Religion a figment of human imagination
a.. 00:01 28 April 2008
b.. NewScientist.com news service
c.. Andy Coghlan
Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have
evolved imagination.
That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School
of
Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and
spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some
anthropologists.
Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain
architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and
the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.
Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction
unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could
use
what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as
nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The
transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of
conduct associated with religion.
"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very
largely
in the imagination," Bloch writes.
"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though
one
never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch.
Moreover,
the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may
equally include the living and the dead."
Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the
living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one
body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.
Stuck in the here and now
No animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this,
argues Bloch. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the mundane and
Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life, of sparring every day
with contemporaries for status and resources.
And the reason is that they can't imagine beyond this immediate social
circle, or backwards and forwards in time, in the same way that humans
can.
Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture
to
imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper
Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.
At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since
the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in
sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to
include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication
the
"transcendental social".
Once humans had crossed this divide, there was no going back.
"The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead,
ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of
essentialised groups," writes Bloch. "Ancestors and gods are compatible
with
living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious
invisible, in other words transcendental."
Nothing special
But Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique
ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or
value-systems.
"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key
adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine
other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the
sociality of modern human society."
"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday,
nothing
special is left to explain concerning religion," he says.
Chris Frith of University College London, a co-organiser of a "Sapient
Mind"
meeting in Cambridge last September, thinks Bloch is right, but that
"theory
of mind" ? the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist,
and think for themselves ? might be as important as evolution of
imagination.
"As soon as you have theory of mind, you have the possibility of deceiving
others, or being deceived," he says. This, in turn, generates a sense of
fairness and unfairness, which could lead to moral codes and the
possibility
of an unseen "enforcer" - God ? who can see and punish all wrong-doers.
"Once you have these additions of the imagination, maybe theories of God
are
inevitable," he says.
Journal reference: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
(DOI:10.1098/rstb.2008.0007)
http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/cr33728h3m98m5k1/
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