Soul Play: Me Tarzan. You God.
Is faith in our genes? Is religion just a base need, written into the human design, unavoidable except for those who recognize and resist it? Are atheists more enlightened than the God-fearing masses?
“I’m willing to believe they’re smarter and more knowledgeable about reality than club-wielding hunter-gatherers, or the members of the Christian Coalition,” says Morton Hunt, author of The Biological Roots of Religion. “But can I suppose they’re more intelligent than such profoundly religious believers as Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Newton, William James, or even Einstein? Or, for that matter, the majority of today’s American scientists, who, according to surveys, profess some kind of religious belief?”
Nearly all human beings in every known culture believe in some sort of God or gods, accompanied by customs, doctrines and institutions. Sociobiology, a branch of human behavioral science popularized in 1975 by Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, asks the question: Why do humans need religion?
“We may view religion, parallel to language…as a long-lived hybrid between cultural and the biological traditions,” says Professor Walter Burkert of the University of Zurich. “We have biological tendencies and capacities that cause us to need, learn, value, and practice religion–not any specific religion, of course, but any one of the thousands of religions that, despite the vast differences among them, all tend to fulfill similar needed functions for individuals and, just as important, for the society they live in.”
One of the primary needs met by religion, sociobiologists say, is the explanation of the world’s many mystifying phenomena. “Primitive humans developed a sense of awe at the wonders they could now think about–birth, the return of life in spring, the rainbow–and with that sense of awe came a need to explain those wonders,” Hunt says. “Religion…except for fundamentalism…has minimized explaining in supernatural terms whatever can be better explained in natural ones and focused instead on phenomena that cannot be tested or disproved, such as God’s mercy, the existence of soul, and the afterlife,” Hunt says. In this way, religion acts as a kind of rationalization to account for all that we cannot understand.
Human beings also need a method of accounting for the joys of “health returning after sickness, hardships survived, crops harvested, problems solved, wrongs righted, and the aesthetic pleasure yielded by the many beauties of the world around them.” Religion thus meets the human need to understand and control life. “Religion serves the same purposes as science and the arts – the extraction of order from the mysteries of the material world,” says Wilson.
Another major function of religion is to serve as a unifying social force. “Religion is…empowered mightily by its principal ally, tribalism,” Hunt says. “The shamans and priests implore us in somber cadence, Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal force, you are one of us.” Religion thus helped meet the need of human beings to live together, a need that is biologically based – we require social life to thrive emotionally and physically.
Source:
The Biological Roots of Religion, by Morton Hunt