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Gods Above: Naturalizing Religion in Terms of our Shared Ape Social Dominance Behavior

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Abstract

To naturalize religion, we must identify what religion is, and what aspects of it we are trying to explain. In this paper, religious social institutional behavior is the explanatory target, and an explanatory hypothesis based on shared primate social dominance psychology is given. The argument is that various religious features, including the high status afforded the religious, and the high status afforded to deities, are an expression of this social dominance psychology in a context for which it did not evolve: high-density populations made possible by agriculture.

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Notes

  1. For example, in the book of Judges [2:5–7], the Gileadites slay the Ephraimites, who are ethnically otherwise indistinguishable from them, based on whether they could pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’ correctly; ever since, some tribal markers are called shibboleths. The particular term used here is arbitrary and meant the seed-bearing part of a plant. It only had to be hard to fake, and accents are among the hardest.

  2. A spandrel is a trait that is a side effect of the function for which it evolved (Gould and Lewontin 1979). Whether we can ever know clearly what an evolved function evolved for is a moot point (Forber 2009).

  3. Attempts to give historical accounts of gods include Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda of the thirteenth century CE, and Robert Graves’ White Goddess (Graves 1948) and The Greek Myths (1955). They have not generally been successful, understandably, since the evidence of the transformation from real a person to a deity is rarely preserved.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    John S. Wilkins

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  1. John S. Wilkins
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Wilkins, J.S. Gods Above: Naturalizing Religion in Terms of our Shared Ape Social Dominance Behavior. SOPHIA 54, 77–92 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-015-0461-5

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