Human Religious Evolution

Abstract

This paper posits that human religious evolution is derived from individual vulnerability, the sacred guardian-community-contract, the technological revolutions, and the worldview-sociality model. The paper posits that religion emerged when the vulnerable humans turned to the supernatural as the sacred guardian for help during the harsh Upper Paleolithic Period about forty thousand years ago. The paper posits that religions have evolved with the technological revolutions. The Upper Paleolithic Revolution was produced by religion. After the Agricultural Revolution, the simple sacred guardian in Upper Paleolithic Period was transformed into the sacred guardian-contract as the explicit obligation between the sacred guardian and the human society to maintain the social order in the sacred agricultural-nomadic society. Science, individualism, and pluralism in the Industrial Revolution brought back the secular, resulting in the sacred-secular coexistence in the separate sacred-secular industrial society. The closely interacting information generated by the Information Revolution starts the process unifying the sacred and the secular in the unified interdependent sacred-secular information society. The five periods of human religious evolution based on the technological revolutions are the eusocial secular period started by original Homo sapiens without significant religious practices, the eusocial sacred guardian-community period started from the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, the sacred guardian-community-contract period started by the Agricultural Revolution, the sacred-secular period started by the Industrial Revolution, and the unified interdependent period started by the Information Revolution.