How Belief in Divine Surveillance Helped Religion Survive Evolution

Did Religion Evolve?

Believers and scientists alike may hesitate to ask how religion evolved. Believers often deny the importance of evolution, while scientists might conclude that religion is a wasteful enterprise that involves time-consuming rituals, nonsensical beliefs, and unnecessary sacrifice that couldn’t possibly have helped our ancestors to survive the crucible of natural selection. More militant scholars might even repeat the insular view that religions are a way to control people, if their anthropological scope is limited to a couple of monotheistic faiths.

Thankfully, most scholars now dismiss these views. They know, for example, that every culture has supernatural beliefs or intuitions (even cultures that don’t use them for control), and every person is disposed to thinking about supernatural concepts like ghosts, post-death consciousness, lady luck, creationism, and karma (atheists override it, but it is present). These dispositions make it extremely easy to develop a religious mindset, and they strongly suggest that some elements of religion evolved.

The Supernatural Watcher Hypothesis

The debate is therefore limited to whether religion evolved and is "hardwired" into our brains, or whether it is parasitic on hardwiring that evolved for other purposes such as threat detection, social communication, and ritualized behaviour. It may be a bit of both. For example, if detecting gods and spirits is reliant on an ability to detect threats in the environment, a subsequent belief in gods may be naturally selected if it bestows group cooperation benefits. This would make the belief an exaptation.

The religion evolved position relies heavily on the supernatural watcher hypothesis. The hypothesis states that believing in a watchful, punishing god causes people to be more moral and cooperative, which causes their society to prosper and survive natural/cultural selection at the expense of less cooperative, more atheistic societies. (Disclaimer: what worked in our evolutionary history does not necessarily work today.)

Princess Alice, Ancestral Spirits, and Big Brother

The idea that gods are watching—ready to punish transgressions—is ancient and perhaps universal when it comes to the religions of the world (see Dominic Johnson’s book, God is Watching You). Whether an omniscient, omnipresent god, or a giant Buddha perched on a mountainside, the belief that gods provide and enforce morality is widespread.

The idea of a watchful, punishing god affects behaviour in the manner you might expect. An experiment in which people were manipulated to think about God found that they tried harder on an unsolvable anagram task than a control group, and were more anxious about the results of the task.

This anxiety about being monitored also appears to facilitate moral behaviour. The scientist, Jesse Bering, performed an experiment (see video below) in which children were instructed to play a game. Some of the children were told that an invisible being called “Princess Alice” was seated nearby. Children who were told about Princess Alice cheated less in the game than children who were not.

Similar studies have also found that people cheat less and are more cooperative when they think a supernatural being is observing them. For example, adults cheated less on a test when they were told that the test room is haunted by the ghost of someone who recently died there. People were also disposed to think of the deceased as especially moral, which is consistent with what is found in many indigenous societies, where ancestral spirits are believed to monitor the living (rather than gods).

Another study found that people who were manipulated to think about God were more charitable in a game than people who did not receive the manipulation, while a further study found that religious people who view God as more punishing, angry, and harsh were less likely to cheat on tasks than people who had a more forgiving view of God. The experimenters summarized their findings as “mean gods make good people.”

The Evolution of Religion

Taken together, these studies suggest that people are anxious about the punishments that powerful, watchful gods and spirits may exact, and they behave more cooperatively and cheat less as a result.

In terms of human evolution, people succeed when they work together, which suggests that religious societies were more successful in our evolutionary history than nonreligious societies. This tendency would certainly explain why religion is so popular today and why all large-scale societies appear to have produced morally-concerned gods.

As Jesse Bering explains below (video), the reluctance of god-fearing people to cheat strangers may have helped religious societies to grow larger, which would have provided significant advantages (e.g., in conflict with other societies).

Does the Supernatural Watcher Hypothesis Explain Religion?

As with most evolutionary explanations, the supernatural watcher hypothesis explains some of the why but none of the how. It does not explain how religion first appeared, how it works in our brains, how beliefs are formed, or why people choose to hold these beliefs and perform the associated behaviors (worship, ceremonies, rituals, etc.).

The hypothesis only explains why all of this was a productive use of our time and, therefore, why people who were disposed to religion (for whatever reason) kept being disposed. In other words, this mysterious phenomenon that we call religion happened to help certain people to survive and propagate their DNA, psychological dispositions, and cultural teachings in such a prolific way that these things almost became a human default. The questions that remain are better addressed by cognitive and emotional explanations for religion.