Archeology shows us a lot about the origin of religion. History and current events tell us a lot about where religions went from there. Different religions have different stories about the world. But all of those stories are answers to the same questions people everywhere ask about life.
Religions bring people together into communities through shared stories and shared beliefs. That means we can bring more people together with bigger shared stories and more shared beliefs.
ACT I
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Y’all know what archeology is? It’s the science of bones and stones.
In Africa the bones of the earliest people go back 7 million years. The first stones people turned into tools go back 2 1/2 million years.
Archeologists have been studying the progression of things people invented. Psychologists use their discoveries to study the evolution of human intelligence.
They can’t draw an exact picture of the evolution of our intelligence that way, because archeologists haven’t discovered every single thing people ever did. Much of what people left behind has decomposed or broken down or gotten scattered or destroyed. But it does show us an outline of how our intelligence evolved in stages.
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People started chipping rocks into tools about 2.6 million years ago. They started using fire about 1.5 million years ago. Those are clues that people were getting more intelligent because their understanding of cause and effect was expanding.
Around that time the evolution of intelligence gets more complicated. As people evolved more intelligence they got better at adapting to different living conditions. They spread all over Africa, and then into Asia and Europe.
That happened over such a long period of time that after groups split apart from each other they evolved into different species and sub-species, with different physical adaptations to their environments.
Intelligence evolved differently in different species. Sometimes people of different species would meet and some would mate with each other and mix their genes back together. Species died out at different times.
The more intelligent ones survived the longest because they were able to adapt to changing situations better, because they had a better grasp of cause and effect.
In the end, all but one species died out. That one remaining species is us.
ACT II
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About 130,000 years ago people began burying their dead. That tells us at that point people started thinking about the fact that if they left the bodies of their friends and family aboveground they would get eaten by scavengers, and they didn’t want that. So they decided it would be better to dig holes to put their dead friends and family in and cover them with dirt.
About 100,000 years ago people invented paint by mixing water with certain kinds of dirt. They started painting pictures on walls of caves. That’s the first clue we can find about the evolution of language.
Bones tell us very little about stages of the evolution of language, because your vocal cords and most of the other things that make language possible aren’t bones. They don’t fossilize. They decompose.
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People painting pictures on the walls of caves is a big clue to the evolution of language because pictures are symbols. A person sees something or does something, it makes them think of ideas, and then they represent those ideas somewhere else. Like people, or spears, or animals.
Then they can string symbols together to tell stories. Like people with spears hunted animals and killed them, and then everyone ate.
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Words are symbols too. With these words I’m saying right now, I’m thinking of ideas, I’m making sounds with my mouth, and you understand my ideas because you know the ideas each of these sounds represents. Then we string symbols together to tell stories.
Soon after people invented paint, the paint starts showing up in people’s graves, mixed with their bones. There’s no way to be certain what they were thinking at that point.
Maybe they painted pictures on their dead friends and relatives to connect them to the pictures they painted in the caves. Or maybe covering them with paint and then painting a picture to represent them made them feel like they were still there.
Whatever it was, that tells us now they were thinking of burying their dead as something more than hiding them from scavengers.
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From about 80,000 to about 50,000 years ago human intelligence took a big leap.
People started creating more complicated things, like tools made by connecting parts together, like stone axe heads on wooden handles and clothing that was sewn with needles and cords. They started creating things for more abstract purposes, like musical instruments and jewelry.
Around that time they started burying their dead differently again. They started burying them with tools, clothes, blankets, and other things they needed while they were alive. Now they were acting like their dead friends were asleep, and were going to need this stuff when they woke up. Or like their friends were leaving and they knew they were never coming back, but they wanted to make sure they had the things they needed wherever they were going.
Think about what that means. People who told stories with pictures were now burying things in the ground that took them hours or days to make, and that would be valuable to living people, as if they felt those things would be even more valuable to dead people.
From all these clues we can see at that point people believed in an afterlife.
ACT III
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Now let’s jump ahead to today and work backwards.
Religions are built on collections of stories. What are those stories about? Think of any religion you want. What are its most important stories?
It has stories about the origin of the world. It has stories about the origin of humanity. Stories about morality. Stories about a sense of purpose to life. And stories about what happens to people after they die.
Each religion has its own stories about those things. That makes religions seem different from each other. But every religion has stories about all of those things.
That tells us that there is no individual religion that thought of these things. Instead, these are things that people everywhere feel they need.
That means human intelligence makes people ask these kinds of questions about life, and makes them search for answers until they feel like they’ve found them.
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Now let’s jump to the middle. In between archeology and current events is history
People live in groups. Religions help solidify communities by telling stories that groups of people feel are true.
For a group of people to function as a community, they have to agree on how to interact with each other. That lets them work together, trust each other, and depend on each other, because it lets everyone know (or at least believe) that everyone else in the group shares their feelings of what people should and shouldn’t do. We can call that a shared moral framework.
Moral and immoral are what we also call good and evil or right and wrong or acceptable and unacceptable. When you feel someone made a good decision, you feel they made a moral decision. When you feel someone made an evil decision, you feel they made an immoral decision.
Now the question is: How do religions create their communities of shared moral frameworks? Are the stories mainly inspirations about how people can reach their goals if they work hard and work together? Or do the stories mainly try to scare people into cooperating by threatening to punish them if they don’t?
Here’s the problem.
If you comply with your moral framework because you live in fear of what will happen to you if you don’t, it means you also live in fear of people who don’t even seem to try to comply with your moral framework because they don’t believe in the stories it’s based on.
If you believe that your own moral framework, and the stories that create it, is the only one that’s right, it means you don’t even have a vocabulary for saying anything positive about those other people.
If you feel that different = immoral, then there is no way for you to feel that different = good.
ACT IV
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How do people organize themselves into groups without religion?
People have always lived in groups, like all the other primates. That means we have social instincts.
Our social instincts create in-groups and out-groups. Think about all the people you know. Which people do you trust the most to be on your side no matter what? The people closest to you.
Those are your closest friends. Most people’s families are in that category too, but not everyone’s. That’s your in group.
You trust them because you know them and you know you have important things in common with them, and because you know that they know you and they like you and trust you too. Being friends with someone is the feeling that you can trust each other all the time, not wondering if or when you can trust each other.
Now think of the people you hate the most. Those people are your out-group. They’re the people you distrust the most.
In between there are a lot of steps that other people fit into.
Beyond your closest friends there’s your friends you don’t hang out with as much, and then there’s classmates and coworkers you like but you’re not really friends with, and there’s friends of friends, and neighbors you say hello to but don’t really know, and then there’s total strangers who you don’t know anything about but who don’t seem like a threat.
Then there are strangers who seem untrustworthy, and then there are strangers who glare at you as if they don’t trust you, and then there are strangers who shout insults at you every chance they get but don’t act like they want to kill you. Then there are strangers who do act like they want to kill you.
The point is, we categorize people according to how good of a relationship we feel we have with them.
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People have found ways to create in-groups.
Countries are an obvious one. We have borders and citizenship that determine who belongs to which country. We have flags and national anthems that symbolize which country people belong to. All of that is supposed to make us feel more loyalty to other citizens of our country, which is supposed to make us more dependable to each other.
It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well much of the time. When foreign countries declare war on us they have to declare war on all of us at once.
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Religions create in-groups too. But instead of grouping people by the land they live on, they group them by the stories they believe in.
Groups depend on moral frameworks to function as communities. But what does that morality say about out-groups? Does it say that people outside your religion do immoral things? Or does it say they’re immoral people?
Immoral means evil. When you see people as evil, you’ve assigned them to the worst out group there is.
Some religious fundamentalists are just hateful people who will always see everyone else as their enemies no matter what anyone does. We can’t wave a magic wand and erase that part of human psychology. So we have to work around it.
ACT V
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People have always lived in groups. They’ve depended on shared stories to help organize their groups for as long as people have been able to tell stories.
Religion has been a huge part of that. But today religion isn’t enough.
We do have compatible ideas about who we are and what we want in life. If we want to be a functional country, which we’re not now, we need to start telling a story that is big enough for all of us to be in it. And we need to tell that story in a way that makes as many people as possible feel like they’re part of it.
That might sound hard. But telling stories like those is an art form that goes back at least 50,000 years.