The Enigma Of Religion Is Explained By Our Mind

How to unravel the enigma of religion? It arose as an ancient necessity, or so it is believed, and has remained to this day with no hint that it will ever go away. If we look at history, we will see that religion – if you can speak in the singular – has gone through many variations. So, for example, we have seen the birth of monotheistic religions, in which one God is worshiped.

These gods also underwent changes over the centuries and were endowed with different names and forms. There are gods of which no representations can be made, as well as others to which fantastic forms are attributed, sometimes related to animals.

Religion was also institutionalized and, in its name, social institutions were created for the purpose of providing or improving services, such as education and health. The downside is that great wars have also taken place in their name and many crimes and injustices have been committed based on the dictates of the faith, often misinterpreted.

Explanations for the Riddle of Religion

There are many explanations that have been put forward to try to explain the birth and enigma of religion over the centuries. One of the most defended is the one we defined at the beginning – religion fulfills the function of giving answers to those questions that we cannot answer in any other way – but this is not the only explanation given to religion.

Below, we’ll expose some of these attempts to explain the birth, survival, and enigma of religion:

• Religion emerged as the cause of drug use. People who consumed hallucinogenic substances had abnormal visions that they ended up interpreting as messages from the beyond. Some shamans and witches used drugs to get closer to the gods or to communicate with them when making decisions. It is also considered that the consumption of these drugs was sometimes unintentional, so interpretations that introduce divine beings are plausible.
• Another explanation considers that religion arises to give explanations of phenomena that had no logical interpretation.  Some phenomena for which it was not so easy to find a convincing explanation, such as rain and thunder, were interpreted with a logical restriction, and the motivation to explain their cause led people to create the gods. Thus, it was the gods who caused these phenomena for which there was no rational explanation.

• The rise of religion also appears as a form of idolatry. Some people were even idolized for their actions and their words. This worship led to the creation of religions around these figures.
• The last explanation compiled here tells us that religion appears as a cognitive adaptation. By cognition are understood mental functions, processes and states, with a special focus on processes such as understanding, inference, decision making, planning and learning. This perspective is one of the most accepted in biology and psychology.

“In gods we trust”

According to Scott Atran’s book “In Gods We Trust”, religion tries to change genes that are predisposed to certain behaviors, to group selection and to mimicry or imitation. From this perspective, religion is not a doctrine or an institution, not even a faith. According to this view, religion arises as a consequence of the common tasks of the human mind when dealing with vital concerns, such as birth, old age, death, the unexpected and love.

To understand this perspective, it is necessary to understand that religion has a cost and that its doctrines often contradict intuition. For example, the meaning given to sacrifices that some religions propose. Following one religion or another represents a great cost, at times it could even cost your life. The comparison between the positive and negative characteristics that religion brings can present a negative balance, which indicates that religion is not chosen simply based on its benefits.

Therefore, it is understood that religion is a non-adaptive consequence of the adaptive characteristics of human cognition. In other words, religion is an adaptation at a cognitive level that, by itself, is not adaptive if we analyze the costs and benefits it presents. Religion, like other cultural phenomena, is the result of a confluence of cognitive, behavioral, physical and ecological limitations that inhabit the mind.

Psychological Faculties That Create Religion

As already stated, religion is developed by certain psychological faculties that serve to adapt to the conditions of life. Some of these faculties are:

• Primary and secondary affective programs: the emotions we feel and the way we interpret them have consequences for interactions between people. Beliefs in a religion make us have affective responses with our group that are different from those we have with other groups, being more affective with members of the group itself. This way of expressing emotions was evolutionary in that it benefited the group to which one belongs.

• Social intelligence: group life gave rise to different interpretations that served to protect the group. Choosing one god or another is determined by membership in a group, and this choice, in turn, creates differences with other groups. The difference in this choice serves to regulate and legitimize the relationships that are established with those groups that chose a different god, which benefits the group itself.
• Cognitive modules: are mental schemes that regulate the interpretation of actions and rituals that take place. These modules are justified and understood on the basis of religion. Rituals that are performed within our religion are understandable and accepted while those performed in other religions seem strange and incomprehensible to us. Through these schemes, the rituals and actions of the group itself are perpetuated.

In short, human beings have a tendency to identify the agent, or the cause of an action, where these are not present. For example, belief in the supernatural can be explained, to a large extent, by the same cognitive adaptation that caused our ancestors to interpret the sound of wind making a tree move like the presence of a saber-toothed tiger.

This interpretation was useful in that it benefited survival. Thus, supernatural agents would be an evolutionary by-product caused by the predator identification scheme.

From this interpretation, religion would be the instrument our mind uses to give plausible interpretations for events that are undefined for us. In turn, the mind would reproduce these mechanisms or schemes through evolution to ensure group membership as well as survival.