By Chris Crawford

I try to understand religion in terms of the evolution of human cognition. One of the great leaps in human cognition probably occurred well before Homo Sapiens. One of our precursors, possibly as early as Australopithecus, developed the capability to attempt to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships. This cognitive skill was most likely used in persistence hunting, as the prey often ran beyond the view of the hunters. No problem; they would infer from the local topography the likely path of the prey. Hominids continued to develop their understanding of physical cause and effect, giving them greater power to anticipate events and provide for them.

A crucial intermediate step was the realization that the motions of the sun permitted predictions of annual events: the changing of the seasons, the annual flooding of the Nile, migrations of animals, and so on. This seeded the idea that somehow celestial behavior controlled terrestrial events.

But some crucially important events defied all attempts at understanding their causes. Lightning, windstorms, floods, earthquakes, droughts — lots of phenomena simply refused to show their causes. Yet the need to predict such events was of immense importance to early peoples. They HAD to find an answer.

At this point, they jumped from one mental module (look it up) to another: the ‘social relationships mental module’. Instead of thinking in terms of physical cause and effect, why not approach the matter in terms of social cause and effect?

All they needed to do was postulate the existence of powerful people who were the causes of these events. Obviously, these people had to be very powerful, and it was equally obvious that they had to be invisible. Perhaps they lived in the sky, or atop inaccessible mountains, or in the ocean, or under the earth. But they could observe human behavior, which meant the humans could manipulate these powerful people by kissing up to them. Give them something, something valuable. To ensure that it was going to these gods, the best thing to do was to remove it from human access. Burning it was a good solution. Also, saying nice things about the gods was good. Saying bad things about the gods was very, very bad.

Of course, none of these things worked, but it was easy enough to convince the population that these techniques had always worked swimmingly in the past, and if they didn’t work now, it had to be due to somebody messing things up by improper behavior. If we just hunt down these sinful people and kill them, the gods will be satisfied, and perhaps next time, our sacrifice will work. By a remarkable coincidence, this strategy also served to eliminate anybody who challenged the power of the priests.

Thus was religion born. Later, just as small social structures with lots of local kings merged into larger social structures with just one king, religions merged all the specialist gods into one all-powerful god. Monotheism echoed social conglomeration.

Nowadays, of course, many of us have left behind such superstitious nonsense. We don’t believe that some god is controlling our fates. Instead, we believe that secret groups of powerful people are manipulating our fates. Perhaps it’s the Gnomes of Zurich, or the Illuminati, or a secret group within the Catholic Church, or antifa, or the deep state. That’s much more rational.

Isn’t it?

[Editor’s Note. The preceding was written in response to the philosopher Joshua Shrode’s essay “Why Did God Write A Book?” Mr. Shrode responded to the above as follows.]

Thanks, Chris! I really like how you’ve expanded on this. That jump you describe from physical to social cause and effect makes perfect sense as a way to explain how the idea of gods could emerge naturally. And the connection you draw between the rise of monotheism and the consolidation of social structures sounds spot on. It fits perfectly with what I was trying to get at. The notion of “a God who writes a book” says quite a bit more about how we think and organize meaning than about any divine choice. Scripture feels like exactly the kind of communication system a species like ours would come up with. It actually raises a deeper problem about divine authorship itself. If meaning depends on the intention of the author (not an uncommon view) and the author is said to be omniscient, timeless, and wholly transcendent, then that intention would be inaccessible to finite minds like ours. A being whose thoughts are eternal, perfect, and unchanging couldn’t express meaning in a medium that’s temporal, ambiguous, and context-dependent without collapsing its own transcendence. So even if a divine book existed, its real intention would remain inscrutable, and we’d only ever be reading our own reflections back into it.

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