Why We Are Still Religious
We're running Modern Applications on a Caveman Operating System
By James Aames ~In order to understand why humans have a seemingly instinctual inclination toward religious answers, you have to believe in evolution. If you don’t believe in evolution, stop reading now. You won’t agree with anything I’m about to say.
Here’s a statement that we don’t often consider; we evolved to do four things.
- Stay alive
- Attract a mate
- Procreate
- Raise children to the age where they can procreate
Our brains did not evolve to show us what is true or to help us be our own person. If you meet someone who believes in fairy tales, or simply follows the tribe, they are not less evolved than you. Rather, they are the template of humanity. People who reject mystical answers have rebelled against many instincts that humans evolved to survive.
Caveman Operating System
Our bodies did not evolve to drive on freeways or work in a cubicle for eight hours. We can do those things because we’re adaptable and we we’re very good at mastering our environment.
But imagine you are a caveman. The year is 80,000 BCE. Agriculture will not be invented for another 70,000 years or so. You live in a small tribe of 18 people who migrates north and south along a peninsula to gather food and hunt for meat. You have 100% reliance upon your tribe to survive. You love them, and you need them to love you.
You have no idea about science. You aren’t aware of sanitation, bacteria, germs, or viruses. You don’t know why it rains, or even what the connection is between plants and rain. Lightning and thunder are scary as shit because you have NO idea what that is. You go to sleep at night full of terror from the mysteries of the world around you.
In spite of how ignorant you are, you are just as smart as the version of yourself that lives in 2024. You ask all the same difficult questions. You have the same mish-mash of complicated emotions that wax and wane every day. But the emotion you feel most is terror. Death is a harsh reality. Your uncle just died last week. You have had two children die. You have a little girl who is wheezing when she breathes, and you have no idea what to do. Last year your niece broke her leg when running downhill and some rocks broke loose and crushed her. You had to watch her suffer in agony for months until her leg mended, but she still can’t walk very well and she is still in constant pain. She can do a little gathering, but the tribe has to see to most of her needs. That means you need to get more food.
That kind of stress and anxiety is enough to drive a person mad. This would make that person less viable as a mate, so their DNA is less likely to replicate. However, if you can figure out a way to keep yourself from going nuts, you might survive and procreate. Hell, you might even thrive.
Here’s where the inclination to find a mystical solution becomes genetically favorable. You get creative. You start to imbue the world around you with something—anything—that will help you make sense of your surroundings. Suddenly you see it … those rocks that rolled down the hill and crushed your niece’s leg? Those aren’t just rocks. That was the earth spirit, and your niece disturbed it by running downhill. So even though she is suffering, there is a lesson for the tribe to learn. That night, around the campfire, you explain your belief to the tribe. They listen in wonder as you explain why everyone needs to be respectful of the earth spirit.
You tell this to your tribe and your tribe is suddenly filled with a deeper understanding of the world around them. Now … that understanding is totally wrong, but it keeps the entire tribe from falling into despair, and helps the whole tribe survive. Everyone believes your story. In addition, after telling this story, one of the females in the tribe wanted to bed with you. You got her pregnant and now your tendency to see mystical machinations in the world around you is passed along to your progeny.
Not only that, the tendency to go along with what your tribe believes is also heritable and advantageous. If your tribe believes in a crow God, it will be advantageous for you to put on the black feathers and dance around the fire saying CAW! CAW! If you scoff at how ridiculous it is, your tribe might reject you. Your DNA will not replicate.
Stories like the ones above happened tens of thousands of times to your ancestors, so the tendency toward mystical explanations became a favored characteristic. Over thousands of generations, an advantageous trait can become quite common among a species. And since it’s only been about 10 or 15 generations since the arrival of science and critical thinking, we all have a brain that compels us to believe things that aren’t true, and we have a tendency to go along with the crazy things that other members of our tribe believe.
We have a caveman operating system.
Modern Applications
I doubt I need to explain this, but we do not live in the same world as your caveman ancestors anymore. The gap between what we know and what we wish we knew has closed significantly. In fact, for the average layperson, that gap is nearly closed. Your caveman ancestor wanted to know what lightning was, what gravity was, what rain was, why his teeth hurt all the time, and what happened to him after he dies. You only ask one of those five questions, but there are a myriad more.
It is my opinion that the trait to assign mystical answers to life’s unanswerable questions is no longer necessary. We won’t be crippled with anxiety because we don’t know what a tornado is. Our brains still behave as if assigning that meteorological event to an angry sky god will give us an advantage—but our brains are wrong. It is no longer an advantageous trait. We know what causes tornadoes. We don’t need to make up answers anymore. In fact, fictional answers give people a disadvantage because they are not mastering their environment as well as a person who understands and believes in scientific principles.
To wit, people who do not believe in science are less attractive as a mate to those who do. Our caveman operating system explains why people are still religious in a day when religion has outlived its usefulness.
Rebel
The correct response to our flawed physiology is education and rebellion. We have to know this flaw about ourselves in order to overcome it.
James Aames is the author of the book How to Become a non-Christian: A guide to escaping the delusion and a Substack Blog.
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