Three Buiding Blocks for Human Belief Systems

I was watching an interview on Youtube called “Religion Explained through Evolution“. They had a couple of interesting points I had not heard before.

What I had heard before was that “religion is universal”. What I did not know waas in which form. When I hear “religion” I tend to think of organized entities, with priests, dogma, etc. Those are actually very much cultural and not at all universal.

What is, indeed, universal, are beliefs of invisible entities, able to act on our physical world, with which it is possible to interact.

From there, one can wonder what makes it so universal? It seems that three psychological traits are mainly responsible for it. Each of those traits are independantly useful for our survival. The beliefs describe above are an emergent property. It is not itself a survival advantage, but is the inevitable consequence of:

• The theory of mind: It is the ability of predicting what another human being is thinking and feeling. It was illustrated via the Sally Anne test .
• Overreacting to signals: It is better to jump away from a branch looking like a snake a thousand times, rather than ignoring a snake looking like a branch only one time.
• The reciprocity principal: It is ingrained in our brains that someone who was helpulf in the past should be helped in return. Or, from a survival perspective, being helpfuil to someone today will ensure their help in the future.

And there we have it. One of the points in the video was that people with less control over their environment try to interact with those entities for very concrete things: good harvest, healing, etc.

From there, the story writes itself: if, even one time, someone healed from a bad fever right after someone else made a weird noise while moving in a very specific way, then it’s beneficial for everybody to keep doing just that (exactly like the snake example above). And if an entity is indeed listening, then it seems logical that giving them offerings will push them to look kindly on us. What kind of offerings is appropriate to give is deduced from what this entity is in control of.