Morality is concerned with right and wrong conduct among human beings. For thousands of years, the proselytizers of organised religion have declared morality to be something extrinsic to our species, a blessing bestowed by God upon his creation. It is a view that continues to be championed in religious circles today, with the most liberal view being that God intervened at some point during human evolution to implant the soul, i.e. that which elevates man above the apes, that which allows him to be held accountable on Judgement Day.

Outside of religious circles, this view has been completely discarded. Ever since evolution was proposed by Charles Darwin, the scientific community has given birth to a plethora of credible hypotheses on the natural origins of human morality. One such hypothesis is that our moral sense stems from a Darwinian misfiring of our primitive altruism, i.e. our unselfish concern for the welfare of close kin and potential reciprocators, such that we extend a helping hand to strangers as well. Here is how Richard Dawkins explains it in The God Delusion:

Natural selection, in ancestral times when we lived in small and stable bands like baboons, programmed into our brains altruistic urges, alongside sexual urges, hunger urges, xenophobic urges and so on. An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual’s psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale. I am suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness – to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity. In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the rule of thumb persists. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.

Like any scientific theory, Dawkins’ explanation of the origins of our moral sense is open to debate. What is undeniable, however, is that this sense precedes any exposure to scripture. Indeed, studies of primate behaviour reveal that moral emotions precede humanity itself. All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder and theft. They tend not to like deception or sexual betrayal, either. Chimpanzees, especially, display many of the complex social concerns that can be observed in humans.

What distinguishes human morality from that of chimpanzees is that the former is an out-group code – that is, it extends beyond family and potential partners. We are sympathetic when we see a person or animal in distress, and try to provide relief. We take care of the sick, give to charity, and donate blood to people whom we will never meet. We take on risky jobs, e.g. fire rescue, for the protection of the community. This impulse is the basis of human morality; it’s not about the supernatural, but concern for the welfare of other living things.

Throughout history, this out-group code has been the great enabler of cooperation between strangers, and thus the development of human civilisation. Although the finer aspects of morality may differ drastically from one civilisation or age to the next, the traditional ‘Golden Rule’ has seemingly always been accepted. As the great anthropologist Solomon Asch once observed, “we do not know of societies in which bravery is despised and cowardice held up to honour, in which generosity is considered a vice and ingratitude a virtue.”

Organised religion cannot come about if the community in question is not already held together by some general code of ethics. Indeed, the local origin of religions explains why some of them hold principles which are not universal, e.g. the prohibition of pork. This directly contradicts the idea that morality comes from God, for if this were the case, then surely such differences shouldn’t exist? This point is taken up by Harvard biologist Marc Hauser in his study of human morality. To quote from Hauser’s entry in What Is Your Dangerous Idea?:

If you believe that your religion, with its set of doctrinal principles, is perfectly aligned with a divine power’s principles, then you have to agree that the universal incidence of the countervailing intuition is derived from some source other than the divine. Biology would be the logical candidate. Alternatively, you could argue that a divine power is the source of the universal moral sense but that religions have simply chosen to live by other principles. But if religions are free to choose in this way, deriving their inspiration from something other than the divine, then much of the motivation and emotion underlying formal religion is in jeopardy. This is an irrational position to uphold.

With regards to the origins of religious beliefs, these can plausibly be considered a product of man’s inherent need to make sense of the world around him, as a sentient being. One might describe religion as our first attempt at the truth, and therefore our worst. As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man:

As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence. As Mr. M’Lennan has remarked, “Some explanation of the phenomena of life, a man must feign for himself, and to judge from the universality of it, the simplest hypothesis, and the first to occur to men, seems to have been that natural phenomena are ascribable to the presence in animals, plants, and things, and in the forces of nature, of such spirits prompting to action as men are conscious they themselves possess.”

Given the mythology of the civilisations which preceded us, it would seem that we construct gods when we are dissatisfied with natural explanations for how the universe operates, or are too uncreative to think of them. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a primitive human in his element, gazing in awe at the majesty of the sun and the moon, believing them to be the ultimate rationale for his existence. He then devises a series of convoluted rituals in order to please these gods, lest they leave him in perpetual darkness. This is paganism by definition.

Eventually – usually with increased prosperity – man concludes that it is not the sun and the moon themselves that are to be worshipped, but the numerous gods that are responsible for their activity, who reside in “the heavens” above. This is polytheism by definition.

Monotheism emerges when the number of these gods is eventually reduced down to one, who is regarded as all-powerful. This is by no means the inevitable outcome of an increased standard of living: witness the economic prosperity and simultaneous prevalence of Shinto beliefs in Japan, as well as the fact that 78 percent of Japanese citizens accept evolution, compared to just 40 percent in monotheistic America.

But of course, man’s need to understand why he exists is but one of many plausible theories here; everyone has their own idea of where religion comes from. It fosters togetherness in groups, it provides consolation and comfort, etc. No doubt there are elements of truth to each of these claims. None of them, however, really explain why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion in the first place. Since we are the products of evolution, we should ask what pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion.

So what could the Darwinian survival value of religion be? Well, an increasing number of biologists are beginning to see religion as a by-product of something else, such as childhood gullibility. Religious behaviour may be a misfiring of an underlying psychological propensity which was once useful to our survival, but is now unnecessary and even harmful. To expand on this, we might quote Richard Dawkins one more time:

For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that “Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo” is good advice but “You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail” is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about morality and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children – nonsense as well as sense – using the same infectious gravitas of manner…

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moth’s celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility.

On the basis of ethnographic data and psychological research, the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argues that people have a bias towards detecting human-like agency in their environment which might not actually exist. Thus, when the data on a given state of affairs is ambiguous, people are likely to over-attribute intentional action as the cause. In other words, people can be said to possess ‘hyperactive agent-detection devices’ (HADD).

Such a biased perceptual device would have been quite adaptive in our evolutionary past, for the consequences of failing to detect an agent are potentially much graver than mistakenly detecting an agent that is not there, e.g. a snake. The implication for religion is that HADD might lead people to posit agents, perhaps of a counter-intuitive sort, which are well-transmitted because of their easy fit within intuitive conceptual systems.

*Guthrie, S. (1980), ‘A cognitive theory of religion’. Curr. Anthropol. 21, 181–203.

*Guthrie, S. (1993), Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford University Press.