This book provides scientific evidence that the idea of god works. Supernatural beliefs and ritual practices leave a measurable psychological footprint, one that unconsciously promotes pro-social behavior in believers. But oddly, they have no such effect on non-believers.
The character of gods, attending to the the afterlife, granting free will, and supervising universal morality is a long-running evolutionary show in human culture. Adopting beliefs about gods did not come about easily.
Our brain architecture leaves us with an evolved inclination to rely heavily on cultural learning based on a kind of faith-instinct. This is what has opened the biological door to easier acceptance of ideas and beliefs about the supernatural.
In fact, the ability to mentally represent the mind of a being that doesn't exist, is an integral part of the human brain's ability to see around corners, a part of our unique ability to plan, anticipate, and look ahead. It is a biological glitch, a design flaw, as it were, that comes along with the ability to perform abstract thinking.
According to this author, it might also account for our tendency to separate mind from body, leaving us susceptible to believing in angels, ghosts, spirits and the afterlife, a situation in which the body goes six feet under, while the soul flies out the window through space and time into heaven. This mind-body problem has bedeviled the best of modern philosophers.
The early "hunter-gathers' gods," were local gods concerned with local problems. They were numerous, whimsical, unsophisticated, amoral and unconcerned about the afterlife or cosmic forces.
Morality and universality came into being via competition among religions and their respective gods. Religions with rewarding and punishing gods, thrived, while those that did not, died.
The canons of rituals and beliefs of the winning religions, increased as did their believers. They served as the basis of brotherhoods based on cooperation and trust. In fact, the business world as we know it today, would not exist without the moral foundation for trust built up on religious teachings.
Thus gods evolved logically through competition: from pranksters, to protectors of community norms, to safeguard era of business transactions, to healers, and death-defying martyrs, to the big Chief in the sky who watches over us like big brother.
Eventually and inevitably, politics got into the religious game, and the most powerful religionists used their power to tilt communal rituals in directions that benefited them personally.
The larger point is that cultural evolution and competition among gods and religions, favored the emergence and spread of supernatural beliefs and rituals that endowed gods with the power to punish and reward its believers.
Their beliefs evolved not because they were accurate representations of reality but because they helped communities, societies and organizations win the arms race of religious ideas and beliefs over those of the competition.
A lot of blood literally was shed across history to determine who the winners of the religious-mind wars would be. It is this competition between religions that allowed Western societies to scale-up.
WEIRD Families
Monogamous marriages in bilateral neolocal nuclear families based on love and personal decisions, rather than on kinship ties, proved to be a game changer. Growing up in less kinship-based institutions did not just influence our motivations, perceptions, emotions, thinking styles, and self-concepts, but also influenced how we made our living, how mobile we were, and whether we were slave or free.
The key parameter in this conversion was the Marriage Family Plan (MFP) established by the Catholic Church. In a cascading series of rulings and church manipulations taking place over about a half millennium. Kinship ties and institutions were progressively loosened and replaced with bilateral nuclear neolocal families.
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