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Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around: study
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
When ancient societies hit a million people, vengeful gods appeared
The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.
[...] But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?
The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.
"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."
All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday March 25 2019, @02:29PM (7 children)
People are still trying to figure out the purpose of religion, assuming that people consciously invented it. But I highly doubt it was all that intentional. This study implies that religion is a consequence of complex society, and I would interpret this to mean that it arose out of many people independently trying to explain things they were not able to understand.
Consider this: past a certain population, nobody can keep track of all the social relationships anymore. You might as well try to understand the sand by studying individual grains of it. Nevertheless, we can observe trends and create abstractions like the angle of repose [wikipedia.org].
Complex society is similar. Sometimes bad things happen to people, and we can't blame it on Thog anymore. So why did that person fall into poverty? Simple: God hates him.
Gods can be viewed not just as supernatural persons, but as forces of nature. The God of the Sea creates the tides, and while we may now relate it to the gravity impact of the Moon, Poseidon's will made a reasonable substitute in ancient times.
The Gods of the ancient world are largely personifications of social forces. Death, revelry, fertility; these are all things that are difficult to understand as they apply to a complex society.
I suggest that the origin of these moral Gods followed what people in these societies observed to be related to the bad things that happened to people. Sex is one great example, especially the double standard applied to women: if you have lots of it, you tend to have lots of kids you don't have the resources to care for. Therefore, that woman's life was ruined by sleeping around. Therefore, God hates too much sex.
Repeat this for murder (kill and be killed), lying and cheating (trust has real economic value)...really any moral ill can be explained as "people did this, then bad things happened to them, ergo it was their own fault for angering the Gods".
It's doubly effective at easing our own fears that these bad things can happen to us at any time. Simply avoid angering the Gods, and dismiss those poor people as immoral. Frankly, we still do this, even when the gods are not GOD.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 25 2019, @06:18PM (6 children)
I think you missed part of the conclusion. Religions with powerful gods are a consequence of a complex society. Less complex societies have less powerful gods. Animists and others who prayed to animals and a myriad of natural forces had their religions, but none of those gods were powerful enough to protect from all calamities. Nor were they powerful enough to provide all of man's needs. Thus, a family might have a shrine at which they worshipped their 1, or 6, or 30 most important gods. A town might have 1, or 3, or 9 temples dedicated to as many gods, and a larger city might have 50 temples.
A really complex society will kill off all the lesser gods, and/or assimilate all those lesser gods into one supreme god.
I suspect that there may be something of a feed-back loop in there, too. Maybe as society gets more complex, it begins killing off the least gods, keeping only a small assemblage of gods. As it grows more complex, more of the assembly is killed off, simplifying worship even more, as time goes on. And, maybe lesser complexity in the worship allows people to spend more of their thinking power to create that more complex society.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:00AM (5 children)
>Religions with powerful gods are a consequence of a complex society
I think you're overreaching, their findings were "moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity". Not powerful, monotheistic gods, just moralizing ones - as in they are claimed to care about the way people conduct their day-to-day lives, rather than being focused on more cosmological concerns.
Plenty of complex societies never adopted monotheism - China and India both have ancient, complex societies whose population, knowledge and technology long dwarfed that of of the West, and they still dwarf our size. And neither have ever been monotheistic.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:10PM (4 children)
Point taken. I did overstate my point. Thank you for that perspective.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:35PM (3 children)
You're welcome.
Now that I think of it, the authors of the study may be overreaching as well - I'm no expert in Eastern "religions", especially the ancient ones, but my limited understanding of Hinduism is that most of the gods have very little to say about human affairs. Bhuddism is generally unconcerned with morality, and has no gods at all (though it acknowledges their existence). Taoism is similar. I don't think Confucianism has any gods. And while I think the traditional Chinese ancestor-worship involves gods as well, I get the impression they're more of the "manage the world" type, which is why you pray to your ancestors to intervene on your behalf.
A "general trend" that doesn't actually hold for the majority of the world's population sounds more like the researchers forgot to consider that their own cultural is a historical minority.
I remember reading another study long ago that instead broke down religions as "jungle based" and "desert based". Cultures that developed in jungles where resources are plentiful tend to have lots of gods, and little overarching moralizing, while cultures that develop in resource-poor deserts (the Abrahamic religions and their predecessors being the primary examples) tend to have a single god-king who sets a lot of rules. Rules that are generally conductive to the concentration and control of resources by a clergy-endorsed king.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)
A side effect. In my mind, an undesirable side effect. To the clergy, a highly desirable side effect.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:57PM (1 child)
I would be more convinced of that if it didn't benefit the very people responsible for creating the and spreading the religion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:20AM
People using religion as a front to wage war and profit from the toil of others? Shocking. Just shocking I say.