{"id":248,"date":"2011-06-26T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-26T22:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2011\/06\/the-faith-instinct\/"},"modified":"2011-06-26T22:12:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-26T22:12:00","slug":"the-faith-instinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2011\/06\/the-faith-instinct.html","title":{"rendered":"The Faith Instinct"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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Many Pagans like to call our religion \u201cthe Old Ways.\u201d Even though we understand modern Paganism is a product of the modern world, it clearly has roots in the pre-Christian religions of Europe and other lands. People worshipped Zeus, Cernunnos, and Shiva long before the appearance of Moses, Jesus or Buddha. <\/p>\n

But the worship of Zeus, Cernunnos, and Shiva were not the first religions. What was religion like before it was organized into temples and groves? We don\u2019t know. Clearly religion existed before the invention of writing \u2013 it may have existed before the evolution of speech. <\/p>\n

In The Faith Instinct<\/i><\/a>, New York Times<\/i> science writer Nicholas Wade looks at the evidence and makes some logical inferences. As with his previous book on the evolution of humans Before the Dawn<\/i><\/a>, Wade presents a mixture of mainstream science, unproven hypotheses and his own speculation. This approach won\u2019t win him tenure at a major university, but that\u2019s not why he\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n

Wade defines religion as \u201ca system of emotionally binding beliefs and practices in which a society implicitly negotiates through prayer and sacrifice with supernatural agents, securing from them commands that compel members, through fear of divine punishment, to subordinate their interests to the common good.\u201d For Wade, religion is a communal practice, not an individual\u2019s beliefs. This is how most people have seen religion for most of history, and why the idea of religious freedom isn\u2019t all that widely accepted even in the West today. <\/p>\n

The few remaining hunter-gatherer societies in existence today (as well as those documented over the past 150 years or so) provide a look into what religion was probably like before agriculture and civilization. Far from being peaceful Goddess worshippers, most of these societies are violent \u2013 their death rates from intertribal warfare far exceed medieval and modern humans with our technologically advanced killing machines. For people living in such an environment, anything that would cause individuals to put the interests of the group ahead of their own would give that society an evolutionary advantage. <\/p>\n

Enter religion. Wade quotes behavior dynamics professor Samuel Bowles: \u201cThe group-oriented behaviors that make cooperation for mutual benefit possible among humans also make large-scale lethal warfare possible. And frequent warfare \u2026 may have been an essential contributor to the evolution of precisely the altruistic traits that facilitate war making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wade lists several characteristics of what he calls \u201cprimitive religions.\u201d<\/p>\n