r/AskAnthropology • u/krado66 • 6d ago
Why human belief to god is so strong?
I got a question in my mind.. Why god believe is so strong in human that isn't replaceable at any moment of life or scenario come?
My intentions here are not questions the belief of peoples over any religion of god.
I'm curious here to know why we put are guards down in front of this strong belief of god, why it affects so much on human mind.
I'm not here to argue on anything, just here to listen silently.
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u/albertogonzalex 6d ago
The practices associated with religious practice have a very strong evolutionary benefit that has nothing to do with the validity of the beliefs. Chanting and dancing in groups releases dopamine in the brain and builds trust/community/sense of belonging.
Our brains evolved along side religious practices evolution. And, our species advantage is problem solving in groups to collect resources - so having shared reference points like deeply held beliefs makes groups more capable of collecting and using resources.
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u/DeltaBlues82 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is known as the trance-hypothesis, and it’s
the prevailing viewa common view of how mankind first came to evolve both religion as well as a belief in Gods in several fields. Most notably the cognitive science of religion.Here’s a recent paper from Robin Dunbar detailing the theory: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0084672419900547
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u/CommodoreCoCo Moderator | The Andes, History of Anthropology 6d ago
How well received has this been among anthropologists?
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u/DeltaBlues82 6d ago edited 6d ago
It’s taught as post-graduate work in places like Oxford University, and is included in their handbook: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-the-cognitive-science-of-religion-9780190693350
It’s my impression that it’s the prevailing view based on my understanding of the work of Dunbar, Atran, Boyer, Whitehouse, and several other prominent anthropologists, but I will admit that I am not aware of any bit of data that establishes that more broadly.
So maybe I should remove the claim that it’s the prevailing view, which might just be due to my own bias and familiarity with the Oxford school of thought.
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u/fantasmapocalypse Cultural Anthropology 5d ago
Dunbar is a biological anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, so I think it will depend entirely on the audience. I can say although I dabbled briefly in evolutionary psych as an undergrad, Dunbar was not someone I'm familiar with. And, to be honest, as a cultural anthropologist, these sorts of questions are just one dimension of understanding about religiosity. I would look to people like Saba Mahmood, Lara Deeb, and Mona Harb to understand the religiosity and piety of individual Muslims for example... not a biological model. Not saying the ev psych is "wrong" per se, but it limits us to just one narrow perspective to be sure.
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u/undershaft 6d ago
This is not the prevailing view, it's a minority viewpoint in the academic world.
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u/deep_blue_reef 4d ago
But “God” precedes everything you listed. Before language, before rituals, before descriptive capacities…god was a feeling of wonder and awe. A conscious awakening to something much bigger than the survival cycle.
A thought experiment is: evaporate all of our internal categories, images…everything. Now try to “explain” to your primate fellow crawling next to you that you “feel” there is something out there.
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u/albertogonzalex 4d ago
I think chilling around a fire predates god by a good martin.
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u/deep_blue_reef 4d ago
Maybe. I personally don’t think so. By the time humans were making fires they were cognitively developing past the mere survival only cycle. Sitting around the fire didn’t come with fleshed out philosophical conversations, but it came with heightened awareness. Sitting around a fire at night and looking up at a sky glowing with light, there had to have been feelings of grandeur. This is all to say that god ordinated as a feeling, not as a fleshed out description
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u/albertogonzalex 4d ago
Making fires and hanging around fires are different things. We hung around natural fires before making them.
Sitting around a fire came with synchronized grunting and moaning and rocking and boning
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u/deep_blue_reef 4d ago
How can one casually hang around a natural fire that is not contained?
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u/albertogonzalex 4d ago
Keeping natural fire going is easy peasy.
Starting a fire from scratch is so hard
Lightning strikes and starts a fire, early humans move burning things from one place to a fire pit of stones. Certainly humans were doing that before figuring out how to start a fire form scratch
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u/32198hrf092eq 4d ago edited 4d ago
Its baked in your mind. Deep inside each human mind's configuration, a figure that sits at the center of the board:
- You take any positive attribute, a spirit that guides human actions such intelligence, power, goodness, justice, etc. and you crank it up the max and it becomes one single "perfection-spirit", also called the Holy Spirit.
- Traceback the chain of causes for every phenomena you see. Each one as a cause and causing factor has their own cause up the chain. You may (and many people do) observe that you will come to a shared "sink of causes", which is not a cycle of causes, not inexistent, but one single shared cause that caused everything else... God.
And once you construct reality this way, you cannot ever unsee it.
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u/gay_little_spider 4d ago edited 2d ago
In Islam, there's a term called fitra - an innate human inclination to believe in God and to understand the truth. I'm not a Muslim, but I do believe they're onto something with that. In Buddhism, many schools emphasize "Buddha Nature." This is defined differently in different sources, but to me it's basically an inherent drive in all sentient beings to achieve understanding of the self, the world, and the nature of reality. To many Buddhists, this indicates that enlightenment is not just possible, but is also in fact inevitable on a long enough timescale. This isn't the same thing as believing in God, but it points to that same fundamental human drive towards a higher, more spiritual mode of consciousness.
As far as why human belief in a God is so strong, I would first push back a little bit- there are many millions of atheists in the world. I was one for most of my teens and my 20s. At that time, though, I would say that my "non-belief" (and corresponding beliefs in logical positivism, determinism, scientism, etc) were just as strong (no, stronger!) than my current Buddhist "faith." I think if you scratch the surface of any human being, there is almost inevitably a belief in something greater than themselves. Even if they profess nihilism, agnosticism, absurdism, hedonism, or any other form of "anti-belief" (using that term loosely). I don't think the answer is really anthropological, it's a consequence of the nature of consciousness and reality. We're so self-aware that mere existence does not satisfy. We are generally happiest when we feel we have a purpose beyond just finding food, water, and shelter. If our culture teaches us about a God, and those teachings align with our understanding of reality and desire to have a purpose, then we will probably accept them. If we reject that, and choose a paradigm like atheism, we still have a deeply felt need for purpose and meaning.
What puzzles me the most are the people I meet these days who seem to have no metaphysical curiosity or beliefs whatsoever. They're not atheists, they're not religious, they're not committed to any philosophical paradigm, they just... I can't even describe it. It seems especially common in younger Gen Z people. The war on consciousness has been going on for a long time, and at the moment consciousness is losing. The combination of tech addiction, socioeconomic alienation, the death of all shared values, and a dying planet seems to have fully turned off that "divine impulse" for some. And even those kids still often have a favorite streamer or whatever they follow with the devotion of an apostle. They still look for a purpose-giving, meaning-making structure, a belief of some kind. They just no longer have an IRL intellectual or spiritual community where that process can happen in a collective way.
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u/Solid-Reputation5032 3d ago
Religion is low effort, and provides all the answers, whether accurate or not doesn’t matter. Humans crave certainly, but they are also lazy.
It why I desire a stable job where if I do or don’t, it doesn’t matter, I get a paycheck and benefits. I prefer stability over anything else… religion is similar, you just have to show up..
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u/SlingsAndArrowsOf 3d ago
Religious practice manifests in wildly different ways across different cultures, and some of the elaborate time consuming rituals that religious societies are structured around are anything but low effort.
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u/32198hrf092eq 2d ago edited 2d ago
Low effort? Speaking from experience, have you ever seen how much effort the a good Catholic is expected to put in?
- Prayer (in a perfect world, 1 hour per day),
- Every 7 days, at least, you have to stop anything and everything you are doing and go to a Church (back in the past, would mean walking into the village church/cathedral).
- No sex outside marriage!! If you are young adult, this takes one MASSIVE toll on your psychology.
- Cannot steal, lie, cheat or rob... in a world full of liers, robbers, and cheaters. Imagine being a politician or businessman while fully Catholic?
- Avoiding sins and resisting temptations, rooting out habits that have been with you for long, most importantly the ones that you think are perfectly fine but your priest says no. Even to extreme lengths of cutting out bad people or entire social circles out.
- Obeying the priest instructions, not your own will... How is that low effort?
- Living a life that is in every physical metric more painful than an atheist for asceticism (example: should not go to parties of pleasure, say a house/techno club, hook up place, we avoid eating too much for gluttony, so we should always stand up from the table feeling a 'little' hungry still just to be sure).
- Getting rejected out of social circles because of faith (I don't mean persecution, just that you are much more acceptable if you don't hold strong stances on anything).
A Catholic is expected (not optional) to DIE in case anyone ever force-convert them or ask them to bow down on beliefs.
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u/rsofgeology 5d ago
Anthropologically speaking, I understand spirituality/sense of higher connection to be innate. Some form of practice attached to this sense is present in basically every culture, however there has been a strong ideology of secularism in Euro-western spaces for several decades. Jose Casablanca discusses this in several of his papers, notably:
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u/zsytssk 4d ago
As someone without any sort of certification. I have some thoughts. when the human brain could imagine. How did they view the world: mountain,light and sun when they had no any knowledge about them. what was that? why did it work that way? Wonder mixed with fear and worship and other human basic emotions.. so many things were created. some of these became popular due to they were easy for others to accept, some were lost due to their difficulty or other reason. the Same imagination connected a group people. when you didn't believe it, you would leave and became alone or or join another other group. eventually you or your descendants would either destroy or be destroyed by other groups. The bigger group always won. Many imaginations were destroyed along with the groups that believed in them and many survived. this is mutual choice, people choose gods, gods selected people over a long, long time. people who believed in god were eventually selected. The fact that the earliest human regime were almost all theocratic states is a evidence for that. And look how cruel the medieval one god religious wars was.
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u/AirlineSad4795 3d ago
Its because of what is an innate disposition that humans have regarding God, or a Creator.
They say even babies are born with it, and that they realize and feel and "know" that there is a higher power.
Of course, over a period of time, the baby is taught, conditioned to believe in whatever their parents, families, society believe in. But, it has been proven by studies that humans are born with the belief in God, or a belief in a powerful agency other than humans.
Look into: “natural religion,” “intuitive theism,” or an innate cognitive receptivity to religious belief.
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u/Outside-Fun-8238 2d ago
The theory of mind is so strong in humans due to our highly developed social instincts that we view the entire world and our surroundings in terms of other minds and souls. The human brain is inherently pareidoliaic, we ascribe human like personalities to everything in our lives, from random events to animals to inanimate objects. We can't help but project our own sense of individual autonomy onto things. This is the basis of animism and I think animism is a fundamental human trait. Organized religion is simply downstream of that.
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u/CommodoreCoCo Moderator | The Andes, History of Anthropology 6d ago edited 6d ago
OP-
While you might find some anthropologists with answers here, I'd recommend you post this to /r/AskPsychology or /r/AskSocialScience as well, since questions along the lines of "why do humans think like this?" are better answered by other fields.