An
ancient Egyptian spent her whole life preparing for the moment when her
heart would be weighed. After death, she was escorted before a divine
scale. In one pan rested an ostrich feather belonging to Maat, the
goddess of social order. The other pan held her heart. The deceased had
been buried with a list of her virtues: “I have not uttered lies.” “I
have not slain men and women.” “I have not stopped the flow of water [of
the Nile.]” Any sins would weigh down her heart. When the scale
settled, her fate would be clear: If her heart weighed no more than
Maat’s feather, she was escorted to paradise. If her heart was too
heavy, the crocodile demon Amemet reared up and devoured it,
obliterating her soul.
Although much of Egyptian cosmology is alien today, some is
strikingly familiar: The gods of today’s major religions are also
moralizing gods, who encourage virtue and punish selfish and cruel
people after death. But for most of human history, moralizing gods have
been the exception. If today’s hunter-gatherers are any guide, for
thousands of years our ancestors conceived of deities as utterly
indifferent to the human realm, and to whether we behaved well or badly.
To crack the mystery of why and how people around the world came to
believe in moralizing gods, researchers are using a novel tool in
religious studies: the scientific method. By combining laboratory
experiments, cross-cultural fieldwork, and analysis of the historical
record, an interdisciplinary team has put forward a hypothesis that has
the small community of researchers who study the evolution of religion
abuzz. A culture like ancient Egypt didn’t just stumble on the idea of
moralizing gods, says psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of
British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, who synthesized the new
idea in his 2013 book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Instead, belief in those judgmental deities, or “big gods,” was key to
the cooperation needed to build and sustain Egyptians’ large, complex
society.
Big gods demand costly displays of
faith, like Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. In
Rembrandt's painting, God sends an angel to stay the knife.
In this view, without supernatural enforcement of cooperative,
“moral” behavior, ancient Egypt—as well as nearly every other
large-scale society in history—wouldn’t have been able to get off the
ground. All-knowing big gods are “crazily effective” at enforcing social
norms, says Norenzayan’s collaborator Edward Slingerland, a historian
at UBC Vancouver. “Not only can they see you everywhere you are, but
they can actually look inside your mind.” And once big gods and big
societies existed, the moralizing gods helped religions as dissimilar as
Islam and Mormonism spread by making groups of the faithful more
cooperative, and therefore more successful.
It’s a sweeping theory, grander in scale than much of the scholarship
by religious studies experts, who usually examine one tradition at a
time. “They’ve done a great service by bringing together a lot of
important findings in the field,” says Richard Sosis, a human behavioral
ecologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Now, they’re
embarking on new experiments and analysis to test it—a challenging task
given the scope of the theory. “It’s easy to say” that moralizing
religions spread through cultural evolution, says Dominic Johnson, an
evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom
who studies religion and cooperation. “But it’s quite hard to
demonstrate.” WHEN NORENZAYAN was growing up in Lebanon in the
1970s and 1980s, “it was very hard to miss religion,” he remembers.
Faith was the defining fact of people’s lives, and it fueled the
sectarian war that consumed the country. After moving to the United
States for a Ph.D., Norenzayan became fascinated with scientific efforts
to explain belief, many of them rooted in cognitive sciences. A series
of studies had shown that both children and adults eagerly ascribe
humanlike intentions and actions to inanimate objects like rocks and the
sun. For example, British and American children repeatedly told
scientists that rocks are sharp so animals won’t sit on them, rather
than because they are made up of smaller pieces of material (Science,
6 November 2009, p. 784). Such studies contributed to a growing
scientific consensus that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary
byproduct of the quirks of the human brain, piggybacking on abilities
that evolved for different purposes.
But Norenzayan was not satisfied. The byproduct model doesn’t explain
the particular nature of religions in complex societies—the presence of
moralizing gods who prescribe human behavior. Nor does it explain why a
handful of those faiths have proved so successful.
When Kenya's Orma people converted to Islam, they gained advantageous economic ties and new customs like this Muslim ceremony.
In an effort to answer these questions, Norenzayan began making
forays into the psychology of religion. In one study, published in 2007
in Psychological Science, he and a colleague gave $10 to
participants, who could then decide how much to give to a stranger and
how much to keep for themselves. When primed with religious words,
participants gave away an average of $4.22, whereas a control group gave
away only $1.84.
A few years later, human evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich (then
at UBC Vancouver, now at Harvard University) and his colleagues asked
people in 15 societies, ranging from tribal farmers in Papua New Guinea
to wageworkers in Missouri, to play a similar economic game. The
researchers found that across these cultures, people who participated in
a moralizing world religion, particularly Christianity and Islam, gave
as much as 10% more to strangers than did unbelievers or practitioners
of animism. Their results were published in Science in 2010.
Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and
“prosocial” behavior—curbing self-interest for the good of others—could
help explain how religion evolved. In small-scale societies, prosocial
behavior does not depend on religion. The Hadza, a group of African
hunter-gatherers, do not believe in an afterlife, for example, and their
gods of the sun and moon are indifferent to the paltry actions of
people. Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and
daily life. They don’t need a supernatural force to encourage this,
because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal
or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with
you anymore, Norenzayan says. The danger of a damaged reputation keeps
people living up to the community’s standards.
As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes
impossible. So there’s nothing stopping you from taking advantage of the
work and goodwill of others and giving nothing in return. Reneging on a
payment or shirking a shared responsibility have no consequences if
you’ll never see the injured party again and state institutions like
police forces haven’t been invented yet. But if everyone did that,
nascent large-scale societies would collapse. Economists call this
paradox the free rider problem. How did the earliest large-scale
societies overcome it?
In some societies, belief in a watchful, punishing god or gods could have been the key, Norenzayan believes. As he wrote in Big Gods,
“Watched people are nice people.” Belief in karma—which Norenzayan
calls “supernatural punishment in action”—could have had a similar
psychological effect in the absence of actual gods, a proposition his
colleagues are investigating in Asia.
History and archaeology offer hints that religion really did shape
the earliest complex societies. Conventional wisdom says that the key to
settling down in big groups was agriculture. But “agriculture itself is
a wildly improbable cooperative activity,” notes Slingerland, who
studies ancient China. “Especially in places where you can’t get
agriculture off the ground without large-scale irrigation or water
control projects, the cooperation problem has to get solved before you
can even get the agriculture ramped up.” That’s where religion came in,
he and Norenzayan think.
ADOLFO ARRANZ
A case in point, they say, is Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site in
southeastern Turkey. Huge stone obelisks carved with evocative
half-human, half-animal figures dot the 11,500-year-old site, which the
late Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, who excavated
there, called “the first manmade holy place” (Science, 18 January 2008, p. 278).
Moving and decorating the great obelisks must have required a huge
community effort. But signs of agriculture don’t appear nearby until 500
years later, meaning that the builders of Göbekli Tepe were likely
hunter-gatherers who had come together to practice shared religious
beliefs, Slingerland says. As Schmidt has said, “First came the temple,
then the city.”
The big gods hypothesis also helps explain why a handful of religions
spread widely: They offer new adherents expanded opportunities for
economic and social cooperation. The Orma herders of East Africa, for
example, maintained their animist beliefs for centuries while living in
close contact with Muslim friends and business partners. Then, in the
latter half of the 19th century, war ruined the Orma’s local
institutions and weakened their control of the regional ivory and
livestock trades. Within a few decades, the entire Orma society had
converted to Islam. And once they did, they were inducted into a
worldwide network of long-distance traders, bound together by the trust
that a shared faith in a moralizing god provides.
The Orma had to do more than profess their newfound faith. They had
to show they meant it by giving up pork, eschewing alcohol, reforming
their rules about polygamy, and praying five times a day. These “costly
displays of faith” are “markers that you’re a true believer in Islam”
and therefore are likely to keep your word, especially to your fellow
Muslims, Henrich explains. Whether they take the form of generous
donations to the church or painful body modifications like circumcision
or scarification, these displays prove to others that you are truly
committed to your religion and thus can function as a shorthand for
trustworthiness.
After their conversion, the Orma “missed their days of drunken
bashes,” an aspect of many earlier local rituals, says economic
anthropologist Jean Ensminger of the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, who spent several years with them doing fieldwork. But a
religion that opened up access to economic and social networks all over
the world, while ensuring everyone in that network adhered to the same
standards of behavior, was “a pretty good package,” she says.
Islam’s spread to the Orma is an example of a broader pattern,
Norenzayan says. Groups with “moralizing, interventionist deities or
spirits … expand because all things being equal, they do better than the
noncooperative groups,” he says. “And then the beliefs expand”
alongside them. “Take this idea to its extreme and we get world
religions,” he says, such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and
Hinduism.
Many scientists are impressed by the careful combination of
laboratory experiments and suggestive evidence from the ethnographic and
historical records that Norenzayan and his team have marshaled. But
others question whether moralizing high gods require a special
explanation beyond the cognitive byproduct model. “In the same way you
don’t need any adaptation for people to believe in supernatural agents,
you don’t need any adaptation to explain why people believe in
moralizing religion,” says Nicolas Baumard, a psychologist who studies
the evolution of religion at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris. All you need, he argues, is a sufficiently affluent
society in which people can afford to prioritize long-term goals (like
the afterlife) over short-term needs. Studying Eurasian societies
between 500 B.C.E. and 300 B.C.E., Baumard
recently found that moralizing religions were much more likely to
emerge in societies where people had access to more than 20,000
kilocalories in total energy resources each day, from food, fuel, and draft animals, for example. TO PROVE THAT MORALIZING religion is an adaptive
tool to increase cooperation, the big gods team needs to confirm that
belief in prosocial deities actually causes followers to be nicer to
each other. To that end, Norenzayan and Henrich have expanded their
experimental work on religion and generosity to societies around the
world. They hope to show that the more omniscient and punitive the gods
that people worship, the more money they are willing to give to
strangers in their own religious community. The researchers expect to
publish the first results this fall.
They are also seeking more evidence for the claim that moralizing
religion lays the foundation for large-scale societies. Slingerland is
appealing to his historian colleagues to contribute to a new database
that will assemble quantitative data about social complexity and
religion (see sidebar, p. 922). “If we find there’s a systematic pattern
where most societies in the world scaled up without religion, I would
worry,” Norenzayan says. “I would say that’s a falsification of the
hypothesis.”
Other scientists say some historical evidence already challenges it. This spring, a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported that out of 96 traditional Austronesian societies spread throughout the Pacific, six had moralizing high gods—and
they emerged after the societies became politically complex, not
before, apparently contradicting the big gods idea. Norenzayan points
out, however, that the complexity of most of the cultures analyzed is
limited—they are small-scale chiefdoms, not large agricultural
societies. “You see moralizing gods when you get to a state-level
society,” he says. “But there could be lots of intermediate
cases”—nature spirits that enforce taboos protecting shared resources,
for example.
A third test of the big gods hypothesis is whether it accurately
predicts which religions spread. The Mormons, for example, have had
spectacular success spreading a faith focused on a judgmental god with
strict moral rules, a strong cooperative ethic, and costly signs of
devotion like avoiding caffeine and spending 2 years as a missionary.
“It almost seems like Joseph Smith [founder of the faith] read our
article” on big gods, Slingerland jokes. The team plans to use Mormonism
as a template for identifying other highly prosocial religions
throughout history, quantitatively recording its features and
systematically searching for them in other faiths. If many of those
religions also prove to have spread rapidly, that could point to a deep
pattern.
Critics complain that the definition of a “moralizing” religion can
be slippery. Baumard quibbles with Norenzayan’s interpretation of
ancient Egyptian beliefs, in which “stopping the flow of water” appears
to be a sin. To Baumard, this is clearly not a moral concern, but some
kind of taboo. The big gods team is “projecting a moralizing aspect onto
gods that don’t care about morality,” he says.
Slingerland disagrees. Ancient Egypt’s agriculture was exquisitely
calibrated to the Nile’s annual flood. If someone tampered with the
irrigation system for short-term personal gain, the whole society would
suffer. In the context of that society, religious injunctions against
interfering with the Nile “are absolutely moral,” he says.
Only Maat may have the insight to resolve that debate once and for
all. In the meantime, these researchers may have found a new way to get
closer to a fuller understanding of religion, from ancient Egypt to
today: Hypothesize, test, and repeat.
Lizzie is Science's Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City.
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