If there's one trait that is consistently found across human cultures, it is our religiosity. Religiosity is such a universal trait of our species that we might as well call ourselves Homo religiousum. A naturalist like myself is compelled to search for a natural explanation of this.
What is it about human brains that facilitates belief in entities that are beyond our powers of observation? One is tempted to say, "maybe God really does exist, and he may have wired our brains in such a way as to make us receptive to religion." But this "explanation" is not very helpful. Invoking the existence of God to explain why millions of people believe in the existence of God is fallacious circular reasoning. It also begs the question of why we have so many mutually contradictory versions of God. Surely, they can't all be correct.
But this puzzle is not insoluble after all. Just as scientists have found natural causes for mental illnesses like schizophrenia (previously thought to be due to demon possession), they have also chipped away at the citadel of human religiosity and discovered that it too has purely natural origins at its core. Stewart Guthrie's "Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion", published by the Oxford University Press, is one such scholarly attempt to explain this phenomenon.
Guthrie is an anthropologist at Fordham University. His thesis is that religious belief is a form of "systematic anthropomorphism". What this means is that human beings are prone to attributing human or life-like characteristics to objects and events around them. For example, we've seen how children play with dolls, put them in hammocks, and sing lullabies to them to put them sleep. These children really do believe that the dolls are animate. In fact, Mickey Mouse and the whole Disneyland empire owe their commercial success to our kids' propensity to anthropomorphize. Adults are not immune to this either. We "baby" our cars, curse the bad weather, throw our cellphones in frustration - as if these objects give a damn about our little existential issues.
Well, this is anthropomorphism in action, and Guthrie contends that it is a smart Darwinian strategy which is pervasive in humans because it has enabled our ancestors to survive the hostile environments they were exposed to. Think about it: the objects that our ancestors found most consequential in their environments were their fellow humans and other living things. Our ancestors' ability to correctly judge whether these other beings were threats to be overcome meant the difference between life and death.
Imagine yourself alive 150,000 years ago. You are crouched in the middle of an African savanna, hunting for food. You, in turn, are being hunted down by predators (eg other humans, or animals larger than yourself, like tigers). You move quietly to avoid being noticed. Suddenly, you see a shadow behind a tree. What can it be? Your mind races for an answer. Your pulse quickens, your breathing gets harder. You have a decision to make: either dismiss the shadow as coming from a fallen log, relax your guard, and proceed to go about your business....or assume it's another human being laying in wait to ambush you. What should you do?
If the shadow is just from a fallen log, nothing will happen to you. But if it is coming from a hostile human being, then you run the risk of being killed if you relaxed your guard. The smart bet is to assume the worst: that there is in fact a threat lurking in your environment. It's a smart bet because the cost of being wrong when you presume no threat exists when there is a real one far outweighs the cost of being wrong when you presume a threat exists when there is none. You will surely die if you are careless, but you will live another day if you are cautious.
Our ancestors must have faced scenarios like this countless of times eons ago. Those who were careless and ignored the warning signs were killed, and their genes were eliminated from the gene pool. The more cautious (or paranoid) ones survived. They erred on the side of overestimating threats, and lived. By definition, we are the offspring of the latter group. We inherited their characteristics, including their propensity to anthropomorphize.
We create God in our image, projecting all our habits onto him. He gets mad, becomes jealous if we entertain his rival, bears a son. We believe that he controls the weather, so we pray to him to give us rains for a bountiful harvest. Now, we're not really sure if there's a God behind the clouds, but our brains tell us it is better to assume the worst because the penalty for disbelieving a God who exists (eternal damnation) far outweighs the penalty for believing a non-existent one (no penalty). It is better to err on the side of overestimating threats than to err on the side of underestimating them. This line of reasoning is basically Pascal's wager . It's anthropomorphism at work. It is (or was?) a valuable survival strategy. That's just the way our brains have been wired by evolution.
