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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

  Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid,
  and they believe in God because they are paranoid

So, religion is natural? Although hard to detect, I don't think we have ever perceived any kind of belief in God in any other creature. Including the apes, that are quite similar to us considering the cited "millions of years" timespan.

And +1 to "using I.Q. to measure intelligence."

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So, religion is natural?

I know I've seen a few citations to studies on this over the past couple of years. They allude to the point that religion is somewhat natural/baked in for humans. Only one immediately came to mind though: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118545428/abstrac...

It could be that religion was, too, an evolved and advanced behavior for its time but that deliberate abandonment and irreligiousness in humans today is a further step.

Just because we're the only species that has this trait it doesn't mean it isn't natural. Bats are the only ones that use echo-location, but that doesn't make it more or less natural. It's simply adapting to the environment.

There are many species of bats and I'm pretty sure dolphins use echo-location too.

And I was thinking of the definition of "natural" as something made with a certain degree of consciousness. For example, politics are natural, but political parties are man-made. Being paranoid is natural. Religion is not.

Our nature is necessary, but not sufficient, for religion. Religion wasn't invented by human hunter-gatherers; it only came around after the advent of farming, when we began to think in long timescales (like harvests, or winters) and had static resources (crops, houses) that had to be defended. Thus, we invented prayer to try to change the far future (i.e. long-term weather conditions—due to the large intervening period, it wasn't obvious whether it worked or not in any given instance, so we assumed it did), and commandments to justify our right to static resources, or our reasoning for pillaging them. We also invented the afterlife to explain how our feeling of consciousness would proceed into the far future, and gods to explain capricious phenomena (like lightning, or floods) that our minds instinctively anthropomorphized.

Hunter-gatherers had their own "natural" superstitions, such as the belief that opposing tribes and the unliked were capable of "witchcraft", but these were abductive reasoning, seeing effects and guessing at individual, short-timescale past causes, rather than inductive reasoning, seeing events and proposing prinicples that would explain/predict future events.

I'm not sure I buy your distinction between "natural superstitions" and "religion". Can you go into more detail about why, for instance, the quite elaborate mythologies of the various Australian Aboriginal tribes don't count as religions?

My distinction is purely between abductive, and inductive reasoning. Mythology is abductive—it looks at things that happen, and then ascribes causes. It cannot be used to predict what will happen.

Religion is inductive—you think things like "it appears that people who do X die mysteriously; therefore (through induction) God smites people who do X. Thus (deductively) God will smite me if I do X, so I should not do X." Aboriginals never develop this sort of logic.

Thinking from a life form/species/creature point, this process you described looks quite artificial.

I don't think your explanation is correct, simply because it doesn't give an evolutionary advantage to pray for something that may or may not come true. On the contrary you spend precious resources on something superfluous.

I'm not sure the grandparent ever claimed there was an evolutionary advantage to religion.

Humans do many things "naturally" which were never really selected for. Stubbing our toes, becoming alcoholic, dying during childbirth... these are things which are just incidental consequences of how our bodies are built.

I suspect religion is "natural" in the same sense. We're born with a sense of cause and effect, so when we see effects we hypothesise causes. Our brains have a pretty good sense of human psychology, so we wind up ascribing human psychological motivations to non-human objects too. Pretty soon we've attributed everything in the universe to invisible, powerful and psychologically human beings acting out of some kind of comprehensible motive.

Again, Aboriginal mythology gives us good examples. It seems that every major geographical feature is actually the consequence of some kind of nice comprehensible family drama, eg. http://www.bluemts.com.au/tourist/thingsToDo/threeSisters.as...

The grandparent didn't claim that there was an evolutionary advantage to religion, but he did claim that the human species started doing something that has no evolutionary advantage (we invented prayer).

As you correctly point out the traits we have are either an advantage or an artifact of an advantage. Inventing prayer is neither of those.

It's a superstimulus, in the same way that purchasing lottery tickets is. Praying is a low-probability, high-reward situation (in the unlikely event that our prayer is answered, we will benefit greatly), and our brains seem to favor those unnaturally. Since the things farmers pray for are frequently simple random chance or the effects of nonlinear systems (such as the weather), they sometimes "work"—but not predictably. This induces an even greater impulse to continue trying, because the "prayer being answered" event seems to be a variable-schedule reward. We get addicted to praying.

Additionally, praying signals your group affiliation (praying, in a group, for something that is good for the group, instead of just you) but is usually done silently, allowing you to covertly express your individual desires. It's a bit like voting in that way.

I'm not sure the other animals intelligent enough to develop a notion of a higher power would do so while we are around, considering our species seemingly absolute power over their lives. Where we at our leisure can completely change the face of the land they live in, achieve unbelievable physical feats through the control of inanimate objects and have an seemingly infinite supply of food. To any other species on this planet humans could very well be cause for lightning, the sun rising and all the rest of the things we've been attributing to the gods of thunder and his cousins. It's all magic to an unknowing observer.

Although since I'm not a biologist, I reserve the right to be completely wrong in everything I just said. I'd be interested in a good and sober book on the subject of how other animals perceive us, if there is one.

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