The evolutionary psychology of religion

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This is something that just came to my mind while posting in another thread this morning. It seems to me that religion is ultimately the result of the importance social intelligence had in our evolution. People tend to anthropomorphize things, that is thinking as if an inanimate object or physical process is, or is the result of, a conscious agent. We do this all the time, like when we curse at something (like the Blue Screen of Death) that is malfunctioning, as if the object chose to malfunction. This is the basis of Animism and it's somewhat more abstract cousin polytheism, the most ancient human belief systems. Animism is probably the "default" belief system, people will tend to see the world as filled with conscious agents controlling objects unless taught otherwise.

The emergence from animism and polytheism was triggered at least 3 times independently (in Greece, the Middle East, and India) by the "discovery" of causality, the idea that not all events are the result of the actions of conscious beings but instead are the result of cause-and-effect relationships governed by impersonal forces ("Natural Law," "Karma," Babylonian astrology, etc.) that are the expression of a transcendent being or "first cause". Thus came into existance Monotheism and Pantheism, as well as the idea that perhaps there was no transcendent being and it was just the impersonal forces, and thus Atheism originated independently in Greece and India.

Perhaps people anthropomorphize (hard to say or spell !) the "voices" (thoughts, feelings, urges, drives, impulses, desires, aversions) within their own brains. The notions in my mind I attribute to combination of the biology I entered this world with and acquired reactions to the experiences I've had since birth.

Maybe other people make different attributions, that another entity is communicating with him/her through mental content. Stimuli outside myself, in the world-well, those are outgrowths of same processes as those within myself, albeit writ large & en masse. The world is teeming with everyone's beliefs clashing or meshing in varying degrees, at same time & place. You can see why I prefer to stay home, in my own little world that at least makes a bit of sense to me (less arguing/fighting when I'm alone !).

I do jokingly refer to "weather gods" or "tv gods", but only in jest-as way to liven up viccissitudes (hard to spell that one, too) of life, since the reasons things work or coincide with my wishes on any given occasion seem impenetrable & baffling. So that's a dash of "animism", I guess-but I don't take it seriously. It's mere coping mechanism that doesn't inform/influence my deeply-held beliefs nor my daily activities-not a basis for how I relate to the world or how I perceive & interpet the people in it. My indulging in such thought patterns is voluntary, am not wedded to it as part of my personhood.

David J. Linder's "The Accidental Mind" (2007) has, on pg. 244, a nifty little chart summing up his theories. Basically, it's the left brain doing the fabricating of a coherent (believable to the organism/creature generating this idea) story to fit the valid yet inconsistent information given it by the right brain. Hence, religion.