is because only moral behavior can adapt a creature to the unique situation of having to face no hard constraints on behavior at all. It is a situation of facing no hard constraints on behavior, to which humans strive in evolutionary terms, because that situation offers the maximum options to behavior.

So broadly, humans need to place socially fabricated constraints on behavior to derive full evolutionary benefit from a learning-capable brain. But there are no natural or evolutionary guides to the social forms these constraints take. We only have, looking back, historical guides to the forms that the social constraints did take, with human development here on Planet Earth. And looking back, if there had arisen even a single human society that did not employ religious belief to first explain ethical dilemma, we might claim that religion was "extra-potentate" to human affairs. But religion has been universal in human culture, fulfilling many social, cultural and belief-system roles. On some other planet intelligent societies might have evolved without transiting the religious phase, but we have not observed it. So there is no teleology to this. Evolution "deposited" humans on the shore of civilized society, and while evolution lacks purpose, it at least obeys natural laws. But beyond evolution there are not even natural laws as guides. We have no analytical model of what happens once beings acquire language, brains that can wonder, and behavior whose options exceed normal Darwinian constraints. We only have a single, on this planet only, empirical record of what happened. When humans formed tribes they developed belief systems. And when tribes began to form larger groupings, humans developed religions.

The task of the science and philosophy is not to produce 'silly' dismissive explanations of the universal human religious experience. It is to explain why.