The building blocks of religious systems: Approaching religion as a complex adaptive system

Abstract

Religions consist of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioral, and developmental traits that form a complex adaptive system. The underlying adaptive goal of religious systems is to foster cooperation and social coordination within communities. The workings of religious systems are intricate, and even convoluted, but at their core, they maintain eight primary interdependent building blocks: authority, meaning, moral obligation, myth, ritual, sacred, supernatural agents, and taboo. These features exhibit independent phylogenetic histories, but at some point in human history, they began to regularly coalesce across human populations. Religious systems, which require energy like all systems, are fueled by ritual behaviors. Ritual’s interconnections with the other core building blocks produce individual-level effects, including physiological and affective responses, which in turn yield group-level effects such as shared cognitive schema, ethos, symbolic meaning, and identity. These group-level effects result in a sense of communal order and produce social norms, most importantly, norms that encourage cooperative and coordinated behaviors among community members. Further investments in ritual, which sustain the religious system, depend upon the success of these collective behaviors. Specifically, religious systems maintain positive and negative feedback loops that inform individuals about the system’s success, or lack thereof, in terms of collective outputs, mating opportunities, reproduction, and health outcomes. When cooperation fails, or mating, reproduction, or health suffer, the religious system will generally adapt to its current environmental conditions accordingly, sometimes subtly without notice among adherents and sometimes through significant revivals that reinvigorate ritual participation. Religious systems that are unable to adapt cease to function as living social institutions that bring order to individual lives.