I’m posting this in GQ because I am not looking for a debate, but for one or more accepted theories to the thread-title question. If a Mod. believes it should have been started in GD, please accept my apologies and move it.
Basically, it’s a commonplace of anthropology that nearly every culture has some system of belief in some supernatural force or forces, deity or deities, held in common by most or all of its members (or at least had lip service paid to it by those who don’t believe it).
For purposes of this thread, let us presume the absence of an objective and knowable deity that is the referent for such beliefs. (This is not intended to deny such, but to limit the discussion to data on which there is common agreement.)
Given that presumption, then, what is the explanation or explanations advanced by social sciences for the phenomenon of beliefs in the supernatural? Granted that those beliefs vary wildly from culture to culture, they are present in all cultures or very nearly so. Why is this the case?
If not in GD, then IMHO it should be in IMHO. That said:
The reasons boils down to, IMHO, how our brains process information. We continually compare and contrast current experience that past memory; striving to find links between events, explanations for changes, rules to make the world a little more predictable and a little less scary.
Our distant ancestors created our gods in this process. Later, a distant ancestor of Jimmy Swaggert declared himself a pipeline to god’s will, and shaman/priests were invented, followed in short order by organized religion and tithing.
Yes, “because XXXX made it that way” is a far more satisfying answer to a question than “I don’t know”. Both the asker, and askee are empowered by the supernatural answer, while the later response just leaves everyone feeling inadequate.
Can’t stay out, even though I agree this is either GD or IMHO.
I’d agree with Yojimboguy’s take.
Humans abstract, that is, we take specific instances and infer/reason a general rule. Cause and Effect is one of the basic abstractions. When you see a lot of things happening that you do not have a good natural explanation for, inferring/reasoning that something supernatural is responsible a standard response.
Concieving a god or gods to explain things like famines, floods, disease, deaths of hunters also has the advantage of presenting a possibility to change a situation - one can pray, offer sacrifices, change behavior, etc. in hopes of having the situation improve.
Actually the OP’s question is so large in scope that it exceeds the capasity of this board (or any board). For instance, Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces which basically discusses the subject. It is definitely too much for a few sound bytes here and too complex to be handled by conjecture.
Dawkins’ explanation does not explain why people listen to these memes. And convert. Why, say in the 1st century, people were willing to absorb a message that was contrary to their general culture and why they were willing to martyr themselves and so on. When I was growing up, I noticed that young people were much less religious than older ones and assumed that religion would almost disappear as a serious force in life by the time I was in my 60s. To the contrary, what I see, to my great astonishment is that even people who were raised without religion adopt it, sometimes with great seriousness, if not fervor. And I am at a total loss to explain this. Especially since they seem to ignore the founding precepts of their religion. For example, it seems that the majority of those who call themselves Christian are in favor of capital punishment. And they sure don’t act as if they believed that the meek would inherit the earth and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven. But then religious people don’t seem to mind a bit of contradiction here and there.
The idea of a “meme”, if I grok it, is that you can sometimes think of ideas as being like viruses, and then we find many parallels with evolution.
A “meme” is an idea that can spread from one person to another, by word of mouth, or text, or email forward, or what have you, like a virus infecting new hosts. The meme reproduces itself when a new person hears about it, and likes it enough to speak about it, or write about it, or communicate it in some way to a new person. Memes can mutate and change, when someone puts a new “twist” on them, and this sometimes increases their success. Also, the environment of the meme can change. Different technologies for the spread of memes affect which memes are successful (think of Gutterberg and the Bible, and, heaven help us, the internet and glurge.) The meme’s environment also contains other memes, some of which might help reinforce it, and some of which are in competition with it.
1.If a society with a common morality survives better than one without…
and
People have a tendancy to prefer self-interest over societal interest…
then
Societies as a whole would have to develop reasons for people as individuals to sacrifice thier interests to the good of thier society.
Add to this the incomplete state of knowledge, human desire for ritual, and the need of the psyche to deny death, the answer seems to be that religious belief may be (in a rather complicated way) necessary for governance.
Disclaimer: this musing was written under the influence of a profound lack of sleep and is intended not as a direct answer to the OP but only a furtherance of a very interesting discussion. Please feel free (I know you will) to tell me why I’m a knucklehead.
I think this is one factor. (I picture little kids asking standard kid questions.) All sorts of things would be said to have been caused by the gods. I think another factor was the desire to believe that people who died did not really cease to exist, but rather, were alive in some other place. One would be re-united with them at death.
Because our ancestors were trying to make heads and tails out of the unknown, order out of chaos. So, in the process we created gods. This is called anthropomorphization.
The term “knock on wood” came just from that. No one in old times knew why crops grew or why it rained so they believes trees were wise and would knock on them and then ask for rain or whatever. People created gods because like what said before they couldnt explain or didnt understand. So today we know whay it rains can even predict, we know how things grow and why animals act they way they do. And some people just want a reason to fight a war ( The Crusads) and many other wars at that and it even happens today. Terrorism is basically a "my god is better then your god and since you dont believe my god he wants me to kill you.
